Ankur Agarwal's Story
Current Job description
I am currently the Co-founder and C2C at PriceBaba.com. My job varies from ensuring good lunch for everyone at office to hiring new members, from setting business goals to doing everything necessary for achieving them. Managing sales and product are two essential parts that I focus on the most.
Leadership skills
Leadership is too complex to accurately define in words. While I consider myself largely a work in progress, here are a few must haves:
a) Be the motivator, yet motivate yourself. As a leader one needs to motivate his team, partners and everyone around him. At the same time, you need to be the source of your own motivation.
b) Be a silent layer for others success. Your success lies in ensuring your team succeeds as individuals and as a group. That is the only definition of success you can have for yourself.
c) If you lose your cool, you lose. Things go wrong and people will fail. You need to account for that.
Ensuring Success
I firmly believe in the 1-10-50 rule. If you run a company of 10 people, your best coach is someone who runs a 50 people company. If you run a 50 people company, find a coach who runs a 200 people company. I have my leadership coaches who are greater leaders and I learn from their experiences, I allow them to save my from myself.
Advice to upcoming leaders
It is a game. Take it seriously, but never forget it is a game ;)
Avoiding mistakes – both in your personal as well as profession
You cannot always be sure. That's the funny part of being a leader. You take decisions and then try your best to make them right. Dots are connect on the way back. But there are plenty of best practices:
i) Never make the same mistake twice. Fail fast, learn faster.
ii) Strive for perfection, achieve excellence!
iii) Do, Review & Iterate. Review your actions, actively look for areas where you can improve, change your act accordingly and keep reviewing :)
Influenced by
The milkman at our residential complex. He once convinced me that all of us do the same business. He sells milk and takes money, I sell something else. The common thing between any transaction is communication. He believed he can communicate and thus he can do any business. I was pleasantly surprised when I figured he also started real estate development.
Handling Grievances
How a particular grievance is dealt with is a function of what our core beliefs are.
We believe that we exist in business for creating value for our people as much as for ourselves. We share risks and rewards. Thus everyone working in the company are partners with no employee - employer relationship.
Taking Important career decision
Not continuing with mediocrity. Be it a business venture or relationship.
My prospective towards India Technological development
I am a firm believer in solving problems for India. There are several technology ventures that is making solutions for the Indian market. However, we are yet to see great consumer successes and that is also a function of the market maturing. With the internet and mobile boom, we are about to see a lot of them soon :)
Do remember, India took time to catch up with the Internet era, the situation is very different when it comes to mobile :)
My family background
We are a family of Chartered Accountants with the exception being myself. However doing business isn't something that isn't a alien concept to an Agarwal family. I learn a lot of humble relationship driven business skills from my uncles, that quite balances the professionals I otherwise surround myself with!
More about me
I started working as an online retailer right out of school at an age of 15 in 2002. I continued retail until 2009 before moving to a media business under the brand OnlyGizmos. In 2012 I started PriceBaba.com that is my current focus. You can learn more about us here: http://pricebaba.com/about-us
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