The Power of Empowerment: Strategies for Increasing Women Entrepreneurs

India has about 75 million enterprises for 1.4 Billion strong population with documented 89 million working women in the organized sector. And out of the enterprises, we have 13.5 to 15.7 million that are run by women. In pure numerical term, that's 20% of the active enterprises and when I first looked at it, I felt that’s not bad.

When I read the details more deeply, two important information came out - 69% of the women run entrepreneurs are not employing anyone except for themselves and many of these firms are run only on paper by women. To tackle the latter, we will need to do a deep dive across cultural, social and country's history.

This blog is my attempt to share my story and what I learnt from my entrepreneurial experiments. 

To set the context, these enterprises list only includes the organized sector of private and public enterprises that report data on a regular basis. For this blog, I would like to keep our focus squarely on the organized sector and how women are powering these enterprises. The complete research provided by Bain and Google collaboration is here

I was personally moved by the conclusion from this article

“Unlocking entrepreneurship amongst women in India is a complex effort, but one which provides an unprecedented opportunity to change the economic and social trajectory of India and its women for generations to come.”

There is tremendous opportunity in innovations and tomorrow’s world is going to be distinctly different from the world that our parents’ grew up. The solutions need to be hyper-local and pertinent to address tomorrow’s world.

I want to start my story of being an entrepreneur with the lens of numbers. My last count of companies I have tried launching and couldn’t complete a single year of successful execution stands more than 4.

A little bit of background about myself. I finished graduating from college in the late nineties. I was part of an entrepreneur club throughout my college journey where we organized several events and made it quite remunerative. In my mind, I thought I should be in my thirties to start your own firm. That’s a cardinal mistake. There is no specific timeframe one needs to put yourself in. I met this very bright intelligent girl Prassiddhi Singh (link) who has decided to make a change in climate action from the age of 5.

I started as a software engineer in late-nineties and continued to grow in the corporate ladder. As I grew, my expertise and responsibilities started expanding and going deeper. My experiences help me hone several soft skills including people management, coaching, mentoring, listening and hard skills such as strategy building, stakeholder management, communication and program management. In the sense, my strength was in bringing everyone towards a common goal. I hope one can correlate my role as a Rallyist in Sangatna Angels :)

I felt that I was missing something.  The best advice I received from my family was to arm one with skills. I completed my management degree with major in Strategy and Marketing in the year 2010.

Here are some of my experiences through the entrepreneurial stints – for today’s blog I want to keep in brief.

-       In 2007, I created a PoC for a mobile-to-mobile payment engine. Conceptualized while standing in a queue to pay money instead of tapping and going. I didn’t work harder on that idea thinking that I am too early.

-       In 2012, with a lot of conviction, I tried launching a firm in the field of preventative medical records firm with focus on small and medium hospitals. Closed the business in a year as I couldn’t get the investments to scale. Further I got feedback that the idea was too early for its time

-       In 2013, with a friend of mine, I tried to launch an offering to provide hyper-local delivery service. After servicing about 35+ POs, I withdrew as I felt I wouldn’t be able to stand against such bigwigs. To give some context, this is around the time Big-basket/Amazon delivery was starting their operations.

-       In 2016, launched a firm to provide job portal for women. After knocking doors with many HR firms and advised by close quarters that there are many job portals that I would compete with.

-       In 2016, I launched my private technology practice that offered simple and clear coaching for organization transformation. I was the only employee and ran this consulting practice with community like formation with like-minded phenomenal leaders for 5 years. This is a successful solo-preneur experience in a collective setup.

-       In 2023, with a friend of mine, tried to setup a product firm in the field of IoT (specifically in the electronic meters and electric vehicles). I ended up folding this firm in 8 months as I couldn’t find a way to scale without solid partnerships

As I write this blog, myself along with extremely talented women are faced with similar challenges in front of us. Often quoted cliches for these experiences ring true, inability to take risks, staying in the comfort zone, not able to hear the inner voice and ability to accept failure. Yes, we spoke to more than 75 people prior to the launch of Sangatna Genesis. Some glimpses you can see here.

I wanted to dig deeper in this blog on why 69% of the women run firms in India are solopreneurs? Often the problems around risks, comfort zone, failure would be the same irrespective of gender.

One clear area that emerged from my experiments, in being an entrepreneur, is – women approach startups very differently than men. I fell in love with the problem and truly got invested into two areas – How might I solve and How might I learn from this. In the process of solving for the problem and thinking bigger, the execution chasm becomes more and more wider. As I started thinking bigger, execution of fixing today’s revenue and discipline to execute has got missing. Personally, I never looked at any of these ventures from the lenses of revenue generation and profit making. That’s a cardinal mistake. Companies exist in the world of execution and not in world of ideas, ppt-ware and meetings. Start small and keep at it.  

Through this journey, I could have knocked more doors if I had the more conviction of the solutions that I was proposing. Like me, many people, either drop the solution early or not try harder. I have had an implicit assumption that one needs to time box to 6 to 12 months. If any of these ventures were not taking off, after a period of 12 months, I decided to move on. This period of time was instilled along the way to be self-reliant and not depend on outside money. That’s a cardinal mistake. Anything worth doing takes time and a year flies by very quickly. No point in giving up too early.

I have more than 2 decades of work experience and consider myself a highly disciplined individual in completing the tasks, vision and programs at large. My last firm, I was in charge of integration management of two large banks and orchestrated more than 200 people and 100+ applications to the final leg of program execution. When the roles are defined very well there are plans drawn out, deliberated with multiple people and most importantly, a sense of ownership and communication done widely. When things get hairy, we used to rely on our network (leadership, team) to help out and ask one questions as a true accountability partner (link). I never set up such framework and guardrails for my past ventures. That’s a cardinal mistake. Surrounding oneself with people who rely on you (and vice versa) to be successful is a powerful motivation to stay true to the journey.

Some learnings’ I wanted to share that we are going to do differently

1.     Arm oneself with some of the skills that you think you lack.

2.     Surround yourself around people who encourage you. And have people around you who have complementary skills.

3.     Imagine that you are the secret sauce who’s going to make a difference in every transaction that you are doing. Remember that the world is a level playing field.

4.     Try a longer vesting period, 12 months is too short in a startup evolution, and we have vouched ourselves (within Sangatna co-founders) to stay a lot longer

Enjoy the journey and what lessons you can take away from the skills that you have made.

Call to action I want you to take away (if you are still here reading :)

1.     There are women entrepreneurs who are doing things outside their comfort zone. Encourage them

2.     Challenging the social norm is real and very much doable. If more people do it, its not a rocket science, it becomes a collective effort

3.     We have to be the influencers in thinking as well as acting – if you are interested in creating a lasting impression

4.     If there are women around you trying to offer a service (& in a solo-preneur setup) – ask them what help do they need to take it to the next level

I would love to hear from you on your thoughts on what are your takeaways from your experiements. Please leave the comments.