As part of our ongoing quest to get you meaningful and powerful stories from the startup ecosystem, we invited yet another passionate entrepreneur – Vishal Rastogi for an exclusive interview with BrilliantRead Media. He is the CEO and Director of Doozy Farms Pvt Ltd. Let’s read more about his inspiring journey so far and his advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with him:
Talk us through your background and your journey as an entrepreneur, please;
I did my schooling from La Martiniere College Lucknow and further pursued my engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in 1995. Joined Tata Steel directly from Campus and then worked for a number of medium and large IT companies in various positions across the world. I belong to a Business and Agricultural family and was the first engineer from my family and when I went for my engineering studies at no time I had thought, even in my wildest dreams, that after spending 21 years in IT industry and working my way to the top in the corporate world, I will be here back into the business. Here I am following the path laid down by my destiny where not only I am doing business but back to my routes as a farmer. Compared to my partners I am a farmer to start with and run our own dairy farm that is where we started our journey in this milk business and having done this I can fully understand and appreciate the effort of a farmer who puts that meal on our table.
I have been always interested to do something that has a social responsibility attached to it. So even few of us friend bored from our day to day mundane corporate life was searching for an idea what to do next, and being in IT in 2015 building an app or a platform would have been the easiest choice for me, but then we finally decided to do Dairy farming with just one thought that Milk is the most adulterated commodity and we all are giving white poison to our family and next generation, is there any way we can make a dent and do things right? It is with that thought that we stepped into this field to give a 100% pure milk to our consumer and milk that has complete traceability to the farm it was produced and not a collection centre model where we don’t even know which farm the milk has been delivered to us.”
With that social responsibility, we started on this journey in 2015 and after almost 9a ear of research we established our company in Feb 2016 and I think from that day onwards I had been tirelessly working to make this vision a reality, doing multiple jobs at times before coming over full time to take over the mantle of Doozy Farms.
We had our ups and downs and at one point we were almost bankrupt and were looking how do we come out of this hole, but then with God’s grace we turned the tide both on the capital side and also on how to take our business forward and the lady luck shined on us and since then there has been no turning back.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a corporate career?
I will say it was not I who choose entrepreneurship, rather it was probably the other way round. While working in my last company and bored with the same day to day job, I decided to do my Executive part-time MBA from IIFT Delhi. So while doing my day job and working on my MBA on the weekends, I realized that what I was doing was not what I was looking to do beyond a few more years.
Then once the MBA got over, I found myself having so much extra time with me that I had almost no idea what to do next, that is when I started to support few early-stage start-ups in helping them conceptualized their application as a product manager, as I was quite good in understanding business flow and logic and then helping them put them in on their App.”
That is when the idea came to my mind, that why don’t I do something on my own and as shared above it would have been an easy choice for me to do something in IT, but as the destiny had it I met my Roorkee batchmates on our reunion and that is where this idea of the dairy farm came out and I was the 2nd one to raise my hand, the 1st one being my old roommate from Roorkee and that is how we started with this journey together. We just wanted to make some difference in this field and though we always wanted to do things at a larger scale but never thought we will be where we are today where we are the largest Farm Fresh milk supplier in tri-city Chandigarh and also have a great start with Parth and Sahil in building our Delhi NCR business together.
Please share with us some of the challenges you faced in your journey;
In India, I think we are the very few countries in the world who do not acknowledge the hard work of a farmer and kind of perils and pain that our farmer has to go thru to put that food on our table, I did have some idea seeing my father and uncle struggle year after year with one crop of the other, but once I was in my corporate job I never thought about that. It was only when I started with our dairy venture, I got to know how difficult it is to be a farmer in India.
It was a surprise to know how fragmented our farmers are, and how the middle man makes the best money while our poor farmers do not even get their labour back. How we are dependent on a consultant who knows nothing and is just there to make fool of these naïve farmers and make quick money ( There are few very good guys there as well but very difficult to find and by the time you find them you have probably lost everything or almost ready to throw the towel), then there is weather and then very poor infrastructural support from our government.
And all this is true for Dairy as well, if you have a sick cow you take her blood sample to 2 different government lab and you will get 2 different results – no reliability at all. We faced the same issues, got fooled by a consultant, vendors/ suppliers etc, and in 2nd year of our operations we have screwed up big time on our cow’s pregnancy and which meant huge losses for the farm next.
It was this which took us almost to the gate of bankruptcy. But then we decided we will kick out all consultant and will do everything ourselves, we learnt every aspect of rearing a cow from their milking lifecycle, to find out how to identify a sick cow, how to know when the cow is heated and how do we track all this to ensure we do not make a fool of ourself again. On the other side we were dependent on State cooperative to buy milk from us, and though we are ready to pay 20Rs for a 500ml water bottle the procurement price for a litre of milk is between 28-34 Rs per litre for cows milk, poor uneducated farmers have no options but to sell their milk to these cooperatives who will pay after 30-60 days.”
Being an educated farmer after the first year we knew if we have to survive then we have to direct sales and not to give this hard produced milk to co-operative at a price which was less than the price of milk. These 2 key decisions helped us face and come out stronger from these challenges that are faced by the dairy farmer every single day and that is why so many farms close every year.
During this COVID-19 crisis, what are the measures we have undertaken to continue your business without disruption?
COVID has been a very challenging time for all industries, but somehow the essential commodities industry avoided this curve and for us, this became a boom period.
But what was important was to protect your people, your customer and lastly your business from getting impacted and closed because of this virus. So we had to take all the required precautions from changing how we operate to standard ones like the use of gloves and mask by all delivery boys, taking temperatures and implementing social distancing in the offices.
What is your Business Mantra: Money or Emotions?
For me, it is the values that have been inculcated in me by my parents and my alma mater and those are Do things which makes you sleep peacefully in the night – so do things the right way – no short cuts and do what you promise to your customers which in this case is the Purest form of milk.
Though we know our product can give us a great premium on top of other milk available in the market and we could have made it expensive enough for only affordable to upper-middle-class or rich, however, we consciously decided that our products would be slightly expensive than cooperative ones so as to cover our additional cost in producing this quality of milk.
It gives me so much happiness when I know our milk is being consumed in by one of the richest in Chandigarh as well by a Labourer who wants to give this good quality milk to his/her child and can afford the same.
As a corporate business yes we have to make some profits else we will never be able to continue in our journey of providing Pure milk to as many people we can, so we have to make a right balance between the Money and Emotions and take all our decisions accordingly.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
Being in a corporate world for so many years and leading a large team of 350 people at times, and working on IT projects with crazy timelines or supporting the customer in a 24*7 time basis, I think I already was facing more pressure and stress in my previous days versus now.
But as I said the journey has not been easy, from standing in the sun at 48 degrees Centigrade and getting cow silage done, to deliver milk to customer ourself, I think we have done almost all aspect of business ourselves. So now we know almost how to deal with anything, so not that much pressure or stress anymore.
But I love to unwind with my family and friends whenever possible as I do stay a large part of a month away from them.
What has worked well for you so far?
Meticulous planning and execution have worked well for us. If you see the kind of operations that we run are very complex as it has Livestock on one end and complex milk run logistics on the other side and to support this you have to have a strong sales and marketing team and Collect the money form the market.
All these four levers have to work smoothly for the success of venture like us. So, you have to be continuously planning about all the aspect together making it very difficult to comprehend the impact of one decision in one area on the other.
Given the rapid pace at which the world is changing, what are the leadership traits that are necessary for success?
I strongly believe in EQ over IQ. Emotional Quotient is very important in this changing world, Your partners, your team, your workforce everyone that you work with, you have to have an emotional connection with them and if you do things will work out themselves.
In your opinion what are the keys to success?
Be honest to Yourself and to your work, Work hard, Have patience and Building a good team as you move from one step to the next. Then leave some of it for the God and Lady Luck.
We would love to know your advice for all those starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
There is no age to be an entrepreneur. I started when I was 42 and have seen people starting venture even at an age of 60. So the only advice I can give to all budding entrepreneurs is that don’t get flustered with your failures, learn and move forward.
Each failure should make you even that much stronger in your resolve to be an entrepreneur. Before you start on your entrepreneurial journey keep these 3 things in mind:
1 – It will be only your family that will support you throughout this journey so make sure they are on your side as they will face the same challenges as you will
2 – Never have any debt on your head when you start on this journey, you will not have your salary hitting your bank accounts every month so make sure you don’t have to pay anyone and build a small corpus to support your family.
3 – Start small and then make it big – be frugal in whatever you do when u start.
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.
