Despite job, business losses, some pivot to new opportunity during covid-19
“Initially, I was fine. Then it hit me. How was I going to take care of my child and two home loans?" She considered and dropped taking online tuitions and fitness classes. Then she returned to her first love: cooking. Until she adopted her daughter in 2010, Sachdeva used to cater parties on weekends because she “loves plating, cooking, the whole thing".
With the help of her 10-year-old, Sachdeva has started a food business from home. She sets a menu for a week, circulates it on WhatsApp and Facebook, and gets close to 25 orders a day just from her Gurugram locality. “The money is not bad. It’s definitely steady income," says Sachdeva, 39, who plans to scale up once the lockdown restrictions are further eased in Delhi-NCR. Right now, it’s just her cooking, prepping and delivering, but she’s in the process of hiring a delivery person. “My daughter is the food taster and helps wash utensils. This time I’m not alone, and I’m not giving up."
In a span of five months, over a hundred million people have lost jobs. Restaurants have put cooks and staff on furlough. Travel agencies have shut operations. Corporations have laid off managers. Startups have gone kaput. Even as some states lift lockdown restrictions and people return to work, millions are at home, looking for employment or business opportunities. Some are building a new road to success. Instead of waiting for things to get better, they’ve decided to pivot and map out opportunities in the crisis to create a more solid future.
As Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn notes in a recent article for Harvard Business Review, the pandemic is that one extraordinarily difficult time that offers an opportunity to become stronger, in work and life. “Courageous leaders also understand they will make mistakes along the way and they will have to pivot quickly as this happens, learning as they go," she writes.
Mumbai’s George Solomon found his new career during lockdown, in poker. After daily food orders dropped from about a dozen to one or two, Solomon, a former pizza chef, quit his job with Swiggy. “There was no point exposing myself, my wife and child to the virus," says Solomon, 36. After a week, a friend suggested playing poker on the Pocket52 app. “He had made a lot of money, even bought a fridge. I had never played it before, but I gave it a shot." Within weeks, he started winning and earning. One day, he makes ₹45,000, another, ₹2,000. “I spend close to 10 hours a day, playing poker tournaments. It’s given me a new life, and takes my mind off whatever is happening around us. Maybe one day, after saving some money from poker, I will start my own pizza place. But poker is my first love."
About 1,000 km away in Erode, Kannaiyan Subramaniam also discovered something new during lockdown: using social media to sell his farm produce. Around the end of March, Subramaniam had about 100 tonnes of cabbage, ready to be harvested but no customers because of lockdown restrictions.
He posted a video of his unsold produce on his not-so-active Twitter account. “Many people tagged potential buyers. Even Anand Mahindra offered help. Karnataka MP Tejasvi Surya bought some. People transferred money to me. Social media has opened the whole of India to me," says Subramaniam, 51. He’s optimistic but it’s not enough. “Of the ₹4 lakh I had invested, only ₹1.5 lakh has been recovered. But something is better than nothing. I didn’t realize the opportunity technology presented till this crisis hit me," admits Subramaniam
Luxury bag maker CREA’s founder Upkar S. Sharma saw an opportunity in the discussion on the shortage of protective gear for healthcare workers in April, and decided to make PPE suited to Indian climate.
“The luxury business was at a standstill, and we didn’t want to sit at home and wait for the crisis to pass," says Sharma, 43. “Most international brands make PPEs for colder weather conditions. We found a fabric that suited Indian climate," he explains. He’s now for the PPE right and certified by the Defence Research and Development Organisation. “We have clocked sales of about ₹6.5-7 crore in three months. It’s been a happy coincidence," says Gurugram-based Sharma, who’s now working on biodegradeable PPEs.
Unlike Sharma, Deepesh Agarwal, co-founder of employee commute platform MoveInSync, “totally underestimated" covid-19. “I thought it would be gone in weeks," laughs Agarwal, 42. Before the outbreak, MoveInSync used to transport over 400,000 employees a day from home to office and back. After the work-from-home shift, the number dropped to a few hundred. When Bengaluru-based Agarwal wanted to re-open his office, he had to work out who was in containment zones, who had comorbidities, and who could work again. “It was chaotic," he says. That’s when he got the idea for MoveInSync, an app customized for companies with data on who is living in a containment zone, employee health status, and more.
“You can also book a time slot through the app for when you go to the canteen and where you will sit," he explains. At present, MoveInSync has 10 clients. “It was easy to build it quickly because we have enough experience in people management. We have also put together a website that monitors hotsposts across India, which can be accessed by anyone," he says. “We should never really waste a crisis."
from Poker
Post a Comment