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Arvind Nagpal stands out of the crowd for taking up the entrepreneurial journey, quitting the comforts of a settled role.
The struggle
The journey needed extraordinary courage and confidence to undertake for the then 42-year-old with his career and personal life, among others, at stake. And the only backup plan, in case the venture flops, was to hunt for a new job.
“I had a good feeling that this would be a success. But at the end of the day, there are a lot of risk factors,” Nagpal said, adding an “unconditional support” from the family helped him sail through the initial two years, the tough times when a single penny did not trickle in. In 2009, Nagpal founded The Enterprise Genie with an initial funding of $500,000 part of which he raised himself and part from close family members. This was after two decades of corporate experience and working with fortune 500 companies on enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. The Enterprise Genie was later renamed TEG Analytics (TEG).
TEG is into sales and marketing analytics with focus on convergence of market and media mix modelling, digital media analytics and big data. Its Digiworks solution, through algorithms for cross-media impacts, helps advertisers finalise the optimal mix of spend between traditional and digital media.
“The opportunity was huge and seen as making of the next big industry for India’s strength of quantitative talent,” Nagpal, now 47 years old, who heads the company as its chief executive officer, said.
Frankly, the idea was a no-brainer as all the ingredients for a perfect storm were there. The businesses were sitting on mountains of structured and unstructured data. Decision makers need to support their decisions with facts, and India had plenty of quantitative talent,” he added.
Established with a freshly recruited five-employee team, TEG has now emerged as a profitable company with multi-year contracts. Its clientele includes marquee companies such as Avon, Amway, Nike and Clorox and the company now has more than 75 analytics professionals on board to cater to these companies.
Raison d’etre
“There is excitement around analytics because data and the insights hidden in it, is the next frontier for competitive advantage. The need of businesses around the world is to be able to respond on a real-time basis to the changing business environment.”
Since the past decade, with the proliferation of technology, analytics has become increasingly disruptive. All businesses now have the potential to access data regarding their business and customers, he added.
The factor that makes the company stand out is that it helps clients move further ahead on the analytics maturity curve. Most firms in India operate in analytics at either an information or intelligence stage and the key is to move to the insights stage, believes Nagpal.
“We help our clients tell stories using their data - we do not just create data reports, we take it a step further to answer the ‘So What’ and get to the real story that is driving the numbers.”
Juggling roles
TEG Analytics was Nagpal’s first business venture, even though this is not the first time he’s taking the road less travelled.
In mid-’90s, Nagpal authored a book on SAP (an ERP software) – ‘ALE, EDI, & IDoc - Technologies For SAP’ - that remained Amazon’s bestseller for several months.
He, then ventured out to build an e-business unit for a mid-sized company, and later joined Cognizant’s SAP Practice. He joined Cognizant’s SAP Practice when it employedless than 30 people and had spent nearly five years building its SAP solutions, SAP partnership, and leading some of the biggest SAP deals in Cognizant’s history.
INITIAL CHALLENGES
The biggest challenge was (and still is) the traditional mindset that sifting through large volumes of data can automatically create insights and big positive changes in business. “The process of using data analytics as a competitive advantage is as much of an art as a science. A clear business brief and well-structured hypothesis, based on business experience, is the essential starting points for effective analytics,” he added.
Further, this is fast becoming a cluttered market with both big and small businesses eyeing the same pie.
The company is also looking at the next level of funding, and has initiated discussions with the investor community. The funding would be used to expand its geographical reach, product development and build awareness in the market.
Nagpal, however, neither disclosed the names of the investors that his firm holding talks with nor the amount they intend to raised.
“Bringing in an outside investor, even if you do not require money,” is the advice Nagpal has for other entrepreneurs, as it is important to get other perspectives and bring discipline in business.
“On the business operations front, our biggest learning is to stick with our strategic customers and continue to invest in the relationship and grow deep into an account versus trying to build a broader customer base which can be alluring,” says Nagpal.
He is hopeful that businesses will soon do away with the archaic methods of collecting, transforming and analysing data as these consume a lot of time. These would be replaced with sophisticated and automated data harmonisers, efficient big data systems, advanced statistical knowledge and intensive business domain experiences.
These would be again beneficial to the startup that has already gained a considerable standing in the industry.
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