Away from the corporate jargon, swanky plush offices, suited up people walking back and forth, laptops buzzing with presentations, the serene state of Tamil Nadu houses lots of businesses that have been developed by first generation entrepreneurs. These business do not have the monthly review meetings filled with power point slides, neither do they have flow charts or graphs. But these are the ones aggressively developing, charging ahead with their expansion. Some have their camps at USA and UK too.
Not many around the world would have heard of these companies. There are quite a few, but I would like to talk about the 2 distinct ones, that have touched the billion rupees in turn over. One is a restaurant chain and other is a retail store – Hotel Saravana Bhavan and Saravana Stores. I must point out that, they are not held by the same parent firm. They are two different firms which happen to have the same name, and sustain next to each other without fighting over it.
Both these firms, started off small. The parents of the owners were not entrepreneurs, and they started with a low capital. Knowingly or unknowingly, they found their market very fast. Like all hoping-to-be-entrepreneurs try, they found the need and served the need quite well.
Saravana stores – They are a retail chain, Walmart sort of. From pin to an elephant, you could purchase almost everything that your house might need. Groceries, dress, kitchen ware and the list goes on. However the catch was this. With the volumes they sold, they were able to surprisingly bring their costs low. They did not invest in ambiance or marketing. But for the TV ads, and fliers, Saravana Stores did not go around spending so much. By this, they were able to sustain the costs and provide quality goods at low prices. There is one more thing to note. They did not sell Hettich or high priced products. The ones they sold were extremely cheap themselves. What this really did was this – attracted the below-average income group. This sky rocketed them to newer heights. Sans six-sigma or anything, this retail chain has managed to keep costs low, quality high.
You can find them here –
WELCOME TO SARAVANA STORES – COLLECTIONS
www.saravanastores.net/tnagar/english/index.html
So much did they expand that, they own almost an entire street full of shops. 🙂
Next we go to Hotel Saravana Bhavan (H.S.B) – This is a chain of restaurants which serve vegetarian south Indian food. Starting from one hotel near Ashok Nagar in Chennai, they have around 25+ hotels around Chennai, and a couple of them in USA, some in UK, Canada, and the middle east too.
So what was H.S.B’s USP? – On incessant eating in this joint for about 15 years now, this is what I gather. Their USP is multi fold.
1) First, they gathered the customer base by serving delicious south Indian food. But the real thing was, they were really consistent about it. Unlike McD or KFC, this restaurant does not have a scientific protocol or a measure recipe to make their dishes. They are made usually by chefs in a normal kitchen like the ones in your houses, except it is a bit bigger. H.S.B does not have machine made food, and the structure of south Indian cuisine will make it hard to prepare the food in machines. This gives rise to two challenges – How do you avoid chef attrition? How do you expand?
2) They differed from the other hotels by offering this best customer experience. This can be categorized into three attributes – cleanliness, serving speed and courteous behavior. Impeccable tables and foods that reach you in matter of minutes. You should note that, back then and still to a large extent today, the food served by other south Indian hotels can not match HSB’s speed or hygiene. I really dont know why that is the case!
Over the past 15 years of my experience, the color or texture or taste of the chutney or sambhar they serve has not changed a bit. And this consistency was not maintained by electronic machines, but humans! They owners were not engineers or business graduates. However, they rose to an unimaginable extent.
What is more? None of these above businesses, have a strong online presence. They do not invest into aggressive marketing. Seldom you can see these names on a news paper or TV shows. Yet, people flock in millions to their shops, and their per day turn over reaches millions of rupees.
I do not wish to make this a rags to riches kind of tale. But what startled me most was this. These people with absolutely no background in management or business or engineering have raised an empire. Without any corporate structure, these have sustained over more than a decade and served with consistent quality. What was their secret? Were they just lucky that they were the first entrant or found the market by stroke of luck? Perhaps, but surely the luck would not help them survive more than a decade or help them expand over the world.
What you need to focus is on the customer, not on how corporate you are. The feeling though is good to be suited up, but here are the heroes of India who roamed in veshtis and earned the titles of Business tycoons of South India.