Entrepreneurial know-how can come from anywhere

Raghuveer Sing Chaudhary found employment as a delivery boy with Amazon. Having had to give up higher education due to poverty, the young man soon realized that when he wanted a refreshing cup of tea hygienically made at the end of a hard day’s work, he simply couldn’t find one. If there was indeed a place where the tea was hygienically made, the taste was bad.

Armed with his savings, Raghuveer felt the time was right to open up a delivery service of hygienically made tea – to wherever the customer was. The customers could phone in, WhatsApp or order via their app and the tea would be delivered in 15 minutes to whatever the location.

Made with mineral water and priced at Indian Rs.5 per cup, the young man’s start-up venture quickly took off when the shops in the town realized that the tea was tasty, refreshing and hygienically prepared. Soon, Raghuveer had plenty of orders from the shops alone that wanted to serve high-quality tea to their customers.

Today, his start-up delivers 500-700 orders daily and around 10 people man his operation. The business has been so successful and stands out as a venture that speaks volumes for the young man’s ability to meet an existing need.

Entrepreneurship is often not to be found in big ideas and concepts. It is there in the details, wherever there is a need, wherever there is a tangible, identified need that may be present in our own lives. As Raghuveer experienced, the need was to be found in a lack that he himself noticed. Yet, the powerful factor was that this young man chose to provide a service of highest quality, no compromising there. He chose to go one step above what was available and exceed customer expectations in doing so.
Young men such as Raghuveer hold a lesson for us all. Not only in being innovative and consistent but also in being able to take the initiative to do things that are not being done. One would not think that in a tourist hot spot such as Jaipur, there would be a felt need for a hygienically prepared, tasty cup of tea. Yet there was. And that powerful factor made the difference.

Are there unfulfilled needs in your own community? Around you? I’m not referring to some of the solutions that seem attractive at first but are not really sustainable. A start-up must be sustainable in order for it to work – it has to be able to survive not just months but be workable on a consistent basis, a factor often overlooked by over enthusiastic youngsters who sometimes get carried away with an idea only to realize that as bright as it seems, it cannot be sustained. 

What really is entrepreneurship? It is all about being able to create a business out of a need. It is about fuelling a fire that burns in all of us to be able to not just create a business but to be able to provide a service that is not being met. For centuries, this has been the most powerful notion that has driven the world’s most iconic personalities and made history. 

Raghuveer’s venture is testimony to the ability of one young man to be able to create a business out of nothing. Entrepreneurship empowers us to dream dreams that encourage us to go that extra mile and strive for results that we ourselves may not have dreamt possible. 

If a simple idea such as making a good cup of tea works – nothing new, nothing innovative there, just a simple old need repackaged and delivered – there has to be hope for the rest of us. Good ideas are not always new – they do not have to be. It might be the same old same old, yet repackaged and rebranded to exceed customer expectations.

So look around you – what are the needs that are not being met with traditional solutions? Would someone be interested in a service that might be already being done but with gaps? How would they react and respond to you delivering that same service yet with exceptionally high results? Ask yourself these questions and see how well such a solution can be provided in keeping with your talents and capabilities.

What is the lesson we can take from a courageous young man who found his calling in a novel application of an already well established service? That everything can be done if it is done right; that ideas are good as long as they can be applied in the right dose in the right way.

“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”  -Guy Kawasaki, founder of AllTop
(Nayomini Weerasooriya, a senior journalist, writer and a PR professional, can be contacted at nayominiweerasooriya@gmail.com)