INDIA: The stories given by mainstream media of entrepreneurs being celebrated are largely stories of people from big cities, overseas or glorified stories of tech. There is a stereotype of a successful entrepreneur.
Smart Entrepreneurship Decoded has brought multiple flavours of entrepreneurship with stories from different parts of India, and the world largely.
“India and the entrepreneurial ecosystem is not about the major cities. If you travel to the smaller, tier-four cities of India, you will be astonished at the depth and maturity of the thinking and entrepreneurial spirit of Indians,” said Nalin Singh.
Our guest for this episode, Sanjay Hatti, has created an almost monopolistic situation in the real estate space, in the small town of Karnataka, Bidar.
Sanjay Hatti is the Managing Director of Nisarga Homes. “His is a story that needs to be told,” as quoted by Nalin Singh.
How it all started
Hatti started his career in 1999, he worked with Gharda Chemicals where and learnt how a company functions, their strategy or how the funding happens. “Later my father suggested I start my own business. So I started with finance, then pharma, later I got married. My wife is a gynaecologist, that’s how I happened to start a hospital. I also started a pulses-production (dal) unit in south India. For the last seven years, I have been in the business of the real estate. In short, whatever business I got into, in the tier-two cities, did wonders, also because these cities have little competition,” said Hatti.
Going local, and successful
“In fact, getting investors from metros is difficult. In small towns, we have close-knit groups, so friends or relatives end up becoming part-time investors or partners in whatever skill-capacity they can contribute. That’s how we expand in small cities. Nisarga was started in 2014, today it is a seven-year-old baby. We started with only four people and 10 acres, today we have crossed more than 250 crore rupees, with a staff strength of around 100. All of this using only local resources!”
Definitely, it was not easy. In tier-two or three cities, people come together, take a small land and end up in a row. With Nisarga we started small too, and gradually hired staff from the metros to Bidar. So people with rich experience in real estate started giving wonderful guidance. We are running this as a complete monopoly business, we don’t have any competitors at all. In every district, we sell a minimum of 500 registrations. We have separate department houses, we have created standard SOPs, but we are looked at as a petty, small tier-two. However, we are pretty much at par with the metros, Hatti told Transcontinental Times.
Watch the whole interview here
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