As part of our relentless efforts to identify and share some of the meaningful stories from India and around the world, this week we invited Suzaina Basheer for an interview with us. She is the Founder of Mavericking. Suzaina has over 16 years of domain expertise as a Business-HR and is leveraging her skills to add value to the lives of her clients including startups and SMES. Let’s read more about her interesting journey so far!
Excerpts from our exclusive Interview with Suzaina:
Tell us a little little about your background and your start-up Mavericking, please;
I describe myself as a people, technology and conscious fashion enthusiast naturally inclined towards all that’s creative. Professionally, my career summarizes so far as a Business-HR with 16+ years of experience. Mavericking.com is a venture that encapsulates my learnings in the field of HR and is focused on providing on-demand, bespoke and agile solutions in HR Strategy and Technology for start-ups and SMEs.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
I’ve always liked working in re-inventing environments or in environments where you need to build something ground up. I’ve always loved working closer to business watching how every decision (be it HR centric or otherwise) impacts that P&L ticker and brand value.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the finest across industries doing this. That certainly has helped understand and broaden my capabilities over the years, making me even keen to start on my own and craft unconventional routes from scratch.
I did my share of being a professional, learning, improving, consulting within a company but I was keen to push the envelope further. I wanted to test uncharted territories to see how far can I go and thus satiate my risk appetite.
How do you find the industry/niche that you’re in?
A bespoke, agile and adaptive HR Strategy designed to work in tandem with respective business visions is one of the key pillars that set the foundation for any business. There are merits in investing on it since it focuses on (a) building human capabilities to enable the company’s growth and (b) ensuring an elevated experience for internal customers who not only represent the company but also put their faith in the company to build a career for themselves. So clearly that’s vital. Having said that, working closely with P&Ls, I understand that it can get capital intensive for startups and SMEs to deploy both strategic and domain specialist full-time in early stages.
Thus, I wanted to offer an agile ‘On-Demand HR’ model based on which growth orbit the company is currently in; making it relevant for the start-ups and SME segment.
Here depending on which stage the company is we tailor-make solutions to meet business goals and ensure business continuity. To add, we’ve entered the 4th industrial revolution already. It’s essential to build progressive, simple yet unconventional HR solutions leveraging technology adoption. Being a technology enthusiast, I’ve always enjoyed that space. But it’s no longer a luxury instead it’s a necessity, thus the ‘Digital Transformation’ offering.
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e. what’s your source of motivation?
Gratitude for another day in the life. I am naturally curious and thus look forward to what learnings each day may bring in. To top it up, I love everything where I can let my creative juices flow. Each new day is an opportunity to do so much of this. So, I go straight into it saying, ‘Carpe Diem’!
(Well, also, a hope that I will be able to meet a superhero from any of the Marvel series someday J)
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your entrepreneurial journey so far?
A few but more like hurdles that you need to jump to walk past every now and then. First and foremost, qualitative HR models are relatively a hard sell even internally and our model is an outsider proposing to be that insider for various other merits it comes with. So unless a decision-maker is really conscious about, (a) shaping their human capabilities and (b) creating an unmatched internal customer experience in addition to the basic functioning in its early stages, it’s a lengthier sales cycle before we can showcase the value.
Secondly, being bootstrapped, it’s more often than not a chicken and egg story about where you invest first – tapping the demand or building the supply first. This eases over a few cycles of revenue and then works in tandem. But this obstacle also amplifies when you come across companies where ageing of payables for vendors/suppliers is not a very important metric that is being looked at. In general, the sanity and work ethos on this metric seems to lack compassion in our geography which is a growing concern across the market.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
Meditation – bringing myself back to the now consciously is something that I’ve been practising for a long time and believe in it. Pressure or stress are symptoms resulting out of something. And when I am in it, I focus my energies on chasing its root cause, get to it, understand it and work my way out of it.
What is one strategy that you believe has helped you grow as a person?
Openness to learn and thus evolve meaningfully.
In your opinion what are the keys to success?
Success is a very broad term. Success is each to his/her own. Hence it’s very essential to first define what success means to you versus what it may mean for someone else. Once you have that, with ingredients like consistency, belief, acceptance, pragmatisms you’ll get there.
What advice would you give to someone starting out particularly women?
My 3 bits on this,
1) An entrepreneurial journey has a certain gravity to it. Hold your ground, stay steady, be at it. Don’t let failures surprise you. Accept success and criticism both with grace – there is an abundance of learning in both.
2) If you haven’t started yet it’s like you are on the viewing deck. Look around. There is a sea, people across the sea, in the sea and getting into the sea. That’s a good view. We started, got some feathers in our hats, failed a few times, hustled through time – learn from our mistakes. Make different and new ones but try to avoid the same ones.
3) Most importantly, ask yourself why you want to start. If your idea is to have it simple, it’s not for that. If your idea is to simplify or solve, that’s a solid reason.
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.
