5 years is not such a long time in the history of an organisation. But it is time enough for us at ESY to pause and take stock of our company’s achievements, hits and misses and most importantly our key learnings from this rich experience.

Needless to say, we’ve had many key contributors in this 5 year long journey – our people, our products, our processes and our partners. They have not only helped the organisation succeed in its objectives but also helped it sustain and surpass itself on a number of occasions.

At this stage I must admit, the last five years have come and gone like a whirlwind. We won many uphill battles, we also lost a few but the lessons we’ve learnt from each of these experiences shall always stay with us.

Today, let me share some of those experiences and leanings with my friends, colleagues and the next generation of entrepreneurs.

1. Keep learning Learning is a continuous process. The day you stop leaning is the day you stop growing. I started ESY after having worked in the corporate sector for a very long time. The first thing I did after starting the company was to learn the intricacies of finance, something that I had avoided as a marketing person all along. Today, the knowledge and confidence I have gained from that leaning is invaluable and helps me better manage the show at ESY. In fact, for me at ESY, the learning cycle continues unabated. These days, I’m on to learning behavioural skills, managerial skills, teamwork skills, distributions skills…
   
   
2. Follow up Once the business is set up, it is very important to follow up faithfully. It is like once you have sown the seeds, it is absolutely imperative that you water them regularly, if you wish to see them prosper into happy and healthy plants. And so I try and follow this adage in my life too. In fact, one of the key things I followed up on after quitting my long standing corporate job was to pursue tirelessly with the ESY Group of Companies in Malaysia. My persistence paid off when the company agreed to set up operations in India.
   
   
3. Build interdependencies I believe that in life and in business, you can neither be independent nor dependent. You can only be interdependent. We must learn to implement a culture of collaborative working in every sphere of operations, be it with our vendors, our suppliers, our partners, our employees or even within our own team. The chances of a lone ranger achieving success in today’s world are next to nil.
   
   
4. Seek feedback It is one of the most important things that we need on our way up, both individually and as an organisation. We must be brave enough to open ourselves to a 360° feedback and willing to take it in the right spirit. An honest feedback often ratifies what we already know, but many-a-time it opens up new doors of opportunities, helps us course correct, shape or reshape, improve or further develop our behaviour, management skills, relationships and interpersonal skills
   
   
5. Utilise resources effectively Look around your own home or workplace and you’ll find many little things that are always under utilised. In our professional life too, if we look around carefully, we’ll find many things, including our relationships and our own knowledge, etc that remain either under-utilised or not utilised at all. The key is to identify such resources and then work around them, judiciously. In fact, here at ESY, we managed to reach more than a million customers in just 5 years with a very low marketing spent through a prudent use of the social media to create a pan India dealer network.
   
   

The die has been cast. In the last 5 years, an unknown brand like ESY has managed to create a family of over 1 million customers who trust the brand wholeheartedly, including some of the biggest names in the world of business. The road ahead looks promising. Many more milestones lay ahead of us. Many more learnings need to be identified and explored.

The 5 year old kid is ready for them all.

Author: Dr. V. P. Sajeevan, CEO, ESY India