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Sourabh Sharma, IBS Mumbai (99), runs a Hindi daily newspaper in Rajasthan.  Majorly into Financial Research, Sourabh worked with J P Morgan in IB research before joining his family business.

ourabh got married to Kalpana in 2002, and is blessed with two kids; Vedant & Aditya. “My wife is a great Manager; be it managing money, home or giving the right set of values to our kids. I feel blessed.”

“IBS has been instrumental in shaping up a good career for me. The visiting faculty members provided me with a very realistic picture of the corporate world gave me the confidence to DREAM BIG and to be adventurous. The world seemed to be beaming with opportunity and the discussions always revolved around small businesses and their profit abilities; deciphering the business opportunity in common life all the time. The environment was perfect”

“Life at IBS was fun and lot of work. The faculty members and the case study based approach proved to be most useful. My SIP at HLL was a good experience, as for 4 months I was out in the field organizing a test market for HLL’s yet to be introduced Tea brand. The real life experience of going and meeting retailers proved really helpful. THE SIP provides a glimpse of things to come in corporate life.”
Just after IBS, Sourabh joined CRIS Infac (now part of CRISIL). That was the time of rise of dotcoms and Mckinsey & Co ran a contest where they selected top 100 ideas in the country and offered to mentor them. Sourabh along with 2 other friends were in the top 100 selected and started a portal focused on collecting consumer feedback on various products & services and providing the studies to corporates. That did not see much of light as the Internet bubble busted and the project was wrapped up.
 Sourabh then moved on to join an Equity Research firm and two years later joined J P Morgan in IB Research. “I was a part of the initial team of 11 in the research group. It was like having the best of both worlds. Since the group was newly formed, we had the independence in structuring the operating policies and we were provided with all the resources to develop the structure. Once the team grew to 200, the work became monotonous, That is when I took the decision of coming back home joining my family business.”  Along with the daily newspaper, Sourabh is also pursuing Organic farming & processing with his batch mate at IBS; Sidharth. Stock market investment & advisory services still continue to be a part of his work.
On changes in the economy in the last 5 years, this is what Sourabh has to say; “Now finding a job no more is a challenge; grabbing the right opportunity is. The big companies are getting into areas, which were earlier, necessarily the domain of small entrepreneurs. This has lead to a big social change and forced the small time businessman to innovate. It’s beautiful to see how these innovations work.

      The next big opportunity comes from nature. Big corporate are still gearing up and they will take time to move their management machinery on the issue. Niche farming (special variety), Organic farming to market (warehousing and testing laboratory offers big opportunity because of huge demand for quality resources & government’s big subsidy in this area), Rural tourism, solar energy applications for the poor (remember less than 50% of the rural India has a regular supply of electricity), water conservation and cleaning devices, air cleaning devices. Just remember the “panch tatva” mentioned in all our holy books – Water, Fire (energy), Air, Earth and Sky would be the focus in years to come. If you can’t enter these sectors, invest in the companies which are entering these segments (can’t keep the stock market away for too long).

In my newspaper business, I realized that the first big difference from corporate life is the number of people I have to deal with to run the company from newspaper hawker, supplier of different equipments & consumables, politicians, government officials, companies for advertisements, my own office staff, my correspondents in different districts, reports from other papers etc. And this interaction is a continuous process. Added to that there were no Saturdays or Sundays. The new work environment called for dealing with people from different fields and with different mindsets.