I had a long professional career before I founded the present day InfrasoftTech 15 years back, along with three other founder colleagues and our angel investors. Prior experience was extremely useful in creating a methodically structured business plan for commencing an entrepreneurial organization, with scalability built to suit the needs of banking industry that we were planning to serve.
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| Hanuman Tripathi |
Going by my some past experience, I knew that exclusion of HR, Marketing, Finance, Facilities & Systems in a start-up organization can save costs but can spell complete disaster. These costs have to be seen, not as indulgence but investments for building a scalable organization with manifold benefits in the long run. An integrated organization built this way deals much better with people’s aspirations, creates a strong fabric of policies and procedures that help to imbibe a corporate culture, creates a process driven organization and above all it creates an environment of setting business goals, individual KRAs and boundaries and finally build a review mechanism for meeting organisational goals.
With no illusions that all will move smoothly in the inception stage, we tried anticipating hurdles and we were prepared to find solutions as we go forward. What came handy was detailing of line items for each major actionable element in the original business plan, that probably led to more successes and less failures over time. Undoubtedly, there was stress to handle and some failures to rework around from time to time but the end result was achieved as desired.
In the beginning, the integration of support functions as business partners to the operations team was a challenge, with the operations team seeing the corporate organization members recruited from outside as an avoidable cost. However, I could make everybody see each others value and over short period of time the corporate organization was beginning to be seen as one of the most valuable business partners to pre-empt failures, tie open issues and induce success in all aspects of the organization.
My biggest challenge came in when the original committed investment came to us in several installments, whereas certain upfront investments were essential in infrastructure, people, equipments, software, etc. Hence, we were compelled to accelerate our Go-To Market program to start generating cash faster and close the gestation period early.
| Snapshot |
| Name: Hanuman Tripathi Age: 49 Education: MBA in Marketing from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute, Mumbai. Diploma in Marketing & Sales Management, Bachelors degree in Science Experience in business: 28 years Leadership style: Passionate, people-oriented and knowledge-driven Big Learning: Plan gestation period funding and build support organization |
| Factsheet |
| Name of the enterprise: InfrasoftTech Domain/Industry: IT products, services and solutions for BFSI sector Turnover: Forecasted 120 crores in organic revenue Set up in: 1995 Employees: ~500 Headquarters: Mumbai Website: www.infrasofttech.com |
| Business Model |
| The company specializes in IPR driven product development for the BFSI sector. One of its current focus areas is to develop software solutions for microfinance institutions and small banks with the end objective of building mass-scale-financial inclusion, globally. |
The solution lay in building our products faster at lesser cost. At this juncture, it was important to fire the spirit of entrepreneurialism in each team member which I am happy to say was received well. Secondly, it became a time-bound priority to position the company as a commercially viable option and thus, the focus on sales was intensified and expedited, whereas usually sales and marketing is invested upon by most entrepreneurial organizations much later. In the end, we became commercially viable in half the time owing to a wonderful team work and some luck.
In hindsight, the core benefit of this experience has been that we have learnt to stay profitable and cash efficient throughout in the last 15 years.
My belief is that to create a successful entrepreneurial venture, it is important to plan your gestation period funding properly and also build corporate support organization to ensure that ops team is not loaded with pressing problems of cash flows, recruitment and on-boarding of new people and building and maintaining infrastructure. It is also critical that the sales organisation is built early in the life cycle with high level of result orientation and integration with delivery teams.
Lastly, it is with transparency and equitable work that an entrepreneur can draw greater commitment from the core team members who form the backbone of the organisation. Critically, utilisation of optimal resources and reduced 'time to market' is the mantra, as market realities change very fast, both in terms of demand and
new competition.
Our operating philosophy has helped us dream big. We want to be $100 Mn company in next 3-4 years.  We are focused on latest generation core solutions in global markets. We are covering AML and Islamic Finance sectors in a big way. Much of our growth will emerge from these two sectors domain-wise. Geographically, we expect growth from Middle East & South East Asia and US. We already have a strong presence in the UK.
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