Last week I travelled to the North East with Ronald and Tanveen and had a first- hand experience of what Women on Wings truly does at ground level. It was a very humbling and informative experience.
Three areas of our work
I got the opportunity to be a part of three different visits to social ventures. An assessment of a prospect, for relationship management to our business partner Fabric Plus and a consultancy session on business planning with our business partner Tamul Plates. The 3 days consultancy session with the management of Tamul Plates gave me deep insights of how we hand hold our business partners to achieve their goals and in turn achieving our objective. Our team and the experts work with sheer passion, dedication and commitment towards a social cause of generating employment opportunities for women in rural India.
Hand holding towards a common goal
I realised that Arindam Dasgupta, the founder of Tamul Plates, has clear plans to grow and make his company a 100 crore company, but the plans were all jumbled up in his mind and in the mind of his first line team. He and his team did not have clarity as to how they can achieve the target. After a field visit and two days of rigorous workshop, Women on Wings was able to align the team towards a common goal. The team viewed us as an independent and unbiased body. They have had several discussions previously amongst themselves, but could not arrive at any substantial conclusion.
New possibilities to increase production
Tamul Plates has the market but lacks production capabilities to meet the demand of the plates that are made out of leaves (sheath) of areca palm which is found in abundance in Barpeta and surrounding villages in Assam. We supported them identifying the areas that needed to be prioritized and came up with new possibilities of who and how to sell their machines to increase production capabilities.
Moving ahead
They were very happy with the conclusions and this gave them clear direction to move ahead. By the end Arindam was very keen to have a marketing and financial workshop in near future as well and that tells me the value of our advisory services and strengths my conviction.
Shilpa Mittal Singh
