At BrilliantRead Media, we always strive to bring some of the unique and powerful stories from India and around the world to empower and motivate our growing community of entrepreneurs, coaches, investors, management students and aspiring entrepreneurs. This week we invited Aditya Pratap Singh for an interview with us to know more about his inspiring journey. He is a seasoned entrepreneur and business professional with over two decades of domain expertise. Aditya is a passionate entrepreneur, thought leader, business consultant, mentor & founder and CEO of Let’s Meat. His venture Let’s Meat is India’s first organised chain of Meat SuperMarts supported by delivery systems catering to the entire city area of Jaipur and Delhi NCR. He is further expanding the line of products and geographies. Let’s learn more about his entrepreneurial journey and the way forward!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with him:
Talk us through your background and your journey as an entrepreneur, please;
I always wanted to be a professional cricketer until an injury changed the course of my career. I started my career with the government of Rajasthan but after a couple of years realised that a 9 to 5 job is not my cup of tea. In my journey of over 20 years as an entrepreneur, I launched a successful food delivery business in the education city of Kota…it happened more than 20 years back when there was no e-commerce, mobiles were for privileged only and no logistic backbone. In following years I founded a computer education company, established the largest cable television network of Rajasthan, founded an event company and did talent hunting and talent management for several musical television shows, founded an e-governance company and handled many e-governance projects such as AADHAR and socio-economic and caste census.
Most of my past ventures required extensive travel and being a meat connoisseur I always find it challenging to procure meat in a healthy and hygienic environment. All this while I kept thinking that someone would solve this problem someday but nothing changed in this industry. The desire to transform this industry grew stronger by the day and in one fine moment the passion to do something innovative swayed the entrepreneur within me, and that’s how Let’s Meat came into existence. It was not an easy decision to give away a highly successful and rewarding business for something unknown and very challenging but adventurer within me prevailed and next, I found myself swimming in unchartered waters. Having no prior experience in the meat business I gave myself one year to understand nuances of the trade before launching our first virtual store.
We are aware of all the good work you are doing in your space; what keeps you going?
What started as a business inspired by innovation has now become a mission. In the absence of policy guidelines in most parts of the country, this business is dominated by the unorganised sector. My objective is to offer healthy protein alternative to the households of this country. I hanker to make Let’s Meat the most trusted meat brand of the nation.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a corporate career?
I believe even corporate professionals have equal work pressures if not less but it’s tough to connect with your job given various challenges beyond your control.
Being an entrepreneur allows one to follow its heart and passion, freedom to apply its own ideas and many more things. It also makes you stretch your limits, know the unknown within you and test your own resolve.
Of course, you have to bear the responsibility for all the good or bad decisions you have made in the entrepreneurial journey but the adrenal rush you feel as an entrepreneur is tough to find in typical corporate career or in my case a secure government position.
Please share with us some of the challenges you faced in your journey;
Phew…this by far has been the most challenging business endeavour and full of roadblocks and barriers. Right from procuring space for store and processing units to find good team members ready to make a career in the meat industry to disrupt existing business model, everything was a challenge and it made the entire process very slow. Besides that raising capital and making investors understand an inherently complicated business was and still is a daunting task. Thanks to some wonderful friends and my co-founder Neeraj I had a relatively smooth sail.
What is your Business Mantra: Money or Emotions?
I can’t deny the importance of money and emotions sometimes act in conflict with business prudence but for me, the mantra is to be grateful. Grateful to my customers who are the pillars or my entire business structure, grateful to my vendors and suppliers who have stood by me when I was in rough waters and grateful to my team members who actually shaped this business at the grass-root level. I strongly believe that if gratitude can become the base of every business we can overcome so many unnecessary challenges and develop an atmosphere of mutual trust between all the stakeholders.
While I constantly work towards creating more value for all the stakeholders each store of Let’s Meat has adopted an underprivileged girl child and is taking care of her education until graduation. This is our way of expressing gratitude.
Founder & CEO – Aditya Pratap Singh
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
I am a trained Afro-Latin dancer so that’s one thing which changes my mood in a jiffy.
Some Bachata or Kizomba over my favourite drink with my dance buddies is something I can never pass…other than that a Karaoke evening with friends also does the trick. However, it’s rare that I feel stressed but whenever there is some semblance of it I work on finding solution causing that stress. Any solution whether it’s easy or tough takes time but the optimism evoked out of the process of finding solutions is key to handle the stress during that entire stretch of time.
What has worked well for you so far?
It’s a tricky question as few things which worked once may not work another time in a similar situation but relationships always work. Your conduct during highs and respect you show towards people around you in good times build the foundation of your relationships which in turn always pays off one way or the other. I am the first business person in my family and did not even have seed capital to start my first venture but I made it so far counting on the relationships I developed during this journey. Let’s put it this way that if hard work and dedication is the boat relationships are the oars.
In your opinion what are the keys to success?
I think I may not be in the right position to comment on this as I myself is working towards becoming truly successful but I can tell what can save you from failure. Knowing one’s limitation, recognizing what one can or can’t do and not getting carried away by the flamboyance around you can make you more focused and pragmatic. Recognizing that would limit your chances of failure and propel you towards success.
I recall an interesting anecdote told by a dear friend from my cricket days. He was playing a first-class domestic game and had an opportunity to open the batting with the legendary Sachin Tendulkar. They had a record-breaking opening stand in that game and both ended up scoring centuries in that game. Sachin Tendulkar was mesmerizing and toyed with bowlers by hitting them all over the park whereas my friend Gagan Khoda, who later became selector of Indian cricket team was steady, taking his singles and dispatching balls falling in his strong zone across the boundary.
At the end of the game, Gagan scored 50 extra runs and remained unbeaten in that game while Sachin got out and that is because he didn’t try and outshine Sachin or was not swayed by his aura. Knowing your limitations also means knowing your strength and that’s what makes successful people.
What do you want to achieve with your brand ‘Let’s Meat’?
The meat industry has not changed for centuries. In most parts of the country, the meat is still sold in unauthorized filthy shops with absolutely no hygiene, it’s still cut on a wooden log by rusty iron knives and stored at room temperature and you don’t want me to tell you about the butchers handling the meat. We want to change all that by offering Omnichannel meat shopping experience in a world-class hygienic environment.
However, we are not just a raw meat company. We are offering our customers everything which has anything to do with meat. From exotic ready to cook items curated by our experienced chefs to mouth-watering ready to eat traditional dishes such as Lal Maans to a wide variety to organic meat products, everything is available at Let’s Meat. Our vision is to become ‘The Meat Super Mart’ of the country.
During this COVID-19 crisis, what are the measures you have undertaken to continue your business without disruption?
Our foremost priority was to safeguard our team members without interrupting the supply chain and then to make sure that we offer an absolutely safe and hygienic shopping environment to our esteemed customers.
Owing to the efforts of our franchise partners and team member we could successfully implement all the safety protocols without compromising supply of the products we offer on our platforms. Proactive support of government machinery, particularly in Rajasthan, was also instrumental in ensuring seamless operations. I take pride in saying that Let’s Meat was operational every single day from day one of lockdown.
What’s in store for Let’s Meat in days to come?
While we want to expand across states and regions our focus is on Tier 2 cities which I believe have been deprived of the virtues of the start-up revolution. Most of the new ventures are metro focussed and very less has trickled down to Tier 2 towns. We want to change that by giving equal importance to Tier 2 cities.
Let’s Meat is also getting into cloud kitchen space where we are going to offer a varied range of authentic meat dishes curated from different parts of the world.
Technology has touched almost every aspect of our lives but meat space is ignored for long and is craving for a makeover. We are working towards building a technology that can help customers buying their meat with more conviction.
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