At BrilliantRead Media, our aim is to bring to our community some of the unique and compelling stories from the start-up ecosystem. As part of this endeavour, we invited yet another passionate entrepreneur Anooja Bashir for an exclusive interview with us. Anooja is an Entrepreneur, Leader, Brand Strategist, Mentor Marketing Consultant, Trainer and Founder & CEO of Oureacorp. Let’s learn more about her inspirational journey and her advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Anooja:
We are aware of your contribution to the ecosystem, tell us a little bit about your startup and the problems you guys are solving, please;
As once a wise man said “Dare to dream” was taken quite seriously by me.
Like many of us I emerged from a conservative family and the journey from a professional background as an engineer to an entrepreneur ecosystem was with a lot of toil and hardships.”
I graduated as Civil Engineer and began my career in the corporate field which gradually led to a start-up with a motive of developing an Ed-tech company which finally evolved into a marketing vertical and thereupon backed with IT winded up in a 360-degree business management consultancy providing Marketing, IT, HR and training solution through our corporate wing Oureacorp along with Oureansoul that deals with creative services like interiors and events.
We help companies to gain a foothold in the industry as a lot of small businesses sometimes find it difficult to get noticed. In reality, it’s like they don’t know where to start. So, they create profiles on social media networks and expect leads to come in. But things don’t work that way. What they need is an expert collaborator who can increase their standing in the industry. That’s where our magic works.”
I also have 2 other companies, FlexiCloud and Digitaliz, with my partners Vinod Chacko and Naman Modi.
‘Ourea’ is such a unique name; talk us through more about it, please. Our audience would also love to know what kind of problem you are solving with the help of your startup?
The word Ourea in greek means mountain, where though it’s a struggle to climb up eventually hard work and efforts take you to the top in this case success. The bird in the logo symbolizes the phoenix that never gives up or breaks and even if it does, it rises from the ashes symbolizing our failures and gradual success.”
Ourea’s business model is built around a unique system representing the 7 primordial deities of Greek mythology; Nysa | Athena | Cithaeron | Oreos | Olympus | Helicon | Athos
These 7 entities represent 7 human traits or personas that are embodied in our culture and work philosophy. These entities are further split into our 7 core domains that serve specific business functions:
HR Consulting| Training | Marketing | IT | Events | Interiors | Photography
We offer quality services through all of our verticals tailored specifically to meet our customer’s wants and needs with a bunch of creative, talented, skilled people committed towards maintaining the company standards. We provide the solution with our pitch-perfect strategies and long-term visions along with proper utilization of resources that promotes business growth in all our verticals.
During this COVID-19 crisis, what are the measures you have undertaken to continue your business without disruption?
We had thoroughly dedicated our time in building our brand powerful by training the team with industries best. We utilized our time in finding out the solution to fight out the challenges of pandemic related business obstacles. We promoted our employability program called LIKES – Learning Innovative Key Employability Skills.
We moduled the course in a way that the students will acquire the essential qualities for being in the corporate world. The idea was to give the five vital elements of professionalism to enhance their skills like the Panchatatva theory of life.
In the past few months of recession, we continued our strategy of transforming the talents into skilled employees to bridge the gap between tremendous opportunity and employee candidates.”
Our idea was to get talents under our verticals (Marketing and IT), train them in accordance with the industrial standards and corporate necessities for two months with a stipend. After the completion of the said period, on the basis of their performance, we either hire them or get them hired. Our industrial expertise allows us to connect a wide range of networks.
Us as an HR management helped our motive of bridging the gap which turned to be beneficial for both individuals and organizations. The program resulted in developing a strong human resource system that was capable of bringing more productivity and it eventually worked out well increasing our turnover. We also expanded our team with more employees, proudly enough we hired people when others were downsizing.
We created a solution for a long-lost problem of unemployability for building us stronger than ever. Our revenue generation in turn was manifold because of the right decision taken.
How do you manage to keep going despite the challenges? What drives the team?
I personally believe that challenges make you stronger, wiser and lead to growth. Even though it’s a fact that when we figure an obstacle, naturally it becomes a struggle. But the power of being positive reflects in a different way creating a beautiful solution and it can even turn out to be a game-changing innovation.
Our team really gets motivated when there are challenges because it challenges their skills, capability, and even their individuality. So to prove themselves they rise up and that always leads to something beautiful.
Our program LIKES was first implemented in our own company and post COVID, while the world was downsizing, we were able to hire people. We took in freshers train them to be the professional that any job would require and it gave us tremendous results.
Besides our employability program was also implemented in our sister concerned companies FlexiCloud, a hosting company, which provides reliable cloud hosting services. The training was quite effective which resulted in our productivity.”
Our entire team is passionate about what they do and they always live up to my expectation. Our ambience is always positive and vibrant, we face problems together as one family and I guess that’s what makes us stronger. The trust in each other gives us immense energy to take any obstruction that comes across.
Please share with us about your expansion plans?
We always strive to make Ourea accessible where any company can rely on us to build their corporate /startup journey. We are also planning to expand our product division and our focus is to add more products to each of our verticals. We also are looking forward to creating a platform to support entrepreneurs, so as to help them to get their ideas implemented.
What has worked well for you so far?
Since we are a 360-degree company dealing with marketing, IT, HR, training, and interior verticals, we provide a one stop solution and that brings us a wide range of clientele. Besides, we have a great team of experts in their respective verticals and guide the juniors to bring out the best of them.
My partners, Vinod Chacko and Naman Modi are IT wizards who provide me a strong IT backup to balance every vertical with the technological side. We are quite focused and dedicated towards our job with a long-term vision of developing our enterprise into an international platform.”
One of our strong fortes is that we never give up on anything, we keep up our efforts till we succeed. This mantra has stood firm and stable without getting deteriorated at any point of our struggle keeping our spirits and hope high.
What is one strategy that you guys believe has helped you grow as a team/startup?
We always believed that any dream can be achieved as long as we have a perfect strategy and a resource to fulfil it. The experience I had gained from the corporate world and the associations gave me a better perspective of entrepreneurship.
As I failed a couple of times whilst establishing the venture, it taught the dos and don’ts that made us function more specific and focused. Mr Vinod, our IT Director has been the IT Mozart who always has an IT solution for everything that comes across which made the task less difficult.
Mr Naman and the rest of my crew are so hardworking and dedicated towards our organization that we developed our ecosystem with utmost passion and belief. We believe in our team. Together we stand still to achieve more and more.
In your opinion – what is more necessary: Idea or a good team for a successful startup?
At Ourea, we believe that ideas can be fabulous, but how practical and relevant matters, we always focus on the implementation part. Most of the startups perish, not because their ideas weren’t great but they fail the execution part which might be due to various reasons like lack of full-fledged knowledge or maybe due to lack of the right people who can implement the ideas and so on. The belief in execution is the most important.
Our firm’s key strength lies in its team as I call the strength of me is my pack and the strength of the pack is me. So I totally believe that just having a fantastic idea won’t make your startup. You need the right resources, the perfect way of implementation, and people who can foresee things. A startup to be successful needs a lot of ingredients right from an innovative approach to processing to final implementation with a blend of the team of experts to execute it.
What advice would you give students and young professionals who want to have a successful career?
Nothing is built in a day. We need a lot of perseverance, endurance, and commitment to reach our goals. Never ever give up on your dreams. Like Paulo Coehlo’s saying
“And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” So keep trying, stay focused, increase your knowledge, strengthen your network, build a great team, and besides all belief in yourself and your dreams.
Also, failure is always going to be a part of your life, you’ll keep failing and that becomes the major source of learning. Though it might seem to be a hard way, it is indeed the best way. Failure is the step towards success. So embrace your failures and learn from them.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
