VIA Lady Entrepreneurs’ Wing conducted a Webinar on “FOOD CRAFT – Enhancing Entrepreneurship in Food Industryâ€, recently with the guest speaker Vishnu Manohar, world record holder and the most admired chief of central India under the able chairmanship of Manisha Bawankar, Chairperson of VIA LEW.
Manisha Bawankar gave the opening remarks and welcomed the guests on the e-session with New Year’s greetings. The Chairperson, in her address, said that Vishnu Manohar started his journey from a small food catering business and now is taking a leap towards being a Michelin star restaurant, this would be the first vegetarian restaurant. This secession would be followed by the NSIC scheme for women entrepreneurs, which acts as a catalyst to promote and develop micro and small scale industries and enterprises in our country, by two Officers from NSIC.
Reeta Lanjewar, Past Chairperson introduces Vishnu Manohar, a highly distinguished and well known eminent personality, a gourmet chef, who has many world records in his name, recipient of many national and international awards, author of 52 books, a trained commercial artist, a regular columnist and Director of Manohar Hospitality Pvt Ltd, and a very successful businessman.
Vishnu Manohar in a very interesting interactive session gave answers to questions related to his profession covering all the areas. He started with how he entered the catering business at the age of 16 years and worked for a decoration concern where he met with a caterer and was amused. How he learned the technique of cooking by observing the number of cooks preparing the food.
He said he fancied being an actor and to act in the films and to pursue his dream he started live cookery shows on the UCN, in 1996 he worked with Doordarshan then he did his first-ever national cookery show on ETV having 4500 episodes and 4000 live shows thereafter. He started a master recipes series with a YouTube channel and is having 7 lakhs viewership.
At live shows, the audience used to ask for books when he realized that books will serve the purpose even after him and certainly the audience would be benefited by reading them. So he wrote 52 books on cookery.
His success mantra is that he is a fighter and never accepts defeat and he gave an example of how he was unsuccessful in three ventures before tasting success in his fourth venture ‘Vishuji ki Rasoi’, wherein he constructed his hotel in a filmy way having a cottage and Dhaba serving Punjabi and Maharashtrian food and celebrating many major Indian festivals. He was happy to inform about his 3 internationals outlets in the USA. You have to be a big-hearted person to be successful in this field he said and be generous to know the need of people working with you and said that every person should be part of the growth and cited an example where he said he has people working with him for three generations. He further added that for maintaining consistency in taste he made videos and said that experience automatically checks the theft in any, in the system.
For retaining the customers he opined that we must be good to all, never argue and accept all your faults. You have to sustain to have success as success doesn’t come easy. He said you have to extend freebies and good services to manage the customers.
On starting up a new venture he said that any person who wants to start the business should approach the corporation and get himself registered and also avail all the government facilities.
On education he laid emphasis on acquiring knowledge through education in the field of food industry for taking up good jobs. However, he opined no specific degree is required for starting a new business. On costing of the products he said economics of scales matters and cost should be based on the fair market value. He further added that Packaging plays a very vital role in marketing the products and there are many companies whom you can approach to get your product packed in a decent manner.
He also touched upon various factors of business like Inventory management which is done systematically on computers with less manual involvement, manpower handling and consistency in taste etc. He emphasized on building Clusters so as to make the growth holistic. At the end he expressed his future course of action of starting live cookery classes which will benefit all the gourmets. On the records that he has in his name, he gave credits to the entire team efforts and said it is not an individual activity. A large number of lady entrepreneurs were immensely benefited by the sermon of Vishnu Manohar.
Later in the programme on what help is available from the Government to the entrepreneurs, P Kumar, Chief General Manager of NSIC, Mumbai was invited to deliberate upon the same. He threw light on various schemes like Standup India for Women Entrepreneurs CGTMS scheme and collateral free loan, Mudra Yojana, Annapurna Schemes, Udyogni Scheme, MSME schemes to benefit the entrepreneurs. Thereafter, Kamal Lochan Nayak, Senior Branch Manager of NSIC, described all the schemes in detail which will act like guiding principles to the entrepreneurs.
Reeta Lanjewar and Poonam Lala conducted the program in a grand manner. Prominently present were VIA EC members, VIA LEW Advisory Members – Prafullata Rode & Madhubala Singh; Immediate Past Chairperson – Reeta Lanjewar; Past Chairpersons – Saeeda Haque, Chitra Parate, Y. Ramani, Neelam Bowade, Anjali Gupta, Anita Rao, Vandana Sharma and Shachi Mallick; Vice Chairperson – Indu Kshirsagar; Treasurer – Rashmi Kulkarni; PRO – Yogita Deshmukh, EC Member Poonam Gupta, included in 75 plus participants and a large number on facebook live. Poonam Lala, Secretary, VIA LEW proposed vote of thanks.