 Umar Akshar with us, he's going to give us a talk on stop selling software and start selling Lengas, a very interesting title. So without much delay, over to you Umar, you can go ahead and share your screen. Okay, it's a bit of a weird conference as an interesting and weird because I have never done a talk where I had to sit in front of the computer screen, not have visibility of my audience and try to connect. So it's going to be a little bit of a trial and error for me because this is first time but I hope I can deliver the message that I'm trying to and we can have questions so at the end of the session. So this whole session is about a little bit of my journey in the entrepreneurship space and how I came about building the brand and a lot of people that I've spoken to have asked me to share a little bit of the context of the story before I go on to what the actual brand was. So I'm going to actually start off with a little bit of a background in terms of what what the story is and how did it start? How did I really stop selling software and started selling Lengas, right? So in 2016, I quit a very successful IT 3 year of 18 years and decided to move on and set up a chain of retail stores that would sell Lengas, right? But as dramatic as it may sound, the journey was not so dramatic for me personally because for me it all started way back in 1991. I was just 17 and I was in my second field that felt great as we call it in India. I was just starting to go to college, been a year there and that's when my whole whole life got shook up. The whole world shook up around me and what happened? What happened was my dad was in a business of doing wholesale. He was in some sort of a wholesale business. I was not too involved in it but one day he came up to me and said, Sam, I need you to help me out. I need you to quit your studying and move to Kolar. I used to live in Bangalore so I was asked to move to Kolar which is a small sleepy town to the north of Bangalore about 70 kilometers and run this store for me and you're going to be running the store for the rest of your life and it completely shook me because I was never prepared. I was just a teenager growing up just starting to go to college and I could never relate to not going to continue my studies, not going to continue a career path that I was hoping to get to. But as we had it, I had to make a choice of going to Kolar because the family really needed me to go and look after the business and it was a new store. My dad had acquired it from somebody and he wanted to start doing retail. We were a very lower middle-class family and the reason we had to move from Bangalore to Kolar was because we did not have the resources to start a business in Bangalore to Kolar with a small town so we somehow managed to get started. That's how the shift happened. So I agreed that I'm going to take this up. I'm going to do what the family needs but I had one condition that I put in front of my dad and that condition was I want to continue to pursue my studies. I do not want to stop studies and I requested for a one-month break every year where I could use that month to go and actually pursue my studies and it was approved. I was given the permission to say okay you can run the store every year you get a month off and you go to your life. So that's how it started. My life would be 11 months of running the store six days a week. I would open the store at 9 in the morning and shut the store at 9 in the night. It was not like a software job where you have an 8-hour day. It was a good 12-hour day every day and it was a very traditionally run business so I had to actually sit in the store the whole day. So I was the salesperson, I was a cashier, I was a manager, I was a purchaser, merchandiser, everybody, everybody was me and I had about two or three staff that would work with me to run the store that's how it all started. But at the end of every year I would take the month off that's when my dad come and support me in the store and during that month I had to figure out how do I get through my entire syllabus for the year and you know give my exams in class and the idea was so I would approach it in a way where every year one month I had 30 days I had six subjects so to analyze question papers over the last 10 years that would come for the exam figure out what are the probabilities of the questions that are going to come which are the questions that I need to really target on study those aspects and go and write my exams. So I finished my POC, I did the same thing with my graduation, I did a bachelor's in commerce, I finished my graduation in a similar way and then finally I wanted to do an MBA and MBA was not happening because the town where I stayed there was no college that did MBA and no MBAs were willing to give me an opportunity to not be a regular student and just write the exams. So I had to opt for master's in commerce instead because I figured that in Colorado let me do that. So then I pursued my master's in commerce in the same way and I finished my master's in commerce and after I finished my master's in commerce the second shift happened. So what was the second shift? I finished my master's and at that time in 98 I topped the institute where I was doing my master's in commerce and at this time my dad came up to me and said dude you've never been to college the whole year, you've been just spending this one month doing your study stuff and you've topped the college. I think you should go and figure out your life somewhere else. This Colorado is too small a town for you, you should go and figure out your life somewhere else and see what you really want to do with your life. That was great for me, I was super excited about hearing what my dad was saying and luckily for me we were six siblings so my dad had planned for it I think. We were six siblings and what he said is I will get one of your younger brothers to come and help me and you can go and figure out your life. So that was the second shift which was great but now I was armed with a master's in commerce degree, zero capital in my pocket and I had no idea what to do so I started talking to people and tried to figure out what really I need to do and then there were people at that time this was you know in the 1998's where everybody was saying software is the way to go, software is the way to go, that's where the world is going to move, that's where everything is going to happen and I had no idea about it because we never could afford a computer at home I had never dealt with a computer so I was trying to figure out how do I do this man I have never done software in my life but then my dad was like dude you have done all of this other stuff without being too much involved so you'll do software to just take it up you'll see what happens and a few other incidents happen and I decided to take on software so somebody who I really trusted advised me to go in that direction and we also suggested that you need to learn Oracle and Java and these were two very alien words for me what is Oracle what is Java no idea but I need to learn software that was the whole thing right go and learn software and you will be good so I joined this institute in my show which had a six month course and they promised me that they will teach me both Java and Oracle in six months and I started my my course over there and the first the first few weeks where everything was going over my head I was not understanding anything in the classroom but then I had access to a computer I spent 16 hours in front of the computer and over a period of the first two or three months I started to get to know a lot about what's happening with Oracle what's happening with Java I started learning bits and pieces I started building small bits of software funnily three months into the course there was a company in my show that came to do campus recruitment at the Institute and for that three months course they hired me as a software developer and that's how in 98 my software career started and that's how the next shift happened where I moved from being a retail guy into software so since then career the career spanned over 18 years I had the opportunity to to work in multiple different countries I worked in the US I worked in the UK I worked in Europe I worked in Singapore worked in India and over a span of 18 years I traveled multiple different countries I consulted with multiple different domains in terms of software big banking insurance e-commerce retail government many many different organizations like this gave me a lot of exposure I enjoyed every bit of it I drew a lot in my career but somewhere deep down inside I was still that that boy who was 17 year old who set up this store and with every consulting assignment that I did I realized that there were new insights that I was getting the new insights about retail new insights about operations new insights about marketing new insights about different things that you could do as possibilities in the business and I always would try to apply that to the business that I did when I was 17 how would I do that differently if I did it today how would I do this differently if I did it today and that kept bothering me for many many years that I would always apply things to the same business and somewhere there was a calling deep inside that that is where your life is that is where you need to be and then came the next leap of faith so around 2009 I took the next leap of faith but I was still working in the software world and I decided to start a business on the side on my own at that time I had a grand saving of 14 lakh rupees or from all the salaries and everything that we had say I had saved over the over the years the general advice at home was go buy an apartment and give a down payment and start your EMI and then be settled in your life but I had different plans I really needed to follow my dream and build my business so there was a time they were at this time in Bangalore there was a very small store about 700 square feet that was that was shutting down I heard that the store had shut down three times because different people had tried to revive that so it never worked and finally the good news was it was going away at the price that I could afford so I decided to take the leap of faith I took all my savings I invested in the store and I went very lean because what I did is when we when we took the store over we did not invest anything in the furniture or the branding or anything else we used the store as it is clean it up we did a bit of branding we could not afford a branding agency at that time so it was me and my brother pulling up Photoshop taking our old brand name which was Nina Bazar initially when my dad started the business doing a bit of Photoshop on it and creating a little bit more classy name and getting started my primary objective at that point was to understand how do we do this business with all the learning that we have applied and test these things and learn from these things and evolve and we started applying all of the different learnings that that we had from the consulting background that we that we worked in and very soon we realized that the business was picking up we understood the business model we recovered our entire investment in one year's time and we figured that there was a product to market fit and we figured that there was a really profitable business line and we started taking that on up so this store became successful I was still working in I T and on the back of this store is over the next four years I set up three more stores small little experiments trying things out learning from what we are doing and it kept building on its own so for four years I had a parallel track of being a full-time software developer working in the software industry while at the same time having a business running parallelly where I hired a full team to run the business everything was technology driven I had access to all the data I had access to all the stores so I would look at them via video camera then I was in the US I would look at all my stores via video cameras when I was in the UK look at all my stores via video cameras and had access to all the data so that's how the business started building but then after four years I figured we had built something beautiful we had a lot of good customer responses people kept coming back to us customers were repeating and they gave really good feedback about what we had built about our products about everything else and I thought this was the time where where we call it quits right and in 2016 I quit IT full-time to pursue my dream of building a retail brand that would span the entire country and that's how the the final shift happened from IT to selling Lengas again full-time right so that's the journey that's a bit of the story and now what I'm going to walk you through is a few of the things that we did I think half an hour is what we have that's too short of time for me to talk about applying the various things that I learned in in IT in the agile context in my consulting life and how did we use all of that to build the brand that we have built but I'm going to touch upon three aspects of it and walk you through some of those those processes that we followed and I'm hoping that that led value to anybody who wants to apply them in their own businesses or in your own life for that matter so I think the first thing I figured is while we did agile and while we had a bunch of different rituals that we did in terms of stand-ups in terms of your walls in terms of your ice cream eaters or whatever else it was not it was not just a software context practice it could be pretty much applied anywhere because I found that a lot of these principles were not about software it was about people it was about how people come together and how people deliver maximum throughput and when you in any business what you really want is people to come together and deliver maximum throughput and a lot of these practices you could apply to any context not just software so now that in 2016 I quit my career and I said I'm going to be back in India back in Bangalore from Singapore where I was working before I actually came back to India I had to now think about this is going to be my life this this brand this little business that I've created is going to be my life so I need to look at how do I scale it and the first thing we started thinking about is we need to create a brand for ourselves because we've been riding on top of this brand which was conceptualized 20 years ago we also figured by that time the name Mina Bazar was something that was very very common we had more than 250 registered Mina Bazar in the country so our vision of scaling the country would have never been possible if you would have used that name because nobody would gotten the IP of that name so we had to start thinking about brand and this time we had enough money because we had been post told we had made some money over the period so we decided to hire a marketing or branding agency so they came in and they did a lot of research about our customers about our products and about various different aspects about you know they went through the ideas of going from different perspectives of how do you come up with the brand name and the brand concept after a lot of research and a lot of exercises they came up with a couple options of names so one of the options was Koski the other option was Haseem and there was a dilemma within us of which of the two options should be used should we go with Koski or should we go with Haseem and the thought process was Haseem is a Urdu word and it means beautiful and it's a it's probably a word that most people would understand in the country people connect to it much easier so it seemed like the direction to go in at the same time Koski was interesting because it sounded very different nobody knew what it was and Koski actually means girl it means girl in a language called Naviti which is the spoken language of a community in in a small village called Mureshwar and that Naviti community and why Koski because we are actually the Naviti community and Navite is my mother town and that's how the word Koski came about so while we were had this you know intellectual discussions about what we needed to do we said the simplest way to make the decision is to let the customer decide what that name should be and we took a very simplistic low-profile approach we did not go for high software we did not go for complex survey mechanisms and all of that we took a simple sheet of paper like you see on the screen we wrote Koski and Haseem on the two sides and every customer that walked into our existing four stores we said we asked them a question between the two what would you choose and the customer always asked us what does Koski mean I don't know but it sounds cool it sounds interesting and some people like Haseem and depend based on every customer's feedback we just tracked okay Koski or Haseem Koski or Haseem Koski or Haseem and over a period of one week across four stores we captured enough data to tell us from a customer perspective what is more well received is it Koski or is it Haseem and the results were pretty clear and starting clear actually we saw that 70 plus percent of the customers voted for Koski and their thought process was I don't know what Koski means but it sounds very different it sounds very enigmatic they they feel like they want they want to get it they want to get a hold of it they want to know what it is they want to discover it so it was very it felt very cool to most of the customers that that were giving a vote for Koski while on the other hand all the votes that we got for Haseem what we figured is the demographics of the two groups we got about 25 38 percent votes for Haseem but the demographics was that most people who chose Haseem were 35 plus in terms of their age groups and most people who chose Koski were below 35 30 25 18 and as a brand our core customer is the bride and the girl who's going to get married the woman is going to get married so the age group that we are targeting is 18 to 25 or 28 or whatever that bracket is that's a core audience right so it gives us total clarity in our heads that the core audience is going with Koski and we should absolutely choose Koski but that's how we we use the voice of the customer to actually decide what should be the name of the brand and we got a lot of great acceptance once we launched the brand because even today we have a lot of people saying it's a brilliant name and there's a big story behind the name which I can share with you anytime you meet or at a different a different forum that is one aspect of how we bought the customer's voice into creation of the brand right now now that we had a brand I have to figure how do I get a team to be engaged in driving this brand to its vision because we are very small and our vision was to take over the nation in terms of a vision was to be a national brand and it is still to be a national brand so we are well in our journey to to be an actual brand so charting the journey meant I needed a really focused team we needed to be very focused on what are step by step progress is going to be and at the same time because we were a startup we were not funded we're very small our strategy had to be very dynamic we had to pivot based on what knowledge we get from the market what information we learned from the market and we had to have a very dynamic strategy to be adopted a very interesting interesting way of managing our strategy which again I learned from being in agile and being in thought works and consulting across the world so we would start off with getting first of all getting the team together and we didn't have a very large team so that way it was easy we had about eight or ten people in our corporate team so we'd get the team together on an outside for a day and we'd bring some about first a first thought process was we need to see what a long-term process and we would say five years five years from now where do you want to be and it would be a bit of a ballpark you don't go into too much of detail five years from now we need to be so many strong we need to be so much of revenue and we need to be whatever right so we had sort of a not star not star vision that way and then you break it down to two years down the line where they're going to be and the focus should always be the next year where do we want to be and then you look at so we want to be here and it was all written in sticky is you know what are the different aspects of where you want to be so we want to be here what is going to stop us from getting there from based on where we are today so as a team you're brainstorm all the different constraints that will stop us from reaching to a goal at the end of the year and the whole team would write each of these constraints on a sticky and you'll stick all of them on the wall so the orange stickies that you see on your left are just a few examples of some of the things that the team would come up with right so once we have a whole bunch of sticky is like that you triangulate those stickies to figure out what is the priority what are the things of these that we think are real problem that will give us the solving which will give us the biggest bang for a path and once we prioritize those for each of those problems you'd come up with what are the concrete actions you need to take to solve the problem and achieve the goal that you want to do and what you see on your on your right-hand side is we have one problem which itself don't have visibility of inventory real time which is a huge thing in retail if you have visibility which we did not have a few years ago so how do we solve that problem well we needed to upgrade a backend software because the software was not equipped to give us a web web interface we need to build a little app that would be distributed to all our all our stuff so they could use it you need to hire a data analyst to build it and there'd be a many more such actions that you need to do to solve the problem so as a team the entire team would brainstorm and come up with solutions of how do you solve a specific constraint to meet our goals and by the end of this whole exercise you'd have a whole bunch of solutions that would be sorted out for each of the problem spaces that we have defined as a team so once we had that the next exercise was to say okay we have these problems we have thought to a solution of the team who wants to own this problem space and what would happen at that time is very naturally people within the team would get up and each of them would walk up to the wall and say look I'm really interested in solving this problem I want my name against it and you'd actually write your name on a stick and stick it up against that problem statement and each of the team members would come and sign up for their own spaces and say okay I want to drive this I want to drive this I want to drive this so what it gave me is it gave me a team that was completely engaged with what we want to do as a strategy owning up each of these functions and promising to drive it so what did we do next what we did next was we broke up for the day and each team member had the responsibility of taking their spaces of the problem statement of all the solution that we have spoken about and review them mall on top mall money in their head and come back after a week and when they came back after a week they were to fill any gaps that might have been there in that whole definition of the solution and they had to lay the each of the actions out on a timeline to let the team know when do they plan to finish each of these activities within the timeline and the timeline was always one year but we would really focus on the first six months of it so by the so this was all driven by the team the team was fully engaged and each of these areas were driven by the team so by the end of this exercise you end up with a wall like this right this wall on your left hand side you see names of the people which is the orange sticky that you see and on the top you see the months which is the lavender sticky November December January if I bring it up so you see these are the names of people who own that area so that entire line that is against umar is what umar is going to be doing for that entire for the next six months and on the top what you see is very loosely laid out December January February that's a timeline so we always lay out a six month's timeline and we lay the stickies in terms of what is going to get done by when and this wall is a wall in our office where we sit every single day of our life right so our strategy is always always completely visible to the entire team we all know what we have agreed on what are the next steps that we need to do and the best part of it we know what the progress is because every time a task gets done we track it by marking it with a green dot which tracks the progress of that particular car a green dot means it is done and we are moving on to the next task so what this gave us is it gave us a strategy that was very low-fi as in it was on the wall it was wound by the whole team it had complete visibility of the team and it was very flexible within a business we realized many a times that you had to move things around you know for example right now we have the pandemic your entire strategy goes haywire when you have something like this happening obviously in the past it was not so dramatic but shifts and changes is the norm it is going to happen and you have to have strategies around how you're going to pivot and how you're going to pivot very easily it shouldn't be complicated and very often we see this cars moving but what you do is every month you'd have a ritual where you'd all go and stand up against the strategy wall and you'd update our own task and you'd give an update to the entire team saying you know this month this is the one task that I had from a strategic perspective that I wanted to achieve and you know what it's done and sometimes we also hear that we couldn't do it we actually constraints and we all understand that and then we support each other to make sure that we had that person in trying to finish the task that's how we attract a strategy so right from 2016 until 2020 just before the pandemic we were on target with all the plans that we have made but obviously the pandemic throughout of God we are coming back now but this has been a fantastic tool for us to manage manager progress so that is the second piece now I'll talk about the third piece that the employed and this is a more on the ground very simplistic piece so what happened when I was in the software world is my team was a very highly intellectual team in the sense I work with engineers I work with you know MIT grads I am grads and you know very very intellectual people and when you're working with a group of people like that it's a whole different dynamic of how you work right but when I moved to running this business here I had a very small corporate team of about 8 or 10 people but my real team which was my my staff on the store front that actually was the bread and butter of the company which gave us revenue were people who had barely educated half of them did not know how to read and write but they were very good at selling on the floor a lot of these people barely knew how to read and write they did not understand a lot of numbers so how do we write them so a lot of retail what they do is they have this weekly target such a gift to your team and then an excel sheet goes out they print the excel sheet out they circulated with the team members and overall what I learned is over a period of time most of these people on the ground don't understand excel sheets they don't understand numbers but they're just driving towards they don't know where and it was becoming hard to see how do we motivate this group to get results to get achievements and what we did is we used something from what I learned from the software world so in the software world when we did when we did iterations most of you who are in the agile context would understand what iterations are when we did iterations you'd have this concept of ice cream meter where every point that you progress you fill the ice cream meter and when ice cream is meter is full the whole team gets to eat ice cream right so he implemented something very similar what we did is we we called it the jar score so every koski store was given an empty jar empty transparent jar and every time an event happened that was going to be recognized as progress the person who was involved in that event would have the opportunity of dropping balls into the jar and every time a jar was full the whole store got ice cream right that was the idea very simple very very basic and there could be different metrics that we could be driving for example sometimes a metric could be look there is a certain category of product that is not moving very fast in the in the company but this month of focus is going to be on that product so every time you sell one of those products you get to drop one ball in the jar every time you sell five you get to drop five balls in the jar but anytime the jar is full the entire store gets ice cream right so this was the idea so we implemented it and very soon what we saw is that there's this interesting you know motivation and energy on the whole in the whole flow people were craving to go and fill the jar people were running around to figure out how do I fill my jar and what became more interesting is the at this time we had eight stores and all of these stores have a shared WhatsApp group but all the managers kind of pitch in so every day a picture of the jar would go into the store group and every store would look like oh my god that store is filling their jar we need to fill ours too so tomorrow I'm going to work harder to figure out how am I going to fill the jar and very soon we saw that this whole thing got gamified there was a lot of visibility every person on the floor could see that the jar was filling or the jar was empty and anytime the jar was empty the team was always striving towards fill it and we saw a lot of progress so we we also captured metric in terms of the impact this is one of the times when we were trying to reduce inventory that is older than six months in the store so we said okay anytime you sell one piece of inventory that is older than six months you drop a ball and we tracked it over a month from October 1st to the 30th of October so the first nine days we saw a bit of a drop that's around the time when we introduced the whole jar score and the second nine days we see a further drop next four days is a big drop and the last nine days is a huge drop so we could see visible progress without having any accelerations without having to share any numbers it was basically creating visibility creating gamification and getting the team to own the whole idea of driving sales and driving metrics through a very simplistic approach and this worked brilliantly well for us so that's the that's the third aspect I think those are the three main things I wanted to touch upon it seems like we may have about five or eight minutes for questions this is basically a slide that shows the transformation of where we were in 1991 that is the store that I started working in that is where nine hours of my life were for about seven years of my life and today on your right is what you see the transformation of the same brand into Koski this is one of the stores that we have on in Bangalore commercial street and we have about eight stores at the moment that's it thank you I think I'm ready for questions all right thank you so much Omar that was a fantastic session you can see the thumbs of coming up and I can count in more than one K now so yeah you can see the flood coming in that's how interesting it was and obviously the transformation journey the story was fantastic it's it's so refreshing I think people are just mesmerized by the way you were explaining your journey so I think one of the things that I really want to say is that for me following my dream was everything and when I a lot of people asked me how do you how do you really quit how do you manage to quit a very successful career and go back to something that is so uncertain and it's a tough decision always it's never easy but I also figured till you don't give it your hundred percent entrepreneurship is not about being into boats entrepreneurship is being about a hundred percent of yourself and a hundred percent of everything else and you end up giving more than a hundred percent sometimes it's a lot of hard work so the quitting thing is interesting because you can never you can always think about you know what am I going to do if this happens what am I going to do if that happens but the strategy that I really followed for my career is I I always thought about what is the worst case scenario worst case what will happen and for me when I was when I was at the peak of my IT career and I had enough resources to sustain myself for a year or two I said worst case if things goes out I find a job and come back again and I had enough and more people waiting to hire me back into the industry so I had not much to lose but if I wouldn't have done that I would have never had the opportunity to build what we have built today and I would have never been able to see that like right so I think taking the leap of faith and making sure you have a bit of a backing in terms of your resources so that you don't struggle with your day-to-day life is is necessary and for me it was not very difficult one of the things that worked beautifully is I started setting up the business while I was still working so I already had a running business when I quit so the decision was not very difficult and it made things easy so yeah there are many more things that we have done I've just shared three I can tell you there are at least 60 to 100 things that we have done that are different that are interesting that nobody else would have done in the in the retail industry per se and I'm happy to share things with people if they want to know more so get in touch I mean I'm happy to share any ideas that I have with anyone in the group um Ruti Ruti says it was a very basic yet important dates umar exhibit in his story Guru Prasad says a very interesting session Madhu don't worry we are recording the session it'll be available in youtube um so you would be able to see it even if you've missed a few portion uh so I think there are no questions as of now but thank you so much umar one last thumbs up for umar guys so that we know he knows that we've loved the session thank you so much everybody thanks for listening in today it was a pleasure