In our latest interview, we spoke to yet another promising entrepreneur Arun Chandra who is the Founder at Big Mama. His encounters with various failed projects introduced him to the world of entrepreneurship and he eventually decided to take on a bigger role and delve into it full time. Let’s read his interesting and powerful entrepreneurial journey!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Arun:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your startup please:
My professional background is in Retail, where I have held P&L responsibilities of different companies. I am an entrepreneur for the past few years, being involved in incubating a few startups as varied as furniture e-com to the offline grocery. The most recent one and the one which is seeing tremendous traction is Big Mama.
Big Mama is a consumer product Brand specializing in Ready to Drink Beverages. Our most popular and hottest selling product is Big Mama Cold Coffee. This is probably the best cold coffee around as it champions the flavour of coffee in a very simple yet delightful way.
Further, we have been able to create an innovative distribution platform which has not only helped tremendously with the bottom line, it has put the brand Big Mama on the map.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
It may sound cliched, but I think entrepreneurship chose me. I had an opportunity to be part of an exciting project and I took the plunge. We had a failure to Launch. This was my welcome to the world of being an entrepreneur.
5 years since I have had some more projects which concluded in different degrees of failures. I am not a glass half full kind of a guy, but I feel being an entrepreneur, failures teach you much more and mould you in ways you don’t even realize. So, it is important to give failures due deference.
Only sleeping people don’t commit a mistake, but stupid people keep repeating it. So here I am, a bundle of failure and priceless lessons each one has taught me.
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e. what’s your source of motivation?
Motivation is like a dream that starts fading fast as soon as you wake up and don’t even remember it after a little while. Motivation is also easy to define if you are closer to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and gets really elusive as you reach the pinnacle of the hierarchy of needs.
And to complicate it all, motivation changes as you do and as you grow.
By definition, a thing which is transitory and ever-changing can-not be your life’s lodestar. You need to look beyond the immediate to realize that in the landscape of ever-changing motivations, you need to define your life by doing something meaningful.
Paraphrasing Dr Jordan Peterson, people live in different ever-widening circles and when everything people do is in sync with what is good for these circles, a symphony is created and meaning for life is derived. My circles which give meaning to my life is an immediate circle of my family and friends, the second circle consists of immediate company/employees/society/country that I live in and the widest circle is humanity as a whole.
I try to do something each day to move slowly towards making an impact on widest circle while maintaining the harmony with the inner circles.
That is what gets me out of bed each morning.
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
Challenges are the norm for any start-up and since each startup is like a river, never the same, their challenges are also very different. The biggest challenge we faced, and I speak in reference to our frontline staff, was to keep them sufficiently motivated and do good
Tell our audience more about your failures? How should one bounce back?
Failures are the norm rather than success. One should be surprised at success rather than failure. This is the only way you can dust yourself off after the previous failure and get going again. Failures provide a great insight into business, community, relationships and most of all yourself and hence it is a great learning opportunity. One must try to do it as objectively as possible without passing judgements on one’s own abilities.
Having said that, the best thing to do after a failure is to get reoriented quickly and find a direction you should be moving towards. The biggest cost of failure is that it often leaves the one who has failed completely directionless. So even if it is not optimal, you must decide the direction you should move and get going quickly.
This is the same advice the horse riders get about getting back in the saddle quickly after they have been thrown down by the horse.
What comes first for you – money or emotions?
Human is emotional beings no matter how they try to disguise as rational beings. Money is a construct supported by worldwide collective belief in it. For me, emotions come first, and to serve some of the emotions, money may be a requirement.
What I am saying is that money is one of the means to achieve optimum emotional state.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
In terms of a working environment, Pressure usually results in accumulation of urgent tasks and Stress from uncertainty. My advice to manage them will be to get organized. Time spent organizing oneself will yield better results and less pressure and stress. Abe Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe “
Bottomline – Spend time getting organized.
What advice would you give to someone starting out, particularly to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Other than money and success, always know what is your ‘WHY’?
Why enterprise and not a job?
Why a particular business idea and not the other?
Why now and not later?
These “WHYs” will build your operating principles, which in turn will lead to consistency of thoughts and actions, which will bring the desired outcome closer.
The answer to “WHYs” may change but continuously asking that of yourself will keep you on course, and indicate to you if a course correction is needed. Always remember:
“He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost anyhow.” — Friedrich Nietzsche.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem. Stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
