For the love of food

Ashish Kapur, 31 Education: BE, McGill University, Quebec, Canada Last job: GE Capital, US Last salary: $35,000 a year Time spent as employee: 4 years Age at starting business: 26 years

Initial investment: Rs 70 lakh Sources of fund: Angel investors

Company: Moods Hospitality

Turnover: Rs 50 crore (estimated for 2007-8) No of employees: 600

Testing the waters

An engineer with GE Capital, Ashish Kapur had the desire to do something on his own. When he returned from North America in 2001, he realised there werent too many affordable restaurants serving quality food across India. Im a complete food lover, but the decision to start Yo! China was based more on opportunity than passion. I would often visit China to understand emerging food trends. quotes Kapur Yo! China, India's first chain of Chinese restaurants , founded in May 2003, now boasts 41 franchises in 14 cities.

Stage 1 :Conduct Opportunity Analysis

Kapur found that roughly 350 million middle class people. Each person has three meals a day. That means we have a sector where one billion meals are consumed every day. And the largest category of this one billion meals is Chinese food as it is very aspirational because of our large young population.

"Between street hawkers and fine-dining restaurants, there was nothing that offered wholesome Chinese food at reasonable prices. That was my market, he says

Step 2: Develop feasibility & Business Plan

After eight to nine months of working on the idea alongside his job, Kapur finally quit GE Capital in 2003. Out of job, Kapur continued to study the profitability of food chains, the business models of the successful ones and how they functioned. He worked in the kitchen of a restaurant to get a feel of the food business. Alongside, he prepared a business plan. Besides the dine-in restaurants, the brand also has Yo! express home delivery, which has delivered food to 2,00,000 homes and offices. The company has also established Yo! Dim sum carts, which are kiosks located at malls, airports, and tech parks. Then began the round of visiting investors.

Step 3 : Sourcing of funds/ Financial partners.

Kapur's business required so much money that financing it personally was out of question. In the US itself he had met a number of investors for financing his idea. Though he did not succeed, their inputs helped him finetune his plan. He struck gold in 2003. Three angel investors decided to pool in about Rs 70 lakh for the first restaurant and scale up as the chain grew

Step 4 :Determine Resource Requirement.

Research: Kapur spent months studying the restaurant business. It is important to know as much as you can. Get better people: Kapur hired people who knew more than him about aspects of the business Don't compromise on quality:Cost cutting should happen everywhere. But Kapur made sure that the quality of the product did not suffer

Dream Start:
Kapur recalls: "We had invited 200 people for the trial run. About 600 turned up. Even Kapil Dev had to queue up for food.

To the promoters' delight, the situation repeated itself many times after they launched. Yo! China's first restaurant broke even in its first month. The second opened in December 2003. But not all restaurants were immediately successful. With 20 restaurants (of which 11 are franchisees) in 12 cities, Kapur is still fine-tuning his strategy for expansion. "The requirements for scaling up are so different from starting a new restaurant. I've become an entrepreneur all over again," he says.

Hammer & Mop: For Those Who Love Cleanliness, Not Cleaning!
Name : Sushrut Munje

Education : Engineering College dropout.

Age at starting business: 21 years

Sources of fund: Hatch Incubation Services

Company: Hammer & Mop.

Started Oct 2011

Initial investment Rs 50,000 Number of employees 18 FY12 Revenue Rs 3 lakh

Stage 1 :Conduct Opportunity Analysis

We live in a busy era where people fail to maintain their houses in the right way. It is not uncommon to come across unhappy residents who are unable to find any help for household cleaning and services. In such a scenario, a reliable team of residence cleaning specialists is as welcome as the rains in summer.

The idea clicked when we saw dirty, dusty homes and busy people all around us. It was a need that we believed we could fulfill, says Sushruth Munje, MD at Hammer & Mop.

Step 2: Develop feasibility & Business Plan

Hammer & Mop targets segments that include retail outlets and SME offices. For residential services, the clients are majorly the young upwardly mobile working couples who prefer outsourcing their cleaning tasks to an organization . Laying great emphasis on customization and high quality standards, Hammer & Mop does not seem to leave customer satisfaction behind, always looking to establish great communication channels and lasting relationships.

Most of their business, for the same reason says Sushrut, is generated through referrals and personal introductions.

Step 3 : Sourcing of funds/ Financial partners

The source of funds for Hammer & Mop has been bootstrapping; managing all those equipment upgrades, salaries and looking out for healthy cash flow. Hatch Incubation Services is helping the team in understanding the various aspects of scaling up while building a sustainable business model.

Their mentoring has been very helpful and their domain expertise is playing a key role in Hammer & Mops progress, says Sushrut.

Step 4 :Determine Resource Requirement

In order to better understand resource requirement of Rs.16, 000 crore Facility Management market, Sushrut Munje spent six months on research.

Finding manpower and empowering them to deliver are the major

challenges we face, taking up a lot of time and energy, points out Sushruth.

 Mumbai may have a long way to go when it comes to cleaning its streets but Hammer & Mop is surely pitching in to clean Mumbais houses. The start-up manages to pull in about 20 new customers every month. Depending on the size of the premises, a one-time office clean-up costs anywhere between Rs 3,000 to Rs 20,000, while a one-time house clean-up costs about Rs 4,000.

GOONJ: Changing Lives with the Forgotten Basic Need

NAME: Anshu Gupta.

Age: 39 years.
Educatiion : Mass Communication(IIMC)Journalism then Advertising & PR. , PGEconomics. Experience in business : 1992-98, corporate/ advt agency. 98 Founded Goonj.

Leadership style: Grow as an idea not as an organization. Turnover : 3 crores. Employees :130. Headquater: New Delhi

 GOONJs initiatives focus on making creative and optimal use of underutilized discarded material. Although clothes remain its primary focus, it offers programs that make new use of everything from old cloth and furniture to one-side-used paper and generators.

Goonj works across 21 states with about 250 partner groups. It has 10 offices with 150 full time people and thousands of volunteers. Dealing with 100 tons of material each month, Goonj has an annual budget of 3-4 crore INR. During the Kosi floods, 1500 tons of relief material waS sent to Bihar.

HOW IT STARTED???
It was on a winter night, when Anshu Gupta on a freelance assignment interviewed a man Habib, a professional unclaimed human body collector. Habibs little daughter told Gupta, When I feel cold during the night, I hug the dead body and sleep. It does not trouble me, as it doesnt turn around. This moment made Anshu feel how extremely privileged he was and gave him an insight into the importance of clothing as a basic need. In 1998, not long after this incident, Anshu left his job to start Goonj along with his wife Meenakshi. Starting from 67 items in his wardrobe, today Goonj transports around 100 tons of material each month to underprivileged areas.

HOW IT WORKS???
Today, apart from clothes, Goonjs collection include things like shoes, toys, books, electronic gadgets, furniture, utensils and other urban waste. Contributed materials are divided according to gender, age, size and other demographic and geographic needs.

Cloth for Work initiative of the organization makes sure that materials collected are not distributed as charity. The villagers need to earn the clothes just like wages. Villagers collectively construct bore wells, bridges and repair damaged roads in exchange for value added materials. Materials which are not worthy of distribution are transformed creatively; audio tapes are used to decorate handbags, colorful stress balls are made from swatches, mats and mattresses from waste material are some of the items sold in fund raising camps or distributed in villages.

FUNDING
For the first five years of its existence Goonj has operated without any major source of funding. We tried everybody, but came back empty-handed because we did not fall within their parameters of funding, says Anshu.

But today, it has a turnover of around 3-4 crore INR: around 50% of which comes from individual contributions, thus reflecting the strong base of supporters that the social enterprise has acquired. The rest 50 % comes from the sale of products

www.goonj.org
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