At BrilliantRead Media, we always strive to bring meaningful and powerful stories from India and around the world to empower and motivate our growing community. As part of this endeavour, we invited Shreya Prakash for an exclusive interview with us. She is an Entrepreneur, Leader, Mentor, Consultant, and Change Enabler. Shreya is the Co-Founder and CEO at FlexiBees. Let’s learn more about her incredible journey, her background, and her advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Shreya:
We are aware of your contribution to the ecosystem, talk us through your background and your journey as a women entrepreneur, please;
I have always taken the biggest decisions in life driven by instinct. Be it in the choice of life partner, deciding to have a baby or starting a company, they all felt right. I felt ready, inspired even, to take those leaps.
Becoming an entrepreneur was not an intuitive choice for me, having grown up in a family that wasn’t a business one, a professional career seemed like the obvious option.
After graduating from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2008, I was set for a career like that at one of the biggest FMCG companies in the world. And for the time I was there, it was great. For eight years and across a variety of stints, I was like a sponge, forever learning.”
But there was another kind of learning happening in parallel. Through the experiences of close friends and colleagues, I was starting to see how tough it is for women professionals to grow in their careers once they hit certain life milestones like marriage and maternity.
This is especially stark after maternity, whereas per a study in April 2018 by the Genpact Centre for Women’s Leadership, among women who join the workforce, 48% drop out within four months of returning from maternity leave, and further down the line, 50% drop out before age 30 to take care of their children.
The problem is a global one and I wanted to help solve it. And that’s how I got together with my then friends and now cofounders, Deepa and Rashmi, to start FlexiBees.
‘FlexiBees’ is such a unique name; talk us through more about it, please. Our audience would also love to know what kind of problem you are solving?
FlexiBees is a vetted talent platform for part-time, project-based and remote work via qualified women professionals who want to work flexibly. We help businesses hire in an affordable and on-demand way and women professionals balance their professional and personal priorities.
We are solving two problems:
On the one hand, businesses today want to hire talent via flexible models across all kinds of roles but end up wasting time & money hiring the wrong talent – they are difficult to find, difficult to vet for, and might not give the commitment the job needs.
The second problem we are solving is of talented women professionals dropping out of the workforce in millions. There are multiple reasons including gender-based societal roles and lack of good childcare infrastructure, but lack of flexibility at work is a key reason. The problem is global but especially acute in South Asia where women’s workforce participation is at a low of 26% vs 75% for men.
We are solving both these problems by harnessing this pool of women professionals to provide businesses with talent that is experienced and driven, via models that are agile and affordable.
How has the journey of FlexiBees been so far?
It’s doing very well. We have given talent to 600+ companies, across India, Singapore, UAE, UK, USA, and other markets and across functions like Sales, Digital, Marketing, HR, Finance, Technology and so on.
We have a talent pool of 50k+ women professionals from across functions and sectors, all of whom are experienced and driven.
Has the world become more remote-friendly today, post the pandemic?
Yes definitely. With both businesses and people now having tasted remote work, they understand the benefits it brings. Especially for smaller businesses, it is a currency they can use to attract great talent without any geographical limitations.
Almost all of our engagements are fully remote and in 80% of the cases, the client and our consultant are not even in the same city (or country).”
We have had some very interesting cases: one that comes to mind is where the client office was in Singapore, the manager in Paris and our consultant in this city on the eastern coast of India called Visakhapatnam! She was working as a Webinar Marketer and it did very well. The contract got renewed and is still going strong!
There are many such examples, we are helping businesses grow by giving them experienced and vetted talent quickly and affordably, like never before!
What attracts you towards entrepreneurship instead of a corporate career?
We wanted to help solve the humongous problem of women’s workforce participation in India and South Asia in a way that was beneficial for businesses.
By the time I left my job to start up, I had also started feeling the tug of entrepreneurship for its own sake; I have always had a high degree of ownership and a strong desire to learn new things, entrepreneurship promised both.
How do you manage to keep going despite the challenges? What drives you?
Entrepreneurship is tough and 6 years down the road, we have seen both ups and downs.
What keeps one going during the troughs is the knowledge that you are changing a part of the world for the better and that there are businesses and people who benefit from what you do.”
What are some of the strategies that you believe have helped you grow as a person?
I remember this one time when in the comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, Calvin’s father tells him that “adversity builds character”. I am not sure whether Calvin paid heed to this advice but I certainly took it to heart.
All of my life I have never shied away from difficult tasks, from putting myself outside of my comfort zone, because I believe I do my best learning that way.”
What advice would you give students and young professionals who want to have a successful career?
For students, I would recommend them to find out more about potential career paths before committing to one.
This could be done by speaking with folks you know or by doing internships and projects.
It could save a lot of headaches later and help in getting to a path that aligns with your interests and skill sets sooner.
Last but not least, what are the three most important lessons you have learned in your life?
I am not sure I can recount three but my biggest learning has been that networking is an essential and legitimate skill. Our network can help us find new jobs, new career opportunities, partners for a business idea and even a life partner.
This skill has traditionally been much reviled, but really as human beings, we are all the sum of our communities and networks. It’s important we own it and build it.
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.
