|
Sometimes tragedies can spur success stories. This is definitely the case
with Ashwani Sharma. When the company he was employed with, PCL, suddenly shut
down in 1997, his life was thrown out of gear. After five and a half years of
working for PCL, he found it hard to come to terms with the fact that he was
left without employment overnight.
After this disheartening blow, he received some lucrative offer multinational
companies like IBM, but these were not in line with his domain expertise.
Finally, he decided that rather than wait around for the perfect job, he would
go ahead and start his own company. This was how Ace Infotech Systems was born
in 1997.
Struggler's strife
In the first six month after losing his job, Sharma was in financial
doldrums. In this circumstance, one of his colleagues came as a ray of hope to
him and Sharma decided to join hands with him to venture into IT business.
The first major project that Sharma grabbed was from HP State Electricity
Board that gave him the opportunity to prove his potential and regain his lost
position.
“It was my mantra to maintain a healthy and trust-worthy relationship with
customers that repaid me in the bad phase of my life. It actually helped to
gradually have a consistent business in the market,” Sharma recollects.
Today, Ace Infotech offers a wide range of IT products and solutions to
Himachal Pradesh, and has grabbed leading projects for various government bodies
in the state. It shares a long and trusted relationship with HP, Acer and
D-Link.
Starting a business with just two people (he and his partner), his company
today has 25 people under his umbrella. It provides services and sales support
to educational institutes, government houses and other clients in the state.
Sharma has always taken the struggling period as a learning opportunity, and
it has inspired him to work harder and maintain his self-confidence in all
phases of life. His positive energy and technical knowledge empowered him to
take all the challenges in life with high spirits and he never let himself down
at any stage.
 |
| Ashwani Sharma,
Ace Infotech Systems, Shimla: Turning failures into success in real and
business life |
Potential unearthed
Before starting his own business, Sharma accumulated 17 years of working
experience that provided him lot of knowledge and confidence to lead in new
business. He soon won the trust of the vendors, and his technical skills gave
him immense exposure to provide top-class service and solutions to the
customers.
Since the beginning of his business, his foremost objective was to become the
king of Himachal Pradesh's channel business. He claims that he has been able to
achieve 98 percent of his target, as he has got acknowledgeable command over the
entire state.
Sharma always follows his strategy to aim for customer satisfaction. He
believes that it is customers who are the best judges for any business. Their
feedback to others can play a major role for any company to gain or lose
business, and therefore for every deal, the only aspect he keeps in his mind is
to provide complete satisfaction to the customers.
His attitude won him deep trust and ratification from the vendor. In the
business life, one achievement that Sharma does not forget to count is having
developed a strong relationship with people from higher authority like
bureaucrats and NGOs in Himachal Pradesh.
In his two decade long tenure in the IT business, Sharma has seen the channel
business going through a lot of evolution. The technical domain has changed a
lot and channel has to really keep them updated round-the-clock to face the
competition.
Sharma completed his education in Ambala and got married in 1986. He
considers his wife to be the source of all his inspiration and success. His son
who is pursuing BTech is also getting ready to step into his father's shoes. But
Sharma insists that he ought to have a working experience of at least 10 years
before he plunges into any business of his own.
Out of the box
Sharma is a homely person and spends his leisure time in chatting with his
wife and parents at home. He loves nature and owns a home at Junga, a serene
place that is 20 km from Shimla, and often goes there with family on weekends.
He believes in spending life with full enjoyment and wishes to spend his life
after retirement only with his family.
But don't take his staid current existence at face value. He has done some
very adventurous activities in his youth. He recalls that once, he along with
his friends went for biking at Khardung La, a mountain pass located in the
Ladakh region that is the highest motorable road of the world. And that was not
all. He even fell into a river while on the way and was finally rescued by a
group of Australian tourists.
Well, it only goes to show that taking risks is sometimes embedded in some
people's DNA!
AMRITA TEJASVI
amritat@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
| 
