Guest Lecture by Mr. Sudhir Khot

The SIMSREE batch of 2011-2013 had the good fortune of getting an insight into the mind of an entrepreneur. Mr. Sudhir Khot, an alumnus of the 1993 batch visited campus to address the newly inducted batch on entrepreneurship. Mr. Sudhir Khot is the owner of Kaijing Agro Services Pvt. Ltd. He currently runs three other ventures viz. Rural Reach, Kaijing Financial Planning and Sahyadri Agricultural Producer Company Ltd. He has been successfully running his entrepreneurial ventures for more than 10 years now. 

He insisted that the session should be interactive and result in some sharing of thoughts. He asked the students to put forth their views on entrepreneurship. After listening to the responses of the students, he summed up the concept of entrepreneurship by saying that an entrepreneur is someone who identifies a gap in the system and fills it. He also helped the students understand the difference between an entrepreneur and a small businessman. He explained that the difference is how the Risk/Reward Ratio for an entrepreneur is much better than that for a small businessman. 

He advised the budding entrepreneurs on three points:

a) Don’t be stubborn and stick to a single business idea; be open to exploring new ideas. 

b) Don’t over-analyze your business idea. If you have a good idea, just follow your heart. 

c) If you really want to start a business, the right time is “now”. The longer you wait, the bigger will be your liabilities and it will become increasingly difficult to come out of your “corporate cushion”. 

He answered students’ questions regarding the relevance of management education for an entrepreneur, the dilemma about whether or not work experience is required before starting an enterprise, how to deal with initial failures and so on. The session provided a dose of encouragement to all the budding entrepreneurs and introduced all the others to the various elements of entrepreneurship. It was a very insightful and engaging session and we look forward to having more such sessions in the future.

- Gauri Sawant (Batch 2011-13)