Mum­bai-based ed­u­ca­tion ac­tivism body EduSikh, sup­ported by Singh Sabha Mum­bai launched its new ini­tia­tive -RISE – Reignit­ing Sikh En­tre­pre­neur­ship.  At­tended by Sikh busi­ness­men, pro­fes­sion­als and en­tre­pre­neurs at the pres­ti­gious Khalsa Col­lege Mum­bai, the meet wit­nessed em­i­nent en­tre­pre­neurs shar­ing their ex­pe­ri­ences and promis­ing to men­tor star­tups and ex­ist­ing busi­nesses. A WSN re­port.

RISEReignit­ing Sikh En­tre­pre­neur­ship is a se­ri­ous en­deav­our to re­ju­ve­nate the tra­di­tional en­tre­pre­neur­ial spark amongst the Sikhs and make them leap for­ward through mod­ern-day com­pe­ti­tion. Men­tor­ing Sikh en­tre­pre­neurs and mak­ing them fu­ture-ready, coach­ing them to scale up their busi­nesses and im­part­ing skills to lever­age net­works is go­ing to be our forte, as the pro­gram will serve as a link be­tween as­pi­rants and men­tors.

Speak­ing on the phone line to the World Sikh News Paramjeet Singh, the founder of EduSikh said, “RISE will ac­tively en­gage busi­ness men­tors, and sub­ject mat­ter ex­perts to guide Sikh-pro­moted ex­ist­ing busi­nesses, FMBs and Start-ups. One-on-one guid­ance on set­ting up and scal­ing up busi­ness, Group work­shops, Sem­i­nars with lead­ing in­dus­tri­al­ists, cre­at­ing a strong net­work and find­ing so­lu­tions to press­ing busi­ness is­sues will be our reg­u­lar tools to achieve our tar­get.

Speak­ing at the sem­i­nar in Khalsa Col­lege, Mum­bai, Paramjeet Singh urged the at­ten­dees not to shy of ac­knowl­edg­ing their prob­lems and be ready to seek help.

“Men­tors can guide from an out­side per­spec­tive and this pro­vides de­tails which one gen­er­ally misses.”

Speak­ing on the Qual­i­ties of En­tre­pre­neurs, pri­vate eq­uity pro­fes­sional and a prin­ci­pal with the US$2BN spe­cial sit­u­a­tions fund, Biren­der Sa­hani said he started his ca­reer in 2001 and had more than 2 decades of ex­pe­ri­ence in In­vest­ing and Fi­nan­cial ser­vices, hav­ing worked with com­pa­nies such as EY, JP­Mor­gan (In­dia and US), and Col­liers In­ter­na­tional. His ar­eas of ex­per­tise com­prised Cor­po­rate Fi­nance, Fi­nan­cial Mod­el­ling and Ac­count­ing. He shared how he ex­per­i­mented, and made mis­takes but with a lot of per­sis­tence and guid­ance from men­tors, man­aged to sur­vive and grow.

A char­tered ac­coun­tant by pro­fes­sion, well-rec­og­nized for ex­cel­lence in the field of fi­nance, Harvin­der­jit Singh Bha­tia, an alum­nus of Co­lum­bia Busi­ness School, CEO and Co-founder of Ra­diowala- In­di­a’s largest B2B smart-tech plat­form cater­ing to in-store ra­dio net­work and cu­rat­ing cus­tomized ra­dio chan­nels for the re­tail in­dus­try spoke on the im­por­tance of “Iden­ti­fy­ing and fil­ter­ing busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties.”

Sar­dar Bha­tia shared how he joined Ra­dio Mirchi as CFO and how the ex­pe­ri­ence of set­ting it up from scratch helped him till the en­tre­pre­neur­ial bug bit him and he started his first en­ter­prise and is now a founder of two more suc­cess­ful en­ter­prises, namely Sochcast and Frenzi.

Counted amongst the top CEOs and busi­ness coaches in the coun­try, re­cip­i­ent of the Golden Pea­cock Award for cor­po­rate lead­er­ship at the global level, a suc­cess­ful Global L & D and Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Strate­gist and cur­rently as­so­ci­ated with ‘Prac­tic­ing Leader for Lead­er­ship De­vel­op­ment’, and ‘Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives’ with In­di­a’s largest multi­na­tional cor­po­rates, Dr. Jag­mo­han Singh, in his very lu­cid style spoke on How to scale UP and Chal­lenge the Sta­tus Quo. He ex­plained the salient fea­tures and pain points that en­tre­pre­neurs face while scal­ing up.

The fi­nale of the evening was an in­ter­est­ing panel dis­cus­sion be­tween Golden Pre­ci­sion Prod­ucts -In­di­a’s lead­ing man­u­fac­turer and ex­porter of clutch plates for the last four decades, CEO Har­min­dar Singh and young and dy­namic founder of Singh Styled -In­di­a’s first groom­ing com­pany for Sikhs. Mod­er­ated by Imag­i­neer, En­tre­pre­neur, Evan­ge­list, and Lead­er­ship Coach and co-founder of a gam­i­fied con­sumer tech plat­form YON­OMY Manak Singh, both en­tre­pre­neurs spoke about their jour­ney so far and the lessons learned.  The au­di­ence was amazed at their high level of in­volve­ment in re­search and in cre­at­ing world-class prod­ucts.

Suk­bir Singh and Rishi­raj Sethi, the men­tors from EduSikh Team an­swered the queries of the par­tic­i­pants who ap­pre­ci­ated the ini­tia­tive and were keen to know how they could ben­e­fit.

Since the last many years, EduSikh is en­gaged in the holis­tic ed­u­ca­tion of Sikh chil­dren across In­dia and in con­duct­ing com­mu­nity ini­tia­tives through sem­i­nars and on­line we­bi­nars. Mak­ing it eas­ier for the unini­ti­ated, the body con­ducts meet­ings on Un­der­stand­ing the MSME sec­tor, Im­por­tance of Wills and other al­lied top­ics.  Do­ing all this, the pi­o­neers also en­gage in pro­mo­tion of the Pun­jabi lan­guage through Maboli Olympiads and pro­mo­tion of Pun­jabi lit­er­a­ture.

Hosted by lead­ing ed­u­ca­tion­ist and a suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neur in his own right, who cre­ated IMFS -which spe­cial­izes in men­tor­ing stu­dents who wish to study abroad -K. P. Singh, the pro­gram was at­tended by em­i­nent per­son­al­i­ties in­clud­ing Kul­want Singh, Vice-Pres­i­dent, Sri Guru Singh Sabha, Ajit Singh Dhin­gra, Ex­ec­u­tive Chair­man, Pru­dent In­sur­ance Bro­kers, In­der­jeet Singh Matta, Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­ogy, IBM, Gur­preet S Up­pal, Founder, 7Par­al­lels Techno Con­sul­tants, Gurvin­der Singh Wasan and Cap­tain Surinder Singh Sethi, con­clud­ing with ap­pre­ci­a­tion and call for fu­ture sup­port from Singh Sabha Mum­bai Pres­i­dent Man­mo­han Singh.