Do you know the ratio of success?
According to Dr Juzer Haideri, the CEO of NENCO – National Engineering Company, in today’s ever-changing enterprising scenario, “Please remember the ratio of success occurring between ‘Hard Work’ and ‘Luck’ is 70:30.” He furthers that it is very important for a modern age CEO is to know the maxim: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap!” And this is nature’s law. If you sow onions, you cannot expect apples to grow. But the most important is to understand that sowing always precedes reaping. You need to give little before you can get back bountiful. So do not expect to get something before you have given your bit.
Also, remember that the reward of what you will get will have a manifold multiplying factor because when you sow a seed, you do not reap a grain. Your harvest is multiple times more than that.
Dr Haideri spoke in an interview with Insights Success, the highlights of which are given ahead.
Please tell us about the saga of your leadership from the beginning and how you have made NENCO excel in its niche.
As a young student, I hoped to become an entrepreneur and start a manufacturing company. Time flew by, and there was so much to do. One lifetime was insufficient. I was dreaming with my eyes open, racing with numerous business ideas.
It was 1981, and the desire to start a business was strong. Plastics were quite popular at the time, and innovative substitution of complex parts in plastic presented a good opportunity. As a young student, I casually submitted a self-made project report on the plastic industry to the ‘District Industries Centre’ and, surprisingly, received a letter that the project was approved and industrial land was allotted in Pune’s premier industrial belt ‘Bhosari’.
Amidst serious financial difficulties, the factory building was built. From day one, I carried out deep global research into transmission couplings spending hours and days together in the Chamber of Commerce library and observed the potential was quite interesting. Being an OE product, the toughest job was to develop the technology and win the first customer. There are no ‘good products’ or ‘bad products’. I took the so-called bad idea and tried to fix it, for it is for us to ‘make or break’ an idea. People make companies successful; companies do not make people successful.
It took us over a year and countless calls until the first OEM agreed to purchase our coupling. And the rest is now history.
Please brief our audience about your firm, its USPs, and how you are currently positioned as one of the best product/service/solution providers.
NENCO, an ISO-9001-certified company, was established in 1985 with a specialization in designing, manufacturing and marketing a wide range of shaft couplings, servo couplings, miniature encoder couplings, frictional shaft hub connections, shrink discs and allied power transmission products that connect two rotating shafts.
Continuous research and development documented through several patents and in-house test facilities have allowed us to develop a wide range of products to transmit torque right from a minuscule 1 Nm to a gigantic 1000 KNm for applications ranging with machine tools, test benches, packaging, automation, defence, robotics, earthmoving, material handling, food processing, paper, steel, cement, nuclear and energy to name a few.
As an experienced leader, share your opinion on how adopting modern technologies like AI and ML impacts your industry and how your firm adapts to the change.
Nenco, with its innovative team, was a pioneer in the field, designing an ‘intelligent coupling’ for 50000 Nm torque almost some 20 years back for a critical test bench application where a torque measurement transducer was integrated inside a mechanical coupling to transmit contactless data like speed and torque that helped our customer control motion and torque through PLC. In contrast, the mechanical coupling performed torque transmission functions and accommodated misalignments between the shafts. We have now expanded on this program with our Mezurdisc series of couplings.
Artificial intelligence, especially ML, is becoming an important tool in mechanical engineering due to its power to predict material properties and discover new mechanisms beyond intuitions.
AI in Industry 4.0. integrates numerous technologies that enable software and machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn human operations. The industrial production system can be more efficient using this technology.
Considering the current industry scenario, what challenges do you face, and how do you drive your firm to overcome them?
The biggest challenge today faced by most innovative companies is to find ‘world-class salespeople’; an even bigger challenge is retaining them.
You need to have a keen understanding of the attributes of world-class salespeople. Measure your salespeople with the traits they demonstrate, ensuring they have: a positive attitude, are continually prospecting, and are sales-driven. They must be trained to value their sales calls, and prospecting must be their obsession. They must never stop.
It may sound simple, but how do you objectively measure these attributes? Unfortunately, there is no magical formula! What’s important is to take action to move your team into the 20 per cent zone and watch your sales soar.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into your space?
To every budding entrepreneur who aspires to venture into the engineering solution space, one can only say that ‘entrepreneurship’ is synonymous with ‘problem-solving’, and in doing so: Always look at the ‘silver lining’ and not the ‘cloud.’
To be successful in your venture, all entrepreneurs need to take calculated risks because ‘the biggest risk is to take no risk.’ So take reasonable risks, but do not gamble.
Perceive and interpret the world differently from the rest. And see the glass as full even when everyone sees it as half empty! So make the constraints work for you and adapt to changing environments by improvising solutions to challenges.
How do you envision scaling your firm’s operations and offerings?
Our nation’s father, Mahatma Gandhiji, said, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.” In other words, change is the ‘What’, and transition is the ‘How’. It is the most important parameter that differentiates between the once highly successful enterprises like Kodak, Blackberry, and the then flourishing traditional Swiss mechanical watchmakers, all of whom have today disappeared, and the innovative modern-day enterprises like Google, 3M, and Mayr who have built a culture of innovation.
Nenco has received several awards and accolades throughout its journey since 1985, including the Mayr award for “Best Global Partner”, “Mayr Overseas Sales Organization of the Year,” and also other awards “Leaders of Tomorrow” by Ernst and Young, and ‘Most innovative Test Bench’, by Forbes, amongst others.
To sum it up, whether in life or on machines, ‘good connections count.’ And we develop connecting technologies through innovation.
