Erode, Tamil Nadu: Shree Shivkumar, 50, located himself in a financial and emotional abyss as an entrepreneur in the overdue 2000s. His Erode-based totally family commercial enterprise, SKM, a cattle feed, and fowl powerhouse in Tamil Nadu with a turnover of around ₹six hundred crores back then, became cut up among Shivkumar and his younger brother. Shivkumar felt shortchanged when, as a part of the carve-up, he got control of the institution’s eggs division, a relative rump with sales of only ₹80 crores.
“In traditional enterprise households in smaller towns, the older siblings regularly bring the load of having to be more benevolent. When the cut-up took place, I every day it, however, felt damaged every,” Shivkumar said.
Shivkumar’s SKM Egg Products Export (India) Ltd is not only the most effective ₹300 crore company but also the primary inside the Erode vicinity to move public and the most prominent Indian exporter of egg merchandise, processing approximately 1.8 million eggs a day. “I owe the turnaround in my fortunes, in large measure, to Bouncing Board. It is my group of dependable specialists, personal confidantes, unbiased directors, and prolonged own family rolled into one,” he said.
A Bouncing Board is a closed, casual club of a dozen entrepreneurs from diverse sectors without competing for enterprise pursuits. So, as an instance, a Bouncing Board can best have one industrialist who operates in the actual property sector. Besides monthly conferences, the individuals collectively get an afternoon-long retreat. Twice a year, candidly proportion the lot that concerns their commercial enterprise and personal lives—from their family feuds to falling revenues. Empathy and complete confidentiality are the forex wherein the club price is paid.
In its objective of gaining knowledge through shared reviews, a Bouncing Board sounds like Alcoholics Anonymous for those addicted to earnings. For entrepreneurs in small business clusters of Erode (about four hundred kilometers (km) from Chennai). They no longer have the benefits of exposure to a much broader spectrum of professionally run agencies in metropolitan cities, equipped to get entry to industry systems or a massive corps of expert managers; bouncing boards have become an essential self-assist institution.
Erode’s first Bouncing Board, which Shivkumar is a member, was shaped in 2011. The mixed turnover of the participants of this group exceeds ₹three 000 crore. Now, there are three Bouncing Boards in Erode and one every in Trichy and Coimbatore. When the financial slowdown poses an existential threat for small and medium agencies in massive textile and agro-processing clusters together with Erode, peer entrepreneur boards like Bouncing Boards act as a lifeline on both managerial and emotional fronts.
For instance, C. Devarajan, the coping director (MD) of the ₹800-crore URC Group with pursuits in production, hospitality, and software, found himself amid a receivables disaster after the double whammy of demonetization and the products and offerings tax (GST). “It wasn’t that my clients wilfully held bills again. They had a cash crunch that affected my working prices. The suggestion from the contributors of the Bouncing Board become that I have to be individually cognizance of this problem for a few months rather than business development or approach,” Devarajan said. It worked. “The sight of 55-year-olds making weekly visits to their office perhaps exerted good enough ethical stress on them,” he stated, sitting in a pink-oxide floored, modest two-story residence that is his company headquarters (HQ).
Rules of the game
Bouncing Boards aren’t a consuming and socializing club. Its club comes with stringent and inviolable guidelines. First, attendance and punctuality at the monthly conferences and retreats are mandatory. Skipping multiple monthly meets—hosted by way of every one of the 12-member group with the aid of flip—in a year way expulsion; every minute’s delay of turning up submit the stipulated time draws a high-quality of ₹1,000, as does each a hundred gram of weight placed on with the aid of its participants for the reason that preceding assembly.
