American actor and comedian Milton Berle said, “If the opportunity doesn’t come, build a door.”
And that’s what business owners do, day in and day out.
Starting a small business can be daunting, considering the many hurdles and hurdles the process entails. But despite the many stumbling stocks, there is no dearth of aspiring entrepreneurs across India.
week after week, SMBStory brings you heartwarming stories of small, medium and large businesses that showcase entrepreneurship, determination and initiative. As 2022 draws to a close, we’ve picked out the top 10 stories we’ve run on SMBStory this year.
Chaiwali graduate
“Opening a tea stand is nothing new. Lots of people do it, but a girl, especially an economics graduate, selling tea on the road is not usual]and maybe that made me famous,” says Priyanka Gupta, aka Graduate Chaiwali, in interaction with SMBStory.
Priyanka opened a small tea stall in April 2022 outside Patna Women’s College in Patna, Bihar. In just four months, she opened another tea stall in the city, selling around 400 cups of tea a day, and made a profit of around Rs 1.5 lakh.
In August, actor Vijay Deverakonda, who was in Patna to promote his latest film, paid a visit to Priyanka’s tea stall.
While Priyanka’s franchise business is booming with two other stores in the city, the last two or three months have been difficult for Priyanka after the municipality of Patna confiscated her store.
In a recent interaction, Priyanka said she was rebuilding her shop and the challenges have only made it stronger. “The problem now is not money. I just want to stay true to my vision and grow my business,” she says.
Read the full story here.
Herbal Avimee
When Vinita Agarwal had a hair loss problem during the second wave of COVID-19, her parents RK and Shakuntala Devi Choudhary, also known as Nanaji and Naniji, decided to make natural hair oil by home.
Now the couple have become an internet sensation, especially after the company made it possible for Nanaji to recently buy his first car at the age of 85.
From one to two orders a day, Avimee began to receive thousands when their grandson Siddhant Agarwal and his wife Ambika posted about hair oil on Instagram and created a page for them.
Nanaji was even invited to indian idol because of its inspiring story.
The brand has even expanded to five other product lines in the past three months and has achieved a sell-through rate of Rs 25 crore, Siddhant says.
Read the full story here.
Sunrise Bakers
Second and third generation entrepreneurs of Sunrise Bakers (left and right)
In a bustling market alley in one of India’s oldest cities, Dehradun, stands Sunrise Bakers. More than 60 years after its creation, the bakery has expanded and opened a second outlet in the city in December 2021.
The expansion was notable as it came after a particularly difficult year for the inherited family business, with the deaths of Amarjit Singh Jolly and Harmeet Singh Jolly, two second-generation entrepreneurs who carried on the legacy inherited from their father Harnam. Singh Jolly.
Talk to SMBStoryRishika Jolly, a third-generation entrepreneur and daughter of Amarjit Singh, says that despite the challenges of all these years, the bakery has been operating profitably since its inception.
In 2022, Sunrise Bakers has imagined festive baskets. The company has also introduced new bakery lines and will soon feature a D2C website.
Read the full story here.
Dupatta Bazaar
From fabric quality to color, design and length, finding the right dupatta to match a dress is exhausting. And this is where Dupatta Bazaar, run by Gaurav Garg, fills the gap.
Gaurav’s a-ha moment came at Mumbai’s Crawford Market, where he witnessed a woman struggling all day to get a dupatta to match her outfit. Coming from a family involved in the textile trade in Rajasthan, Ajmer, he was surprised. “I thought artisans and traders who sold dupattas in Rajasthan were struggling to attract customers and here customers were actually pleading for these same products.”
He decided to create a one stop shop for all dupatta needs. In 11 years, he completed over seven lakh commissions and created a presence beyond Indian borders. The business has grown 300% this year, Gaurav says, adding that the base of rural artisans he works with has doubled to almost 1,500.
Read the full story here.
The tea factory
Ten years ago, then 22-year-old entrepreneur Shashank Sharma decided to open a tea cafe modeled after a chain of popular cafes.
“I was inspired by Cafe Coffee Day (CCD). People used to jump on CCD for business networking, dating or whatever. After graduation, I was thinking about a business idea and discussed my plans with my friends at a tapir chai. We were talking about the success of CCD, and I [thought] why can’t I open a tea cafe? Shashank says SMBStory.
In 2012, there was already an established tea cafe brand in the Indian market, but operating from a big city, Shashank says, adding that he thought he would bring a tea cafe with a variety of offerings to his own city. , Indore.
Shashank then established The Tea Factor, which now has 300 outlets and a global presence in the UAE, Canada, UK, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Read the full story here.
Chaiwala MBA
“Karna tha sangharsh toh road pe chai banaya (As part of my struggles, I made roadside tea),” explains Prafull Billore, known as “MBA Chaiwala”. Prafull is also not a foodie and doesn’t like cooking very much, but he still built a multi-million business selling chai (tea) across India.
Originally from Dhar, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, Prafull had lost his passion for the MBA, which he had been pursuing at the University of Ahmedabad since 2017. However, reading books and learning quotes from famous business leaders l kept them motivated.
Fast forward five years and the 25-year-old is now a multi-millionaire entrepreneur who has built MBA Chaiwala, a Rs 4 crore (as of FY21) business with over 100 outlets all over India.
Read the full story here.
Raheja solar food processing
One way to reduce food waste is to dry fresh produce. Varun Raheja, founder of Raheja Solar Food Processing Pvt Ltd, says the global demand for dried goods currently stands at $70 billion.
Varun, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Indore, says the inspiration to start the business came after learning about sustainable lifestyles and practices at the Jimmy McGilligan Center for Sustainable Development, an NGO in Indore.
His interest in solving farmers’ problems led him to research solar dryers. A few years later, in 2019, he launched his own company. Since its inception, Varun says the company has been able to reduce the wastage of 250 MT of produce by farmers across India.
Read the full story here.
EcoCushion paper
For 40 years, Mahesh Agarwal worked with his cousins in their family business in Delhi. However, during the pandemic, Mahesh had to move to Mumbai to be with her children.
It was during the relocation process in 2020 that Mahesh observed the amount of plastic used as protective packaging.
“There was plastic all over the floor,” says Mahesh’s daughter, Varsha, adding, “We all know that plastic is harmful to the environment, but when we saw the amount used only to leave our house, and how problematic it would be for the environment, we looked at the global use of plastic every day by everyone around us.
The incident gave Mahesh a reason to restart a business at retirement age.
“We moved to Mumbai and he spent the initial six to eight months on research. He then came up with the idea of making honeycomb paper to replace the plastic bubble wrap,” says Varsha.
In June 2021, they set up a manufacturing facility in Navi Mumbai and launched the business through a B2B website. They invested around Rs 50 lakh to start the business. In July they received their first order from a small business and since then EcoCushion’s journey has been upwards. Within a year, EcoCushion Paper has onboarded more than 2,000 small and medium enterprises, including Aadvik Foods, Upakarma Ayurveda, The June Shop, Mars Cosmetics, etc., and companies like Westside, Nestle R&D, 1MG, etc
Read the full story here.
IoTechWorld Aviation
–
The journey of IoTechWorld Avigation, India’s first certified kisan drone company, began in 2017 when Deepak Bharadwaj and Anoop Upadhyay decided to enter India’s breakthrough drone market.
While Deepak was initially inclined towards space defense, the duo decided to focus on the agricultural sector after seeing the need for technology to help farmers improve agricultural production and make farming practices efficient. The duo have invested around Rs 6 lakh to Rs 7 lakh of their savings to set up the base at Gurugram.
Between 2017 and 2020, the company sold around 200 drones to farmers.
Things took a turn in 2021 when the government presented the budget for the PLI drone program and even drafted manufacturing rules. Since then, the sector has seen a boom with more than 200 entrants into the growing space.
IoTechWorld Avigation now manufactures 55% of its hardware components in its Gurugram factory. In the next two to three years, it is aiming for 100% indigenous production by setting up another unit in Hyderabad.
Read the full story here.
NavAlt
Although ferries may seem like a cleaner mode of transport, most ferries run on diesel, a highly polluting fossil fuel.
To help solve this problem, Kerala launched India’s first solar-powered ferry ‘Aditya’ in 2017.
Sandith Thandasherry, founder and CEO of Kochi-based NavAlt Solar and Electric Boats, says the boat has saved 100,000 liters of diesel so far. But has not stopped innovating; it works to build ROROs (freight ships) powered by green energy and advanced fishing vessels and boats that are affordable and easy to use.
Read the full story here.