Speakers:
Moderator: Rashmi Bansal, author, Stay hungry stay foolish
Saundarya Rajesh, Founder-President, Avtar Career Creators
Priyanka Bapna, M/S Priyanka Bapna (Garment Manufacturer)
Robin Chaurasiya, Founder – Kranti, NGO:
G Sree Vidya, Founder, Ravindra Services Pvt. Ltd:

Session Highlights:

• Till date Rashmi has written 3 books on entrepreneurship. ‘Stay hungry stay foolish’ focused on entrepreneurs from IIM Ahmedabad ,‘Connect the dots’ was about entrepreneurs without an MBA degree while ‘I too had a dream’ dealt with Social Entrepreneurs. She was always intrigued by an idea of a sole book on ‘Women Entreprenuers’ on which she is working upon.  As the moderator of this session, Rashmi extracted the stories of these women entrepreneurs in a beautiful manner. Following are some snippets, watch the video to view detailed story.

Saundarya Rajesh:

• Avatar CC was founded on the premise that there is a huge pool of untapped talent among qualified women professionals who have left the traditional workforce because they could not find the balance they needed to manage career with life and family.
• According to a study by Avatar, over the past two decades, over 13 lakh women professionals have quit the Indian workplace simply because they did not find careers sustainable. It is this pool that it is working with.
• Women bring in exquisite skill sets to the workplace
• Move from Work – Life Balance to  Work – Life Integration

Priyanka Bapna:

• She has her own garment manufacturing enterprise.
• Priyanka, an air crash survivor, never believes in giving up. Initially she started from a small workshop in Saki Naka and now she supplies garments to all the big retailers in the country like Big Bazaar, Shoppers Stop etc.
• People always suggested to stay away from a manufacturing business as a women. She was recommended to open her boutique and work at her own comfort levels- there would be no deadlines, no worker issues and less of stress. But she chose to have her own manufacturing unit and yes she is running it successfully.

Robin Chaurasiya:

• “Kranti provides a healing home, comprehensive education and personalized opportunities to India’s socially disadvantaged young women in order to empower and equip them with the knowledge, skills, and confidence necessary to build fulfilling futures and become agents of positive change in the world.”, says Robin.
• She further shared that her main challenge had not  been money but execution of her plans for women. For setting up a healing home, KRANTI was rejected by 12 landlords in spite of having the money.
• Robin feels that more number of people need to be aware about the needs and sensitivities of the disadvantaged young women.

G Sree Vidya:

• “If you can’t become a Cop, become a security guard!” She started off with this entertaining sentence and shared her story.
• Security services is a very unconventional business to enter with respect to women entrepreneurs. Traditionally a male dominated business, G Sree Vidya changed the rules of the business.
• Being the owner, she had to take a few harsh decisions like sacking,scolding and disciplining untrained male labourers. Because of this she used to receive blank calls and threatening advances from them.
• She used to carry ‘Chilly powder’ with her while going for field visits. She even used to perform surprise checks on the security guards in the wee hours to ensure sincerity in employees which eventually resulted in customer satisfaction and retention.

Videos:

Chanda Kochhar, CMD ICICI Bank

Moderated by Anita Ramachandran, MD at Cereberus & Chairperson at TiE Stree Shakti

Videos: