All fired up about his next move

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Friday , April 04, 2008 at 2208 hrs Davangere, about 150 km from Bangalore. We did the fire alarm systems for the institute.” The turnover from that business and a few other smaller jobs amounted to Rs 8 lakh in 1992-93 fiscal year. “Those were the beginning days, we just had two or three jobs for the first two years,” Narendra says.

Soon after that, the salesperson BJ Ramesh at Firepro landed a large contract, through sheer leg work, by working his way through all the new buildings in Bangalore. “We got a contract for providing fire safety and electronic security systems in a housing society in Bangalore,” says Ramesh. That project resulted in a turnover of Rs 45 lakh in the fiscal year 1993-94. Firepro’s first big break came when the company did a job for Embassy, one of the large builders in Bangalore. “We did a large residential complex for them. It was a high-end luxury apartment, the first of its kind at that time.” It resulted in a turnover of about Rs 1crore in 1994-95, fiscal year. After that, work slowly started pouring in.

The key challenges that Narendra faced in the beginning were: access to capital and banking facilities; building credibility took time as people expected to see sustained growth in capability and revenue; ability to attract talent was a challenge but, the policy of sharing success and rewarding his employees helped. Another problem was that the suppliers and vendors would not extend a high level of management support and focus in early days. But then, there was a silver lining in the cloud. Capital was an issue, but Narendra found that his company could get a decent amount of money as advance and manage to move from project to project, complete his tasks one by one. “For about two years, we managed with the money we got from our customers in terms of advance towards the supply of materials. The payment terms were favourable so we could manage for the first two years.”