Member Spotlight - Vinamra Pandiya | ITVidya.com

Vinamra has a passion for entrepreneurship and wants everybody to take their call at some point in time.After working with Infosys for two years, he along with his friend has started Pune's first fully professional tiffin service by the name of Mom's Kitchen and aspires it to be a national brand in near future.

What are your most recent achievements ?

My biggest achievement is that I managed to follow my dreams, chase my aspirations and focus on my goal. I could motivate myself so much so as to leave a well secured job at Infosys and jump into a relatively new area of food industry. As they say the going is tough but I’m enjoying it and I believe that only the tough gets going under these circumstances. My achievement is that it doesn’t feel scary anymore, I thrive living on the edge and Oh!! Yes!! I’ve launched India’s first fully professional Tiffin service by the name of Mom’s Kitchen two months back in Pune (www.momskitchen.in) in partnership with my childhood friend.

What are the challenges you are facing ? I would list them point wise:

Initial choice of the first few employees of your company, believe me, it’s a tricky affair, make sure they are extremely loyal, honest and have worked before with you, in short both parties should know each other inside out.
Bigger still, keeping them motivated and excited so that they can go with you the long distance. Your HR skills should be supreme.
Extremely volatile prices of the commodities make our calculations and hence profit projections a difficult exercise.
To keep our customer always happy and satisfied to the Tummy.

What are you currently learning for your ongoing development ? Learning is a continuous process and mine is no different:

Managing the ever changing demands and aspirations of the employees to keep them motivated.
Satisfying our existing customers from diverse backgrounds and having different tastes and at the same time ensuring that acquiring new customers should not affect the delivery of the existing ones.
Extracting our due money can sometimes be tricky; one should be flexible enough in such cases.
Ensuring that negative publicity due to some unsatisfied customers is kept to the minimum.
Managing the daily accounts with zero scope of error.
Efficient time management and prioritizing things.
Multitasking ability.

What kind of opportunities are you seeking right now? Tremendous opportunity tapping needs to be done right now as my business is in expansion mode. Some of the important ones are listed below:

Quality managers/delivery boys/cooks/chefs for my moms kitchen venture as it expands and charts newer horizons.
Alliances with small/medium sized IT/Non IT companies for their catering purpose.
Networking with like minded individuals who have fire in their bellies, guts in their heart and toughness in their minds.
Lots and Lots of customers who want to eat homely, healthy and hygienic food.

What are your plans for the next 12 months ? My plans are as follows:

To make 10,000 customers by the next year end.
To rake in around 12 crores per annum as turnover by 2007 end.
To support the employee base of 1000 by that time.
To backward integrate my business.
To own around 400 bikes by that time.
To write a fictional novel by year end.
To start a web-site with a fantastic concept.

Who would you like to connect with ? My choice of people would include the following:

Like minded entrepreneurs.
Some fundu technologist in the web space.
Industry experts
Thought leaders
Eminent VC’s and financiers for my other projects.

What message would you like to give to all our visitors and members at ITVidya.com ? Message is straight from the heart.

Dream big and have the audacity to chase them with full stream.
Do what you know you can do best and not what others expect you to do.
Gain, share knowledge and create opportunities out ofit.
Don’t believe in striking when the iron is hot, Infact strike it so hard that it becomes hot.
Surround yourself with lots of positive energy, read inspirational stories to gain confidence.
SCREW IT, LETS DO IT.

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