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Book Review: Go Fly High, Perfectly-Timed for the Budding Enterpreneurs

SME WORLD Bureau
Sep 2010

This book on business strategy set in a purely Indian context deals with the subject in an interesting narrative format. The main protagonist, Rajan, is a successful entrepreneur, who has built a Rs. 30-crore business enterprise in just a decade and a half. On completing his engineering degree, Rajan started-up his own venture of manufacturing and marketing weighing scales. Although the field was crowded, Rajan, the visionary, had a few differentiators. The scales available in the market at that time were not made to very high standards of engineering and precision. They were also not reliable as they broke down frequently. Discerning customers(typically sellers of high-value items, such as jewellery, for example) would be willing to pay a premium for a product that showed weights accurately, needed less maintenance and repairs and lasted longer(he figured).

There was no looking back for Rajan from that point on, until, thirteen years later(just two years before present time), he finds himself beset with several problems on both personal and business fronts.

The story begins with a scene on a Saturday morning, where Raju is in a positive, upbeat and relaxed frame of mind. He is working from his home-office, and his attention is drawn to the pile of letters on his desk. The one of top is a large, white envelope and is a very special letter. On reading the letter, several thoughts flood his mind. And then, his mind drifts back to the August weekend at Chargaon(his native village to which he returns for the first time after having left to attend engineering college in the city) two years ago, that helped bring about a transformation in Rajan’s life.

Although outwardly, mid-sized businesses appear to have crossed the zone of facing day-to-day problems of continuity of sales and receipts, timely payment of utility bills, liquidity, supplies, employee attendance and performance, and the like faced by start-ups(by the sheer process of having had a good run for some years) many mid-sized business owners that find themselves in a phase of “mid-life-crisis” when they are simply stuck in a band. Rajan has a similar experience and finds that he has no time to get out of operations and day-to-day fire-fighting, no personal time to spend with his family, and little or no time or money to work on ideas that can help take the business to the next level-which is frustrating.

At this juncture, Rajan goes to Chargaon, where the panchayat has organised an important event in the old village school to felicitate Rajan for his accomplishments and also show their gratitude to him for his having “given back” to his roots. Rajan’s firm had installed an electronic weigh-bridge that could weigh an entire truck, in the village at a subsidised price. Villagers from Chargaon and the neighbouring villages could now their seasonal farm produce with ease and accuracy. Rajan makes an impromptu speech, at the end of which he receives a standing ovation from the villagers. Just as he is soaking in the adulation, his childhood friend and companion, Manu comes up to him. For a moment, Rajan is speechless as he cannot recognise his childhood friend. And the plot takes an interesting turn.

Though both Rajan and Manu have shared a similar childhood, Manu’s life-story is very different from Rajan’s. On his father’s death, Rajan takes over his father’s small farm. Rajan has expanded his ancestral farm manifold and is now the owner of large, profitable, sustainable, well-run farm(which also includes the plot of land that was earlier owned by Rajan’s family). In what comes as revelation to him, Rajan(in a mixture of joy, disbelief and a tinge of envy) discovers that he wasn’t the only one in the village to have experienced success after all. ‘Today Manu has achieved everything I could possibly have achieved had I stayed on in Chargaon… maybe even more!, he silently says to himself. This could get readers thinking, “Is the grass really greener or the other side?”

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