Joint Winner in the first Small Scale Entrepreneur Success Story contest.

We are extremely grateful to Mr. Amit Bhanawat from IMI Delhi for contributing an inspirational success story on small scale entrepreneur. We are thankful to him for promoting the basic ideas that a person can work with limited means and promote small businesses.

The success story is as under:


A Story of Nothing to Everything - by : Amit Bhanawat, PGDMHR 2007-09 Batch, IMI, New Delhi
This story is about a small entrepreneur from a small town of Rajasthan. His name is Ashok Bhanawat and he owned a marble processing unit named as Ashok Bhanawat Marbles Pvt. Ltd. His company now has annual turn over of about Rs. 3 crore. It’s a gang-saw marble processing plant in Rishabhdeo in Rajasthan. Rishabhdeo is world famous from its green marble mines. His company supply marble slabs to all over the country. He also has a branch in Kishangarh (Rajasthan) which is one of the biggest marble markets of the country.
His story starts about twenty years ago when he was running a small kirana shop in Rishabhdeo. From that shop he just used to manage livelihood of his family. But he had big dreams in his mind. He wanted to be a “bada aadmi” if say in his words. He didn’t want to stick with this business. He wanted to change his line of business. At that time, in 1992, cable TV was getting popularity. So he found it a good opportunity. As he had not have enough money to start a business in full flash, first he bought one colour TV and a black and white TV of brand BPL and Darshan (a local brand of that time) respectively. He put these on his kirana shop only for sale. For the first six month he got no customer. After that one of his friends bought that colour TV. In this time of six month he knew that the Indian customer did not have faith in local brand like Darshan. So this time he brought a B&W TV of Weston brand which was a well known brand for b/w TV at that time. This time he got a very good response. Thus he started earn good money from this. Then he decided to open electronics goods shop. At that time he had only Rs. 20000 in his hand. He started his business on a very small scale. He brought 3-4 Phillips’s cassette players/ recorders, some radios, B/W TVs etc. Some of these items got sold while some were not. He continued to experiment in the product portfolio of his shop. In 2-3 years he becomes an established profit making electronics shop keeper. His cousin brother, at that time, was engaged in business of financing old vehicles. He advised him to this financing business. For this he should have money. But being a small shop keeper his credibility as borrower was very low in the market. Then he borrowed Rs. 50000 from his friend at very high interest rate than the market rate. From that money he started financing old vehicles and he becomes very successful in that field. Being a new person he started with small scale. As he started earning money and after developing understanding of the business he invested more and more. At the same time his electronics goods business was also growing. He invested more money in that business and converted his small shop into a big showroom. He got dealership of some of very big international brand like Samsung, LG, Phillips etc. Till that time he had developed a good reputation in the market. His shop becomes a well known name for electronics good in that region. He had a very close friend who was involved in marble business. At that time his interest developed in marble field. He found that buyers had to buy big marble blocks from the mines and there was no processing plant there near Rishabhdeo. He felt need of marble processing plant in Rishabhdeo. He went to Kishangarh to study such plant. He found it a very profitable business. But such plant required a huge investment. It was more than Rs. one crore for establishing such plant and another 30-40 lakhs for purchasing raw material. He did not have such huge amount and also he was inexperience in that field. So he decided to involve his two elder brothers in this business. All three decided to invest Rs. 10 lakhs each and rest of the money they arranged from the market and got loan from bank. Initially they had not enough money to buy raw material and also did not have expertise to to buy marble blocks as raw material. For buying marble block you must have expertise to judge which block would give you profit and which would give you loss. In the first year of their business they did only job work. That means they used to cut marbles only for the external customers and used to get cutting charge on per square feet basis. In this one year they developed such expertise through experience and visiting marble mines. They developed some very good contacts in this industry. Then, after one year, they started to have their own raw material and started to sell. In this way he started to make big profit. He developed good customer as well as supplier relations. The process at his factory was stream lined as well. So it used to give higher production without wastage in compare to other such factory in the area. Right now his company is no. one marble processing company in that area with strong reputation among suppliers as well as customers. His business is continuously growing and now he is also going to diversify his business. Now he is planning to establish such plant in Bangalore for granite stone as well.
This is the story of a person who becomes a big businessman from a very small kirana shop keeper without money and expertise. You would get wonder that he had studied only till 10th standard.