Stint with Goldman Sachs, ISB turns a stepping stone for this duo

BENGALURU: Nivedita Prasad says her chocolates are better than those of Lindt. It’s said only partly in jest.
Prasad, who started a chocolate business in Bengaluru with friend Uma Raju in 2006 as something of a pastime, ended last financial year with a revenue of Rs 1.85 crore.
Early on, they took the call to do very high quality chocolate — what’s called couverture chocolate that contains extra cocoa butter.These were expensive at over Rs 1,000 a kg. But the initial response was encouraging. “In our first year we did 100 boxes and all were sold out immediately,” says Nivedita.
Soon they were doing Rs 50,000 to Rs 75,000 a month, without any advertising, without any social media, just by word of mouth.
In 2009-10, they were selected for Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women programme, a global initiative to provide women with a business and management education, mentoring, networking and access to capital. It involved a three-month stint at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. The programme completely changed Nivedita and Uma’s perspective towards business.
“We developed a vision, we realized that growing a business was not only about passion. We now know what it requires to take something to the factory level, how to do digital marketing. We are so much more confident,” Nivedita says. They have customers like Fidelity, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, real estate developers, they are at select retail outlets. And now they are even looking at the US market, where they will have to more directly compete with brands like Lindt.
The 10,000 Women programme has been a liberating and enlightening one for many in India. Of the 10,000 around the world – a figure that Goldman Sachs touched at the end of last year — more than 1,300 were from India, second to China that saw the participation of over 2,000 women.
“The statistics speak very strongly of the programme’s success,” says Bunty Bohra, CEO of Goldman Sachs Services India. “Their (women entrepreneurs’) revenue and headcount growth has increased, they have become more confident, they are mentoring others, and I have personally heard a lot of anecdotes about how it has changed the dynamics within their homes,” he says.
For Mukkamala Bala Tripura Sundari from Hyderabad, the 10,000 Women programme, which she completed in 2011, proved to be a life-changing one. She had till then a small training venture going for workmen in the automotive industry.
During the 10,000 Women programme, she sat down with a mentor and drew a business plan. “I realized what a big opportunity there was,” she says.
She redesigned her training products, she got a loan from the National Skill Development Corporation for a Rs 30 crore project, and she started a skill development institution she called Involute Institute of Technical Training (IITT).
She has five centres and is opening a new one in Jharkhand. Prior to the 10,000 Women programme, her revenue was Rs 6 lakh per annum; last year it was Rs 3.5 crore.
Bohra says access to capital is the biggest problem for women entrepreneurs. To address this, the World Bank arm IFC (International Finance Corporation) and Goldman Sachs jointly launched earlier this year a $600 million global facility that will increase access to finance to as many as 100,000 women entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Goldman Sachs has made a $50 million seed contribution to this fund. “The fund will be more like a bank than a venture capital fund,” says Bohra.