The Anexas Story - Chapter 1: Introduction

Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests asking me to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn to motivate would-be entrepreneurs, I am starting a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone! 

INTRODUCTION

All of us have dreams. 

I had too. Modest dreams. The kind of dreams that you feel foolish about in the mornings, while the family wishes to just have a good breakfast or the children have to gather their books in a school bag and go off to school. The surroundings tell us, forget the dreams, do a hard day’s work and be done with it. 

I was losing hair rapidly. The simple dream of remaining handsome and dandy forever was proving to be a pipedream! But, dreams keep changing shapes and sizes as we change our shapes and sizes from childhood to adulthood to ‘retire hood’. 

One of the many dreams in my early thirties was to be an entrepreneur. Don’t start laughing now!

What’s in a dream! It plays itself in the mind while the hands and legs are busy doing something else. It festers in the mind. It harvests in the brain. It looks at the world distantly from behind the retina of the eye. And I was already wearing spectacles. So, it was kind of a spectacle. For me only.

And the seedling of this dream did not have any fertile land or supportive weather. ‘Business is too risky’, my parents would say. ‘Eight out of ten businesses fail within eighteen months,' Forbes, Harvards and Bloombergs of the world would proclaim. They sold magazines and research findings. They also put fear into us. 

Can you imagine a person in the year 2002, four years into his marriage with newly born twins, earning Rs. 7000($100) per month from a temporary job, and still dreaming of starting a company? Sounded like a politician suddenly wanting to build a huge wall across the long border with another country or a mayor wanting to rid the city of all potholes. You get the drift, right? Possibly, even more impossible than their claims. 

With a family history dating back to generations devoid of any business experience, and no degrees from any of the traditionally 'famous' institutes, my career recipe had all the ingredients of anything but entrepreneurship.

Yet, just in three years, Anexas was born.

Of course, it was not born in a traditional birthplace a professional company usually boasts of. (Like, as I always remember the way I was not born in a hospital).  My not being born in a hospital was then a constraint beyond my control because the village where I was born did not have any hospital. But the city of Bangalore, where Anexas was born certainly offered a possibility of a fancy office as its birthplace.  Yet some events choose unusual places to start off in. (The prospects of being a wannabe Google or Apple by starting in a garage were slim, given steep garage rentals in Bangalore!)

Anexas was also born in a home, in an apartment in Koramangala, Bangalore where I lived. Without any office, not even a desk dedicated to it! 

And in the next five years of its birth, Anexas would turn all the key persons associated with it to millionaires, and that too with zero investment.

Millionaire. Me? I still pinch myself. It pains. But I feel good. It says this was not a dream, I lived it. Actually, mostly smiled through it.

I don’t do cartwheels for a living. But I can do one now. In happiness.

The purpose here is not to tell you a success story. The purpose is to take you through a journey, a story that is anecdotal, that I, with the Anexas team, undertook while confronting usual challenges of life and business, with unusual responses, which made all the difference. 

This is my story, our story at Anexas, told as I know. There are many who have been with me on this journey. I have tried to remember all of them, including our team members, most of who came from tier two and three cities.  

You must have heard of great success stories of companies like FaceBook, Uber, Google, etc. Not all of us have the same ecosystem in which they started. I invite you to listen to a story from your neighborhood from your kind of person who operates in an ecosystem like yours. 

Of course, as I reveal the story, I will also reveal the secrets Anexas team possesses. The simple secrets which allow us to break all the clichéd rules of success while operating as an MNC in different countries, making millions. If we could do it, you can too!

To protect the identity of the individuals, sometimes the names referred in the book have been changed, except for those who have given their consent. And to not make it look like our advertisement mouthpiece, most of the client organization names have not been mentioned. This also is done to respect the non-disclosure agreement we sign with our clients. Or, to hide a lot of our client names to make it harder for our competitors to reach them!

However, all the claims of the projects mentioned in the book are verifiable. Well, I am that kind of a person. I usually have things verified. Helps in the long run. Could help you too!

In some cases, clients have been kind enough to grant permission to use their names, in that case their stories are told with their names included.

The word client here means the organization or individual for whom we are consulting or helping to excel. If you are not a consultant, but a working professional, then a client for you might mean your boss, or a department which is your internal customer, or sometimes it might mean your own colleagues or fellow employees. If you are a student, your client or customer would be your college, professors or your parents. So, the suggestions in the book apply to everyone, because everyone has a customer to please.

Anexas story, though it keeps referring to process excellence in general or sometimes Lean Six Sigma in particular, it doesn't mean that you have to know or learn about it to be able to relate to this story. Just substitute that with your own expertise, and you would be able to relate to it.

We have lived the Anexas dream for more than thirteen years till now; there’s a lot to deal with. When I tell the story, I will get a sense of accomplishment if I can convey the essence to even some of you out there.

You can read this like a racy paperback too. But hopefully, some stuff will stick. Usually it does.

If it doesn’t, call me, we can have some samosas and tea. We can trade gossip and I can leave, enriched by your stories, that may make their way into another book, another time, somewhere, somehow.

If they are good samosas, I shall remember more.

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For subsequent articles, please watch this space.

You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com

or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7