An open door for first-generation founders - what I tell them
Mentorship in engineering is unglamorous. Most of it is helping a younger founder see the trap before they walk into it. The conversations that come up most often.
First-generation founders in Indian engineering tend to make the same mistakes in the same order. They scale faster than their working capital allows. They diversify before they have learned to repeat the first business cleanly. They confuse winning a tender with winning a customer. They under-price safety and under-staff engineering. I do not say any of this from a podium - I learned each one the slow way. The door stays open because the same conversations come up again and again, and most of them a founder can have for the price of a phone call.
Win the repeat customer before chasing the new one
A new customer is exciting; a repeat customer is profitable. In the rush of the early years every founder is tempted to keep adding new names at the cost of doing right by the first few. But the first few are the ones who refer the next thirty. Putting the discipline into making them want to come back is worth more than ten new tender wins.
Hire the engineer before the salesperson
Engineering companies die from poor execution capacity long before they die from poor sales. The first hires should be engineers, project managers and quality people, not business development. Sales without execution gets you into trouble fast; execution without sales gets you into trouble slowly, with time to recover. Pick the trouble you can survive.
Stay close to the work
The single habit I keep is staying close to the work - the project site, the engineering office, the customer's specification. A promoter who can answer a technical question on a Monday morning without consulting anyone is a promoter the customer respects. The one who is always three layers removed eventually gets quoted to. The substation, the line, the shop floor - that is where the business actually lives. Spending time there is not a habit, it is the job.
This essay is an in-house first draft, prepared for Mr. Paresh Ardeshna's review. It expresses general operating opinions on themes within his domain, but no specific event, customer, year or biographical claim has been verified. To be edited, signed off, or replaced before publication.
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First-generation Indian industrialist and engineer. Promoter and Director of Hi-Tech Transpower Pvt. Ltd. (est. 2005), a pan-India engineering and EPC services company in power transmission and renewable energy.