Issue 4 - Volume 2 | February 2017

VOICE OF SMEs: DIFFICULTY IS WHAT WAKES UP THE GENIUS


Scrolling through my Facebook this morning I came across this beautiful quote “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”. This made me stumble upon it for a few minutes on its truism and forced me to pull back a little and recall my meeting with Mr, Durga Das Thakur, an entrepreneur based out of the land of gods, Himachal Pradesh, owning and handling a business of handloom products across India.

Probably in his early 40s, Mr. Thakur looked humble, buoyant and welcoming. On requesting to share his story with me, he gave a smile and started with little anecdotes from his early life.

“My childhood years were majorly spent on playing around on streets, carefree and sans responsibilities. Our economic condition did not allow me to continue my schooling beyond 8th grade and like every small town person, I was married off at a very early age, I think I was just 17. The early years of marriage were spent in poverty majorly on the nominal allowance that my father could afford to give us every month. But the guilt of not being able to do anything in my life and not being able to provide a decent lifestyle to my wife was building up way too much for me to not bring the much needed change in myself. After many sleepless nights and days, ideating, overthinking, daydreaming and discovering ideas to do something, I finally made a decision to identify & utilize my capabilities and my wife’s skill of weaving and stitching with starting my own business of Handlooms”

But Himachal has no dearth of Handlooms, you must have had faced tough competition. How did you deal with this to stand where you are today? I asked with sheer curiosity to know his journey to success, to which he gave an almost blank look as if he has gone back to the memory lane, recalling his struggle and failures.

Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations. I firmly believe in this philosophy and was determined to not let failures define me. The passion and will to change my life and succeed was much greater than the obstacles that challenged me time and again. Himachal did already have plethora of handlooms when I started my business and the early years were full of struggles because we had not earned the trust of customers yet. The first 2-3 years were gloomy and did not show any hope for future. There were days when I had almost given up and decided to shut down my business. But I am thankful to god for blessing me with an extremely supportive wife who who is also very talented. She gave me hope to continue and weaved shawls beautifully with extraordinary designs, sacrificing her sleep, food and everything essential, only focusing on our business and I on the other hand used to go door to door, requesting everyone to allow me to explain the specialty of our products and sell them at very cheap rate initially, mostly running at loss. Excellent quality with beautiful & varieties of design at a never before rate and convenience to receive at their doorsteps made us win a lot of loyal customers. The business started flourishing gradually and we did earn a few exclusive customers who started ordering in bulk to sell it across other cities and in a few years we had enough capital to open a shop. From a small shop, we went ahead to start a small industry and recruited around 5 women and further ahead, with god’s grace, my hard work and my wife’s skill and support, we became a proud owner of a small and flourishing business “Kullu Handlooms” with around 50 workers, exporting handloom pan India and having a turnover of around 2 crores. We are planning diligently to go international soon.”

Standing in awe of his determination and thoroughly inspired, I could not resist to show my admiration to him and quickly asked if there is any piece of advice he would like to give to his fellow entrepreneurs
“The road to success is often full of thorns, you will be hurt, tired and hopeless at times but remember, the real key to succeed is to have an unfathomable passion for your goal which will give you reasons to work harder on days when you feel like quitting” he added and suggested that everyone should remove the word GIVE UP from their dictionaries and be determined to turn their dreams into reality, for hard work always pays off.

Mr. Thakur truly shows how with a right attitude, hard work and zeal, every small can indeed be big.

 

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