Being an entrepreneur

The association of my society, Genesis, which is newly elected, is a team of highly motivated individuals and the moment they were voted to power, they came up with an excellent idea of celebrating Independence Day in the society. It was the first time that I was going to be here for such celebrations on the Independence Day. Various activities were planned for the kids. Drawing competition, painting, fancy-dress, dance and sports was announced for the kids. And the adults were given a chance to showcase their cooking skills.

Yes, the residents were given a chance to put up stalls of eatables, accessories, dress materials and I was quite excited by the very thought of it.

My two pals in the society, S and M are enthusiastic like me and we immediately decided to make the ever-green, always loved, Vada Pav. S is a baker by birth and she decided to make muffins, but another person was going to make cakes, biscuits, cookies, so she had to drop the idea and settle on chocolates instead. We immediately contacted the person in-charge for the food stall and locked our idea of Vada Pav and chocolates. We also paid the rent for the chairs and table and immediately got into action. We made the list of ingredients and the cost and decided the stores to pick up the material and also the day to shop. Every evening at the place where we met with our kids was filled with these conversations; apprehensions whether we will be able to do it or not, whether people will really come to eat Vada Pav at 11 am and so on. This was our first time and a new experience. So we literally had cold feet, but we decided to do our best and give it a shot.

15^th August was a Saturday this year. We decided to make the batter ready on Friday evening itself so that we could just fry the Vadas in the morning and make them available for selling by 10:30 am. My dad helped in peeling the potatoes. We all assembled at my place in the evening and made the potato batter with the instructions and experiences of M, S and my mom. We tasted the batter and it was just amazing, just like the one we get on streets in Mumbai. Happy with our efforts, we waited for next day where we were going to face all the known and unknown faces of our society. I couldn’t sleep well that night and had all sorts of dreams of our venture being a fiasco and so on. I woke up at 6 am that day and got ready to go to M’s place for frying vadas. S had already kept the chocolates ready by wrapping them and by giving them a price.

Saturday morning started off well, but later the frying of vadas started turning out to be a disaster. We had estimated around 60 vadas and only 48 turned out to be well. The others lost their cover as soon as we put them to fry. S and M worked out something at the last moment and I rushed to the venue with my mom to set up the stall and arrange the board etc. I was tensed and my mom sensed the tension, the mother knows it all, you see! She asked me to keep cool and sell whatever turned out to be good. We arranged the table, put our table cloth on it, put up the board displaying the name and price of the products that we would be selling that day and arranged all the plates, cashbox etc. When S came, I went to M’s place and got all the good vadas in a box so that we could start selling them as soon as possible. Other people had already put up their stalls and there was a great rush there. We all had doubts if anybody would really come to our stall which neither had fancy stuff to display nor the experience of a cooking tradition. We all experiment daily in our kitchens. M and S are good cooks, but not me. 

The first customer came and we thought, chalo at least our sale started. One by one people started coming and buying our stuff. Mostly the Marathi speaking crowd and the kids turned up in large numbers at the stall. I was the one who was giving them the vada pav, M was managing the counter and S was managing the chocolates and helping me out. We had a good co-ordination and we managed to sell all the vada pav we had made in 2 hours. A good start, we thought. The president of our association, Ms. G came to our stalls individually and told us about her idea of giving a platform to all the cooking-enthusiastic people to put their recipes for sale on a Sunday from 10 to 6. We were overjoyed and immediately started thinking of the next options that we would like to cook and put for sale. I felt really amused last night we were all tensed about how this trial of vada pav will turn out and now we are already thinking of what next! How strange is the human mind! It approaches every change in life with a negative approach and once the confidence sets in, it already starts anticipating the next change. I had communicated to all my friends in the society about our venture and had asked them to come over and cheer us and taste our first experiment. A few came and that really made me happy.

How did I feel as an entrepreneur? For the first time in my life, I stood at the other side of the counter. Felt really good and in control. I greeted everyone with smile and thanked them for having made the decision to come to our stall and buy the modestly priced vada pav and chocolates. Some people just came, looked around, stared at us, our notice board and left. Some people bought something or the other from our adjacent stalls, but did not dare to come to our stall. Some people came and appreciated the taste of the vada pav and some people just chose not to come at all. The kids especially the ones ranging between 8-15 years came in groups and relished this dish. It is sold in Bangalore under the famous “Goli” Vada pav, but it is not as good as what we get on every other small shop in Maharashtra.

I think we made a decent profit and moreover the joy of participating and doing something on our own and facing the crowd was a learning in itself. All the hard work, running around, estimations, experiments, planning paid off and we had a first successful stint as entrepreneur. 

Thank you everybody who were a part of our joy and sorry those who missed it!

We wish us many more of such occasions.

:-)