From starting up part time to taking the plunge, the story of Suruchi Anand

I worked for over 8 years with MNC’s like Ernst & Young and Northern Trust when one day I realized that my learning was only limited to my area of expertise. There was no feeling of satisfaction or fulfilment in my job.

When Suruchi Anand was managing company portfolios at Northern Trust, she started up an e-commerce platform with her husband’s support. TheCatchy.com was selling sarees and accessories and reaching out to audience outside India in a very short time. “We faced a major challenge in the logistics part. We did not have a trusted partner and at times we were not able to answer to our customers queries. There was no track of where a consignment was!” says the founder. This lead to a bad reputation and customer attrition.

I quit a luxurious life to take the plunge. There was no time socializing, movies or even travel at times!

Suruchi realized the need of an end to end logistics solution where the logistics company would own the entire responsibility of delivering the consignment. “With a little research, I found out about the potential in the e-commerce logistics market and started vLokal,” she adds. The company provides end to end logistics delight to its clients. They have achieved 99 % SLA in delivering the consignments on time, in a short period of 9 months.

A lot of people started to find me bossy when I took business decisions and gave instructions. We live in a male dominated society!

The company experienced major success with the clients across Laundry, hospitality and food segment. And even with a very limited capital, vLokal made over 2500 deliveries in 40 days of business and went ahead to receive seed funding after 2 months of operations. But as the business was growing, Suruchi and team found difficulty in hiring the right talent. “We faced problems in selling our services, since they were priced higher than the competitors. But once companies started to see the difference in the work, there was no looking back,” says Suruchi happily.

Women tend to be more sensitive towards their business, I think because the business is like their child!

Being the CEO of a startup, it requires one to be engaged in almost everything. In the case of vLokal as well, Suruchi handling everything, right from client’s relationship, to employee satisfaction, to meeting the expectations of investors. “I could never imagine that the skills i learnt during MBA would help me so much,” she says surprisingly.

She advises the future womenpreneurs to follow your passion and not worry about what the society has to say!

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