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Gaurav Raghuvanshi

Kunwer Sachdev is a businessman with a difference. He shut down a profitable business to plunge into an unexplored venture. Here too he was successful.

When his home inverter conked for the nth time, Kunwer Sachdev did not pick up the phone to call the service guys; he opened the unit, tore out all its parts, and decided that he would build a better unit for himself. A couple of months later, he shut down his profitable dish antenna manufacturing business and was assembling the first lot of inverters at his small unit in North-West Delhi. And that's how, in 1997, Su-Kam, the country's largest selling brand of inverters, was born.

"I had a simple brief for myself — make reliable and affordable inverters that would also look presentable. I was discouraged not to enter the business. I had already made my first million from the dish antenna business, but I took the plunge into an unexplored business only because I had a gut feeling that it would work out," says Sachdev, the Chief Executive Officer of Su-Kam Communication Systems.

But the first few lots were not exactly a spectacular success. "In fact, by my standards, my first lot was a disaster. But we soon sorted out the initial teething troubles and gradually established ourselves as a company producing quality products. I went around the globe buying inverters to locate the best technology," says Sachdev.

From its humble beginnings, Su-Kam has emerged as a Rs 100-crore company in just eight years and now employs 350 people. The company has two modern manufacturing units at Gurgaon (Haryana) and Baddi (Himachal Pradesh) and aims to sell 3.5 lakh units in the current financial year. Su-Kam boasts a nation-wide network of 19 clearing and forwarding (C&F) agents, 800 distributors and 4,000 dealers.

Sachdev, who grew up in a lower middle-class environment and never went to a management or engineering school, says that his simple management philosophy is to empower his team to take decisions and operate independently. "I am myself a dreamer and I want people who are true to their dreams to work with me," he says. The 30-something entrepreneur says he always wanted to be a businessman and the name `Su-Kam' was his spontaneous response when someone asked him as a kid what would be the name of his company. He does not know how Su-Kam came to his mind then, but Sachdev stayed faithful to the name when he actually set out to start his business.

"I do not carry a brief-case. I never sit on any decision. Right or wrong, the decision is taken the moment a matter is brought to me. It is better to take a wrong decision than keep a matter pending for months. At least then I can learn from my mistakes," he says.

The company has recently diversified into UPS (uninterrupted power supply equipment) and inverter batteries. The Baddi unit produces batteries, which Sachdev believes, is another area where growth will come from. "I always try to identify a need and then develop a low-cost, reliable product which can be mass marketed. While inverters will continue to be our mainstay, I see the battery business as the new growth opportunity," he says.

Sachdev has already come a long way. But for a man who is not get worried about losing it all and is always willing to take bigger risks, it might just be a the first chapter of a long story.

Picture by Kamal Narang

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