my journey
50th issue special
Success doesn’t come to you…you go to it! The road to success is a long journey infused with stumbling blocks and difficult terrains. It is a path which few have the courage to tread, and these are the few who have, through their steadfast commitment to achieve their goals, left an indelible mark in this world. MY JOURNEY...the refreshing new addition to the digitalLEARNING Magazine highlights the life and journey of some of the known leading personalities in today’s world. They will tell us their stories and accomplishments, give us insights into life turning moments that have the power to inspire others, and provide us with a sneak peek into those obscure events that have turned their life’s course. This enlightening and enriching segment will be an enthralling new addition to our magazine, specifically meant for those looking for inspiration and wanting to explore the enigmatic life and times of the achievers. Madan Padaki, Co-Founder & CEO, MeritTrac Services Pvt.Ltd
My Diary: 5th July 2000 “ Woke up to a bright sunny morning – which is quite unusual in this season. Quite disoriented - the fact that I have quit my “job” yesterday and started-off on my own to do something in testing, is yet to sink in. “Unemployed” is the word that keeps buzzing in my head - even though I know that I am stepping into a new life where I am creating my “own employment”. This sounds both exciting & scary at the same time… I get ready and lock myself up in my bedroom - a makeshift office with my old battered computer. I call up Murli & Mohan (my would-be co-founders) trying to figure out what I should be doing - now that I am full-time into this. The things on the agenda are - to pick a name for this venture, put a full fledged business plan in place, run after some prospects trying to generate some business and also try to raise some money to get the venture going. Seems like quite a lot of things to do … Lunch at home (Ah! the small pleasures of being on your own…) and the bed looks pretty inviting for an afternoon siesta. I fight off this urge and get to work on the business plan. I call up some contacts at Wipro & IBM and bingo! - I have got my first meeting with the Head-Recruitment of IBM! Not a bad first day - managed to get some semblance of a start-up…I hit the sack with a prayer on my lips… God: help us !” These are the actual excerpts from my diary on the day I started out on this dream called MeritTrac. Even now, from a detached perspective, the only sense I get out of this posting is hope, belief and a sense of adventure: pre-requisites for any entrepreneurial venture. And given this start, let me share my story and some experiences of balancing dreams and reality! I stumbled onto the idea of providing assessments & testing services quite by accident; the thought was triggered by a comment from a friend who was running a financial software products company – and he had got this request from an IT company to develop a question bank management software. The need from this company was that they were recruiting large number of software engineers and wanted to test all applicants – and hence the requirement of a question bank management software. This set me thinking that such companies would probably require assistance in the entire process of testing – right from developing scientifically validated tests to administering these tests in a secure environment across the country. This thought was also backed by the fact that knowledge services economy was slated to grow exponentially – and the core asset of any knowledge-led economy is quality of manpower. Therefore a service to measure “quality” of manpower objectively will be very valuable. And so was born the idea of an assessments-only company! A belief in the idea is essential but it has to be backed by cold and solid math. The most important part of starting off on your own is in developing a business plan for your brainchild. Simply put, it is the ability to make money out of your idea and the way of doing it. Every future step will depend on a business philosophy and a way of doing business- “why will someone pay you for this service/product?” will be the most important question that you need to convince yourself on. All other things like create/outsource, delivery mechanisms, costs, etc. are the next set of relevant questions that need to be answered. We shut ourselves in a room for 3 days to build our first draft of the business plan and I still have that sheet with me- I am amazed at how true the model that we envisioned has played out. After building the business plan, the feeling was that we will get funding immediately and we can subsequently quit our jobs to start off full-time. I still remember the day when I realized how wrong we were! We had gone to meet with a Venture Capitalist (VC’s) office with our business plan. 40
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