Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Starting a business is challenging. Scaling it is even more challenging. And if you are a woman, the odds are perhaps stacked a tad higher against you. However, regardless of the strenuous path to becoming your own boss, more women are turning entrepreneurs. According to the government’s statistics, the share of women-led micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) has increased from 13.72 per cent in the financial year 2010-2011 to 20.37 per cent till the last year. There are 1.29 crore women-owned enterprises out of 6.33 MSMEs in India. Nonetheless, as the world observes International Women’s Day on March 8, there are a number of stories that are reminiscent of the challenges women entrepreneurs face and overcome. Here is the first story of the three-part series celebrating women entrepreneurs:

Mumbai-based Sheetal Talati has been at the helm of Pushpa Industries, which manufactures condensers and cooling coils for air conditioners and other products in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry, since 2007 after her father Rohit Talati’s untimely death. Talati, then 22, had to take over the business, which was started by his father back in 1987, almost overnight without much clarity on even the basics of running a business. “While I wanted to join my father but not in the way circumstances pushed me into it. I was in the office within a week of his demise. It was a completely new field for me,” Talati told Financial Express Online. 

In order to understand the nuances of manufacturing products in the HVAC sector, Talati did a one-year technical course on air conditioning systems from Mumbai’s Father Agnel College alongside running the business. “To understand every aspect of the sector we were in, right from manufacturing, sale and purchase, to marketing, it became important for me to first learn about it. I used to attend college from 7 AM to 9 AM and get back to the factory by 9.30 AM,” said Talati.

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Along with the course, Talati also attended business workshops conducted by the local industry bodies for the HVAC sector. This helped her in the business. “The course also helped me improvise our products and market them. In two years, I was able to get the business back to the level where my father had left. I had gradually started setting annual targets and achieving them,” she added. 

The recovery assumed significance as the business had lost around 80 of its more than 100 clients when they were told of a young girl without any experience and understanding of the sector and business filling her father’s shoes. This was during the summer of 2007 before Talati enrolled herself for the technical course. That was a crisis situation as summer is the season for the HVAC sector to do business, she said. Calling clients and often waiting at their offices to meet and restore confidence in them over timely fulfilment of orders didn’t work. 

“The problem was with me. I had to prove myself. Thanks to the course and support of some senior employees in the company, I gradually got deeply involved in every aspect of the business. There was also a lot of self-learning involved because I knew everything in business depended on me. There were some employees who were not willing to accept my work but I never paid heed to them,” said Talati. Over time, Pusha Industries also won Carrier, Blue Star, Voltas, Chroma, etc., as its clients and registered growth of 15 per cent per annum. Moreover, from manufacturing 55,000 coils a year back in 2007, Talati scaled the business to the capacity of manufacturing 3.65 lakh coils a year.