Amazon Smbhav celebrates Indian SMBs

The excitement of Amazon Smbhav was carried over to screens where the first episode of the series had NR Narayana Murthy Co-founder of Infosys and Kishore Biyani, Founder and CEO of Future Group giving small and medium business owners their tips for success

Amazon Smbhav 2020, a two-day mega summit saw 3000+ small and medium businesses, as well as micro-enterprises from across the country, interact closely with their peers, and rub shoulders with top-flight domain experts as well as India Inc, sharing learnings and insights on future trends. Smbhav also had industry leaders, solution providers and Amazon’s global leadership share their ideas on the various challenges facing SMBS, like logistics, payments, digitization, global trade etc.

NR Narayana Murthy, gave a riveting keynote speech. He said SMBs, which contribute 10% of the country’s business output, will play an “extremely important role” in taking India’s economy to the $5 trillion mark.. “To do that,” he said, “you have to create a differentiated business value proposition…better than any of your competitors.

Mr. Murthy advised SMBs to embrace discipline, hard work, good work ethics and good values.

Sharing lessons from his own entrepreneurial pursuits, he stressed on the importance of hiring the best people, building teams with collectively exhaustive but mutually exclusive skill sets, and inculcating durable value systems.

Kishore Biyani spoke about his journey as an SMB in India during a fireside chat. He recalled, “I started by supplying fabric to the garment industry. It was a journey of learning.” India’s heterogeneous market comes with its own set of challenges, Biyani said, which led to the setting up of offices across zones. This allowed the Future Group to scale up quickly.

Mr. Biyani explained, “We decentralized on day one, and that helped us understand the nuances of each market.” Advising the participating SMBs to not take failures to heart, Mr. Biyani added, “Today, failure doesn’t disappoint us because that’s the customer saying ‘you’ve not done well.’ Change yourself, or change the product.”

He said that the journey from small scale to large is the most interesting – he added, “Starting small is the most interesting thing because you’re doing everything (on) your own, handling every aspect. The sense of creation gives immense satisfaction. (Today’s) new age entrepreneurs are bubbling with new thoughts and ideas, and dreaming much larger.”