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BY POOJA KOTHARI
Kunwer Sachdev is a compelling speaker. When he talks, it is difficult to do anything but listen. Not because he is the owner of a brand that has redefined innovation in the inverter industry, or because he is highly knowledgeable. It is not even because he is the only person talking in Hindi. It is also not because he mocks as much as he entertains, with a shocking irreverence for degrees. It is simply his fascinating story, with the right mix of a hit pot-boiler that holds the audience captive.
The credit for noticing him goes to the guru of all management gurus, CK Prahalad, who invited Sachdev to speak at a session three years ago. Despite the lack of any formal management training or education, the 44-year-old entrepreneur did not disappoint. As anyone who has heard him speak would know, Sachdev shoots straight from the heart, without any hesitance about speaking in his mother tongue.
He is equally unconscious about lounging around in shorts and t-shirt on a Monday morning at the posh DLF Golf Club in the suburbs of Delhi. Looking at Sachdev, so much at ease in his luxurious surroundings, it is difficult to imagine that he started off his career at the age of 15, hawking pens and later installing cable connections. From then, he has travelled a long distance to build a company that generates Rs 500 crore in revenues and champions product innovation. You might not even recognise who he is, even though numerous ads are run by Su-Kam featuring inverters that can power air-conditioners.
“We came up with Su-Kam in the college canteen. It does not mean anything special. It just seemed like a nice name to put on the pens that I was going to manufacture,” explains Sachdev of the unusual name.
But his destiny was writing another story. After finishing his graduation from Hindu College in 1985, he fell out with his brother and stopped selling pens. Instead, he enrolled for a law degree for want of anything better, and even practised it for a few months afterwards. Soon after, the salesman in him took over and for the next two years he returned to selling, this time for a cable company. By 1990, Sachdev was ready with his own company, manufacturing equipment such as dish antennae, amplifiers and splitters, used to connect cable TV to buildings. “Except for the cable itself, we made everything,” he recalls of the business he built to a turnover of Rs 3-4 crore.
It proved to be a great learning experience. “I was a good sales guy, but had no understanding of technology. A lot of people fooled me. I didn’t know how to install a connection. I simply knew how to get contracts from hotels. I started reading my Class IX - XI physics books once again. I made sure I learnt everything there was to know about the equipment I was selling,” he says.
Then, one fine day in 1997, his home inverter broke down. Sachdev, who had a keen interest in product engineering, decided to open up the device and figure out the problem. The product intrigued him so much that he bought a few other inverter models from the market to get more information. “I realised they were all the same. I also discovered that the business itself was highly fragmented and local; there was no national brand, and the concept of service was completely missing,” he says.
As instinct dictated, the entrepreneur in him started improvising on existing inverters. It was a year-long process fraught with mistakes. “An Indian consumer durables company was launching a fancy new model. We copied that inverter but that was a failed product, so we failed too,” he adds, completely unapologetic.
When the product was ready, Sachdev had no idea how he would sell his inverter. It was not easy to convince the local traders to sell his inverter since his product design was very different from existing models. It ran on a single battery instead of two, and was one-fourth the size of the other models in the market. So he pushed sales through his cable business. In the first year, Su-Kam sold about 150-200 inverters. Direct selling continued for about two more years, after which, Sachdev set up his own distribution network.
More research and product development followed. “I was the first to bring technology into the inverter market,” says a proud Sachdev. The MOSFET technology that he used to build his inverter later became the norm for the industry. Su-Kam was the first to launch inverters with larger capacity (5KVA and 10KVA) models, and remains the only player in the country selling 100 KVA models. The inverters that run ACs are exported to more than 70 countries in the world. And R&D is still about 6% of his total salary costs and boasts a 40-people team. What followed was a climb to the top of the industry. In 2006, Reliance-Temasek picked up 20% stake in the business, which now has four plants across India.
A few months ago, Sachdev quit his management role in Su-Kam and handed over the reins to a “very capable CEO” he has groomed over the last two years. “I was too close to the situation and hearing only what people wanted me to,” he says. “Now, I am a little away from the organisation, so I can see things for myself. This helps me in framing the goals for the company.”
Sachdev realised the lack of service mindset in his organisation. So, while the long-term goal remains to become the largest power storage business in the country, for 2010, he has put the spotlight on structures and processes for a better service and sales orientation.
As far as his personal role is concerned, Sachdev isn’t ready to be tied down yet. “We have only one life, but so many things to do,” he philosophises. So, for the last few months, he has been researching why Indian bread does not taste as good as the one in Europe when toasted. “I am going to show you what real bread tastes like,” he declares, making clear that he is now eyeing kitchens. And, perhaps, he will manage to do for toasted bread what he successfully did for another insipid, but essential product, the inverter.
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