One hell of a roller coaster ride

This is Suraj from OfCommerce and OFB operations team penning my thoughts sitting in the city of Nizams.

I joined the OfBusiness family in April 2018 right after my post-graduation, and it has been nothing less than a roller coaster ride. I was born a Jaat in Haryana but have ended up being more of a Marwari courtesy endless “taka” and “rotation” related discussion on and off work. But my biggest learning here has been with the teams — the sheer power collaboration holds when efforts are aligned and how you can actually see your team flourish and achieve the goals that were once deemed difficult, although difficult is a word we don’t give a lot of weight-age to here at OfBusiness. I learnt it most from my mentors whose teams I have worked in- Pratyush, Vasant,Jaivee, Mohit and Vikram most notably, and applied the same in my own teams.

I had the good fortune of working not only in one role but to experiment throughout the year, but operations has been the cornerstone. 2019 started with a handful of people in operations in South India. Ayush and Harish had joined less than three months back and were trying to get settled in their respective regions. On the process side, Vijay was also finding his ground and the company was going big into book building. The focus was shifting towards account management as we shifted from commodities as our bread and butter.

Since then, we had inducted a lot of amazing people in the team starting with Tarin who joined to head Hyderabad Ops followed by the trio of Kartick, Raghu, and Ashok who had become the other three horsemen. Tarin proved his mettle in account management and is now heading the account management team across India. We started new channels, most notably cement and pipes, which turned out to be much better than expected! We soon got into the insides of Tamil Nadu, which turned out to be a big boon for us.

I also had the privilege of working with the sales team starting with our experiment with channels. Both were mildly successful but we felt like we were lacking scale. Then I shifted to take the lead of AP and TS purchase financing team in September and October. And once again towards the fag end of the year, owing to the immense need of the hour, OfCommerce was formed, and I joined Jaivee, Mohit and Vikram in our quest to maximize the growth opportunities.

2019 was a great year in many senses and the following are some glimpses of what we did good this year:

1) Talking numbers first, we have been able to maximize the margin in South India.

2) Operations team transitioned seamlessly into an account management team through February to April and has later formed a sturdy offshoot team under Tarin. This has made all the sales guys primarily hunters, maximizing their output and ops has been able to proactively rotate the accounts.

But there is no success without failures and no failure without learning. The only thing is to fail fast and learn from that.

There were a lot of occasions when we laughed and celebrated as teams, but some stood out. One was the bachelor party we threw for Ankush in Goa. After that, we had a grand opening for our Hyderabad office by Asish himself. After that, the entire team united in Delhi for two days of town-hall event! Hyderabad team itself is known for its Camaraderie which is one of the core values of our company too, so there were too many occasions ending with our own Mocho getting set for marriage!

Now, onto an amazing 2020 as we usher into a new decade and as the title of this handbook, from good to greatness! The new scalability engine, in my opinion, is OfCommerce. We have already laid the groundwork for some partnerships on this model with the SMEs in South India.

Let’s make 2020 our best year yet!!