Women entrepreneurs back to biz after a learning stint at IIMB

BENGALURU: On Friday evening, a third cohort of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 women entrepreneurs will walk out of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIMB) campus having completed their academic training programme at the top-ranked B-school.
The programme is a fully-funded curriculum hosted over a three-month period, including 15 days of intensive classroom learning on business subjects like accounting and finance, marketing, operations, people management, strategy, and leadership and negotiations.
The current batch of 53 women is a varied mix of entrepreneurs from various sectors. TOI features four of them.
Dr Jayanthy Ravindran
She’s a plastic surgeon with surgical training from AIIMS and specialisation in cosmetic surgery from Belgium and Singapore. From being a freelance plastic surgeon, Dr Jayanthy opened Tamira in 2016 to provide a aesthetic healthcare solution “based on honesty, transparency and state-of-the-art processes”, redefining the existing paradigm. “The aesthetic industry is unorganised. There are saloons that give solutions for hair loss and there are specialist doctors who provide treatment that doesn’t meet standards. I started the hospital as a single specialty hospital for aesthetic enhancement. However, as a doctor I didn’t know how to deal with the finance aspect and faced a cash loss within two years. That’s when I realised a management training is important,” she said.
Tan Kuruvilla
An engineer, Tan started her own venture Kavani, a one-of-its-kind bridal designer store of exclusive white wedding saris and gowns, after she was unimpressed by the limited variety of saris in stores for her wedding. Kavani now has two stores — in Kottayam (Kerala) and Bengaluru — and a strong online presence. “The course here has helped me identify the right direction in which I need to move. It made me realise that my market is not just among Christians, but also among Sri Lankans, Parsis and people in North India, who use white saris for occasions other than weddings,” said Tan.
Ivy Manohara
Ivy, along with her partner, runs Filmapia, an online portal that helps in finding locations for film units. “It’s like Airbnb for film location hunters. It democratises location hunting, brings in transparency of processes and costs and saves time and money up to 10x or more,” explains Ivy. What started as a hobby born out of passion for movies and travel turned into a serious business with the founders researching and learning the trade of film production over six years, moonlighting along with their full-time jobs before they quit in 2017. Filmapia has helped locate spots for feature films, short films, documentaries, TV serials and web-series apart from multi-crore mainstream film projects.
Sharmistha Nandi Paliwal
Sharmistha is co-director of Third Eye Education, a 23-year-old Guwahati-based educational and training company. She is part of the core team that heads the skill development and vocational training initiatives of the company, which has over 170 training centres in Assam and other northeastern states. She also initiated the latest brand of the company — Kid Veda Pre-Schools. “Each of my initiatives not just helps myself but creates job opportunities for hundreds of others as I follow a franchisee model. The women entrepreneur programme has been a great learning experience not just for the mentoring and hand-holding we received, but also for the peer learning,” she says.