CASE STUDIES OF

SUCCESSFUL
ENTREPRENEURSHIP

PREPARED BY
 ABDUL MOEED SYED
PRANAV K R
"I do not sell products. I sell an entire civilization in a
jar."
-Shahnaz Husain
“She lives, sleeps, breathes her business. She is
consumed with building a successful company which
she has done.”
- Janine Sharell, CNN

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 • She captured the markets around the world and now
she wants to conquer space.
• In an innovative move, Shahnaz Husain has started
work on formulations that astronauts could carry
with them to protect their skin from the ravages of
space travel and slow down the ageing process.

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 ACHIEVEMENTS
• She has sent National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) free samples of
her moisturizers, hoping that they will be used on space expeditions.
• Shahnaz Husain is one of India's most successful women entrepreneurs.
• Her company, Shahnaz Husain Herbals is one of the largest manufacturers of herbal
products in the world.
• It formulates and markets over 400 products for various beauty and health needs and
has a strong presence across the globe, from the USA to Asia.

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 TIMELINE &
AWARDS
• In 2002, the Shahnaz Husain Group, based in New Delhi, was worth $100 million. It
employed about 4200 people in 650 salons spread across 104 countries. The Group has
seen a good growth rate in the 25 years that it has been in business.
• The average growth rate in the initial years (late 1970s to the early 1980s) was 15-20%.
In the 1990s the average growth rate was 19.4%. A number of awards, both national and
international have been conferred on Shahnaz Husain.
• Some of them are "The Arch of Europe Gold Star for Quality", "One of the Leading
Women Entrepreneurs of the World", "The 2000 Millennium Medal of Honor", "Rajiv
Gandhi Sadbhavana Award", etc.

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 PERSONAL LIFE
Shahnaz Husain belongs to a royal Muslim family which migrated
from Samarkhand to India and later held high positions in the princely
kingdoms of Bhopal and Hyderabad before India's independence.
Shahnaz received her schooling in an Irish convent and because of the
influence of her father, Chief Justice N.U. Beg, she developed a love
for poetry and English Literature.

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 RICHARD CHINA
• In 1943, Abraham Maslow defined a
hierarchy of five human needs, the
most basic of which, the physiological,
includes food, clothing, and shelter.
• Social entrepreneurs worldwide are
aggressively working to find ways to
increase quality of life in developing
nations that often lack these basic
needs.
• One such entrepreneur is Richard
China (pronounced “Keena”), a lifelong
entrepreneur with a big vision: to build
5:
12
a company that will provide the
:4
solution to the global housing crisis.
 TIMELINE
• Richard China, the son of two Italian immigrant parents, spent the first 24
years of his career building a successful electrical, engineering, and
construction business that was started by his father.
• In 1999, he sold the business and became a director and chief operating
officer of a Fortune 1000 publically traded company.
• Prior to selling the family business, he also cofounded four other
successful companies in lighting management (Primo Lighting
Management, 1991), general contracting (Gilford Corporation, 1995),
network integration (PrimeNet, 1998), and commercial real estate.

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 TIMELINE
• In 2006, he, along with a business partner, cofounded Critical Response
Networks in response to issue stated by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency for “alternative forms of disaster relief housing.”
• The issue was a directive by the U.S. Congress to phase out the use of
modular travel trailers for emergency response housing because they
contained formaldehyde, a carcinogen.

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 TIMELINE
• CRN offered a much healthier—and sustainable—solution; its houses were
made from a renewable resource: the biomass residue of wheat, or straw.
• CRN utilized a technology first developed in the 1940s that compresses
agricultural straw under extreme heat to create Compressed Agricultural
Fiber (CAF) Panels. These panels could then be used for both the exterior
and interior walls of a house.
• After a two-year evaluation process that compared them against other
solution providers, the company was awarded a 5-year contract by Govt. to
supply houses utilizing the company’s technology.

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 CHALLENGES
• Globally, some 827 million people live in urban slums (62 million in East Africa alone).
By the year 2020, that number will be one billion.
• To provide shelter for all these groups, at a minimum, would require 167 million housing
structures.
• This global housing crisis is also causing increased poverty, disease, death, as well as
challenges to food and water security, urbanization, and a country’s overall desire to be
economically sustainable.
• Traditional building materials (concrete block, wood, and brick) are not able to keep up
with housing demand in developing countries.
• Houses made from these traditional materials are often out of the price range for the
growing middle-class population in these countries.

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 CHALLENGES
• Yet, there is a lack of knowledge about Alternative Building Technologies that can build
structures quickly, safely, and at a lower cost. After many fact-finding missions to Africa,
a new strategy began to evolve.
• After changing the market focus, China realized that the existing strategy and company
name no longer fit. So, the company was rebranded as International Green Structures.
• It was at this time that China replaced the cofounder and recruited Britt as the Chief
Operating Officer and McCarthy as global business development officer. Both very
successful entrepreneurs.

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 STRATEGY
• Unlike Richard China, many entrepreneurs find it difficult to identify a new
product/service or a new market opportunity.
• To start and expand a venture, an entrepreneur needs to identify opportunities for
domestic and/or international expansion.
• As the new venture grows and develops, a need for different management skills can
occur.
• Some entrepreneurs forget that in business the only constant is change.

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 STRATEGY
• Entrepreneurs like Richard China or Mal Mixon, CEO of Invacare, understand this and
effectively manage change by continually adapting organizational culture, structure,
procedures, strategic direction, and products in both a domestic and an international
orientation.
• Entrepreneurs in such developed countries as the United States, Japan, the United
Kingdom, and the European Union need to sell their products in a variety of new and
different market areas early on in the development of their firms.

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 DISCUSSIO
N
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 THANK YOU
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