Opulent & it’s unstoppable journey to enrich India through innovation
After completing my engineering (in biotech from Punjab University) and two years of experience in an leading IT MNC handling a few things in Branding and HR engagement activities, it was clear that this cannot sustain for long. The hunger for bigger challenges was there. With few ideas in mind, but lack of direction at that point, Business Design PGDM Course at WeSchool became a good starting point to understand the world of business . WeSchool provided me with not just the right mentors and professors but also took us closer to the world of business and provided opportunities to build a good network . Hence the journey of Opulent began in the second year of PGDM course, when during classroom session we discussed on each other’s ideas, helped each other’s business ideas grow and see them being mentored in the InnoWe Lab at WeSchool’s Mumbai Campus .
With vivid interest in education sector during brainstorming sessions, other than me was another classmate named Tanul Mohod who had just established a company (yet to be named) with two friends from his Engineering days. As a part of my final project at WeSchool where we had to be a part of the set up we were researching on, I became a part of Opulent to establish basic HR & operational processes and researched on difficulties a start up has to go through to establish a company with employees being a part of it.
During these three months of fulltime involvement with Opulent, I got to know the other founding team members Rohan Kulkarni and Atul Chikane as well. We worked together like a team and the trust factor established quite well within this short time.
In early 2015 began the journey of Opulent becoming a team of four with each person’s strengths complementing others! This team of four – all engineers, were bothered by the fact that there are hundreds of problems one faces in daily life but hardly any one is applying engineering to solve the same. Opulent’s mission became to enrich India through innovation, and we started our unstoppable journey to fulfill it! We did campus hiring and increased employee strength by a substantial number of 50 for a startup, built 3 new branches in Pune and one in Nasik. This was all done in two months with minimal finances in hand and vouching on a bank loan to be approved. With less experience in loan approval process, we took a stride and landed up in quite a lot of mess initially. With an agreement on handling HR while becoming first executive partner in the company, I saw myself in the middle of everything within the company– handling internal finance, operations & administration over and above just HR. That was the need of the hour! All four of us arranged finances to make the company survive and got almost strangled by compliances & financial burden of compliances to an extent of having a huge debt to be paid. But we survived one year of business cycle because of our perseverance and team work. We had to try new things to make business pay for itself, so we got into various kinds of technology trainings and worked our way up to become a research firm what we wanted to be.
In 2016, we tried to get in certain investors and by the story of our struggle quite a few were impressed and helped the company come out of instant crisis. Till date we are working on making our processes stronger, operations rapid and employee & customer satisfaction higher. But now, we are not just a training firm, we are truly what we wanted to be – an R&D firms which has recently rolled out two products and have another once coming out soon! These products aim at revolutionizing agriculture and education sector of India respectively. Opulent was a company I or other members could also connect to because it believed in doing good for the society with innovation in technology. Till date profits that are earned are put back in research instantly to enhance our existing and upcoming products.
