1. What have you found most challenging as a leader of a small or medium enterprise?

Challenges for SMEs can be innumerable, as we often encounter challenges that big enterprises are largely resistant to. Access to funding is possibly an enormous challenge faced by us SME leaders. Over the past years, the marketplace has become progressively crowded and competitive. To gain exposure as an SMEs, our need to sharpen in on individuality and present our product or service as distinctive offering was one of the key challenges. To stand out from the crowd, we were required to be very unique in terms of ideas, people, products, and delivery. Nowadays, businesses cannot be said to be entirely autonomous because there are simply enormous regulations and policies that companies must consider. This incorporates things like complying with the national living wage and provident fund auto-enrollment, among many other policies.
Also employing skilled staff had been complicated throughout the journey, considering the competitive advantage larger firms have in terms of higher salaries and better employee benefits and skills. A flourishing business can be built on employing the right people with the right skill set, but that was a challenge for us, in first attracting and then retaining them. I believe I’ve gained a good perspective on the key challenges faced by almost all SMEs today. As far as our business is concerned, in the commencing phase some of the challenges like driving and sourcing authentic sources, Identifying the opportunity in terms of what best could be serving the people, what are the major trends people are looking at, and what kinds of challenges they are facing in terms of all their software needs were few additional major challenges we had faced.


2. How did you become a leader of an SME? Can you please briefly tell the story?

Becoming a leader of an early stage company needs tangible actions to strengthen our own leadership and that of others. Be able to build and manage the team, a team of leaders. I personally coached and mentored high-potential managers who reported directly to myself or to department heads. Have to lead out and up, in front of the team and sometime learn a lot from them. Imperative to be prepared for more such responsibilities and general management. As per my experiences determination to handle uncertain situations is, was, and always will be a key to lead effectively.


3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

Before anything else I give myself 1hr to enjoy beautiful mornings with my better half and post that only my day begins with an hour session of Yoga & Prayers. Typically you would find me on my work desk or taking calls post 10 am, with daily 3 hrs new business hunting and strategy alignment check I move on to day to day business operations and that goes on till late midnight usually.


4. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

You are and will always be a human first, these global pandemic days made my belief in "Service Before Self" more stronger, to lead is not always about achieving, it's a process to develop and fine tune a better ecosystem for all.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Bhagwad Geeta, for every question of yours you can find an answer and roadmap.


6. How do you build leadership capacity in an SME?

I always give full control to my team and trust in their abilities & skills. Just to remind them that i am still the commander in chief we get on small review sessions as to why a particular approach was followed for solving any specific problem domain and try to fine tune the same by adding my experiences to the table and this not only brings more efficiency to entire organisation but allows me to have more bandwidth.


7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader of an SME so far?

We were working for months to get a specific global account on-boarded with us, during final negotiation rounds we could clearly see his inclination towards one of our competitors. That was a time when we quickly needed to come up with a turn around, so I played a small gamble and offered our customer to connect with any of our employees across departments and ask him what, how and how much value add we can bring to him if he chose to go ahead with us. He interacted with 4 random people from my team across departments who had no clue about his products but all of them showcased the true values our company stands for, this clearly made us a winner with streamlined organisation level values.