After building a top-line consumer products company, the Marico chairman is now helping entrepreneurs help themselves
Harsh Mariwala
Chairman of consumer products company Marico
Age: 63
Rank in the Rich List: 46
Net Worth: $2.02 billion
The Big Challenge Faced in the Last Year: Attracting the right kind of entrepreneurs for his Ascent initiative and scaling up the mentoring programme beyond Mumbai
The Way Forward: Ascent has just opened the Delhi chapter. The next stop will be Bangalore. Eventually, Mariwala wants Ascent to help 10,000 entrepreneurs
It is a rainy Saturday morning in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC). In one of the many corporate offices that dot this commercial neighbourhood, seven entrepreneurs are on their toes, playing a game where each has to add a sentence to eventually make a story. In the end, they have it easy; evidently, it is not the toughest thing that they have done in their entrepreneurial journey.
After this warm-up exercise, ‘Habits Coach’ Vivek Slaria (who, in his own words, helps people create the life they want to lead by building the right habits) gives them a talk on willpower. It’s like any other muscle in the body, so keep sweating it out, he tells his students.
The advice may seem a tad redundant, though, given that Slaria is addressing a bunch of entrepreneurs who’ve essayed success on the risky terrain of finance and economics. But if you watch them move into the next agenda of the day, the “check-in session”, you’ll learn an important lesson: There is no such thing as enough willpower.
One entrepreneur, for instance, can’t muster enough of it to let go of a senior executive. “He has been with me through thick and thin. But with the kind of changes that the business is undergoing, he has become a liability. How do I ask him to go?” he asks.
A promoter-peer also has a similar problem. “My CEO is old now and if I ask him to go, he won’t get too many jobs,” he says.
As the group racks its brains over the golden handshake, a third member comes up with his story. “Last month, Harsh bhai had talked about a similar experience at the offsite. He had mentioned that he had waited too long—two years—to let go of a senior official at his team; because your business is not just about an individual but also about the whole company.”
The two words—Harsh bhai—dissolved the brewing tension in the room. The first entrepreneur dug into his bowl of instant noodles with confidence, relieved that if a business doyen like Harsh Mariwala, 63, the chairman of consumer products company Marico, went through such trials and tribulations, he, too, will be able to brave them. “The life of an entrepreneur is tough and lonely,” he sighs and moves on.
For another hour, the group discusses similar issues and then disbands, promising to meet at the same place, same time, a month later.
A New Beginning
It’s hard to believe that none of the members of this group knew each other before January 2013. They got together because of their shared admiration and respect for Mariwala. The initiative that brought them together was the Ascent Foundation, which was started by Mariwala in August 2012 to give entrepreneurs a platform to learn from each other’s experiences.
“I felt that I should handle entrepreneurs who have a proven business model, but had problems of scaling. The objective of Ascent is to create an ecosystem of entrepreneurs through the formation of ‘trust groups’,” he says. “A group discusses issues that are brought to the table. You get the perspective of nine other entrepreneurs with a business of a similar turnover.”
Those who met at BKC formed one such trust group that calls itself Agni. At present, there are 26 such groups comprising 338 entrepreneurs. “The target is to touch 10,000 entrepreneurs across India, including 1,000 in Mumbai,” says Manak Singh, chief evangelist and the co-creator of Ascent. “Ascent entrepreneurs have a cumulative turnover of Rs 13,700 crore and come from over 65 industries,” says Singh, who has been involved with other entrepreneurship ecosystems like TiE, a non-profit trade group that fosters entrepreneurship.
The impact is beginning to show. SR Hande, who owns Master Metrology, an auto parts manufacturing company in Pune, was looking to form a joint venture with a foreign firm, but was unsure about how to make a pitch. “I asked my friends in Agni and they helped me prepare the presentation and the pitch.”
The Exclusive Club
(This story appears in the 17 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)