Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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TOPIC
MY FAVOURITE BUSINESSMAN
INDEX
1. INTRODUCTION
2. BIO-GRAPHY
3. HIS NEW IDEA
4. CHALLENGES
5. ACHIVEMENTS
6. FUTURE PLANS
7. BIBILIOGRAPHY
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MY FAVOURITE BUISNESSMAN
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BIO-GRAPHY
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entrepreneur Jay Gupta let us in on
the story behind “The Loot”.
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HOW IT EARNS PROFIT?
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and source it directly from the
manufacturer or distributors.
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Today it is present in 85 cities with
a total of 150 stores and 600
employees.
CHALLENGES
ACHIVEMENTS
I
wonder then
t is
no
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was nominated one amongst a
series of 12 startups – “Small Ideas
Big Changes” by The Hindustan
Times.
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Personally Jay regards the “TATA
NEN Hottest Start up award” as the
most prestigious award as yet. He
describes his entrepreneurial
journey saying “It’s an adrenaline
rush, seeing the company grow at
a fast pace and watching content,
satisfied customer’s increases this
drive.”
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FUTURE PLANS
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aggressive? Profits. Margins in the
business are a measly 3-4% after
taxes. He needs scale.
He wants to make sure he grows at
such a pace that new entrants
cannot catch up. Six years after he
began, there have been copycats.
But they are small players. No one
has been able to replicate his
model on a national scale.
Gupta believes his systems are in
place; the time is right for
expansion.
For that he also needs competent
people to run his business. This is
where the MBA conundrum comes
in. In 2005, when The Loot began
to expand, Gupta realised he
hadn’t accounted for a lot of
factors. “You need tech support,
your management cost increases,
warehousing comes in, branding,
marketing…all these factors that
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never existed earlier become a
cost,” he says. He hired people
from the Indian Institutes of
Management and poached some
from companies like Adidas and
Levi’s. But he found that they
couldn’t help him with figuring out
these processes.
He began employing people from
“Hindi medium places”. “They
might not be able to speak to you
in English, but they’ll get the job
done,” says Gupta.
Another solution to the manpower
and real estate issue was to opt for
the franchisee route, which it did in
2007. Today, out of the 150 stores,
only 40 are company run.
Franchisees get 28-33% of the
purchase price depending on store
size.
Of course, not having the MBAs has
hurt the company. In the initial
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years, the company often used to
misjudge the quality and quantity
of stock it needed. They used to
get into problems. At the time Jay
used to say, ‘We haven’t done any
management course. So we did not
see this coming. We’ll count this
loss as our course fees,’”.
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Gupta. Even then, around 15% of
the inventory remains unsold. But
Gupta insists, “Everything is
saleable. You just have to find the
correct price.” The Loot sells it to
the unorganised sector at a 20%
discount to its purchase price.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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