We all are familiar with the word entrepreneur. We know what it means and what they do. But one understands the depths of this word when he has felt that pressure of taking risk and betting against all odds. Mr Krishna Ramamurthy is no stranger to such challenging situations. When he started his company, potential genesis,he did not invest in financial resources, rather gotgood Return on Investment by investing his intellectual capital. The foundation was set way back in 2005 when Mr Krishna decided to almost quit his job and pursue his own venture, but instead, he was asked to continue his job and work as an independent consultant by his mentor & coach Mr Anders Bech. Krishna acknowledges his today’s success due to Mr Andres Bech.

Mr Krishna has completed his degree in commerce and after that he has numerous degrees in the field of people and organisation development. Even after graduating and getting a job he kept aggregating knowledge for a bigger leap later in his career. To name a few accolades, he has post graduate diploma in personnel management and industrial relations from madras school of social work, diploma in training and development from Indian society for training and development (ISTD), master’s degree in labour management and Master of Philosophy in labour management. He also completed his executive masters in neuroscience from neuro leadership institute and Global Professional in Human Resource Development from HRCI. During this period, he also got certified in number of psychometry and assessment tools. He also furthered his specialization in Executive Coaching from different International Bodies and in particular – International Coach Federation (ICF). It is Important to state that Krishna also became an Accredited Executive Coach with Association of Executive Professional Coaching and Supervision (APECS, UK) and remains to be the only person to be admitted to this body from India till date).

A key differentiator about Krishna is, he kept his personal development through education and Training going through all those years without hesitation. From 1985, when he started working, right till 2015.It was work, professional development, personal development and studies in parallel.

Starting-up

He is born and brought up in Chennai, up until 2015 he was working with different organisations, but the last assignment that he had was with the multinational as Vice-president, Head of Human resources, safety and CSR and part of the Global People and Organisation Development Team. In that organisation he had the opportunity to work closely with CEO and in 2005, he wanted to resign from that company and start his own company, but the CEO suggested to him to stay on and keep doing the work like an independent consultant would and this journey went on till 2015. In 2015 Krishna decided to start his own dream venture, Potential Genesis. He primarily focused on people development and organisation development and from there on he started this organisation with no revenue& No customer to Medium revenue and strong customer base.

Potential Genesis

On an overall note, the work potential genesis does is people and organisation development. Within that they work with organisations to deliver training programs, behavioural training programs, and leadership training programs. On the other wing, they also work on executive coaching, a space where they work with people one on one or a team coaching. There can be exceptions when they work with organisations for recruiting purposes and conducting various surveys- Stay in Survey, Assessment centres, HR Staff mentoring etc. They have developed a unique product called DEEP – Development, Engagement and Enrichment of productivity. DEEP helps organisation to transfer the engagement and enrichment responsibility to the individual employee by perpetual awareness and self-directed action frame work. The model is based on the research of neuroscience.

In gist the model helps individual to constantly assess and take action about his work engagement and enrichment.It helps Organisation to be proactive in their approach to people development. – A significant need of the industry today!

Potential Genesis is also affiliated with International Coach Federation (https://coachfederation.org/) to offer Coach Certification Training. Till date they have certified close to 90 people as practicing Coaches in India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and USA.

http://www.potentialgenesis.com/.

Presently they are engaged in forming a Practicing Coach Community to help individual and organisation to maximize their potential. They are creating a wave in this space already!

Initial Challenges

He observed during this transformation that it is very different from being an employee to running his own organisation. Especially the change is when you are an employee, you are just working on one function but when you are running an organisation you must work on Customer base, product development, product positioning, finances, sales, risk of expansion.

Also, it is important when you are going for an expansion you need to have a plan B in case the expansion fails, it is very important to quickly turnaround from the failure and keep doing what you have been doing so far. Changing products and changing markets are also one of the major challenges, also another challenge is training people who work with you and upskill them for the product you are building and take customer into the mix.

Hiring the right people for this industry is one of the major challenges, as money is not enough to bring around people to engage in this industry. Working with higher level executives to freelancers it is very difficult to scale up and down. Fluctuations in levels of Training and induction is one of the major challenges. On an overall note, managing people and managing finances are the real challenges.

Current work trends

Potential genesis is currently looking to develop digitalized platform for coaching. They are also thriving to become more reliable, affordable, respectable people development and training service provider.

Accomplishments

• Starting from no customers to building a customer base that is retained over the span of last 5 years
• Customer satisfaction rate of 85-90 %
• “Top 10 best people development service provider” featured in Business connect in 2019
• “Top 20 business service provider” by Silicon magazine in 2018
• Most sought after People Development Service Provider.

Customer acquisition and retention strategy

“I think simple way of retaining customers is building relationship and be very genuine about your relationship that you build” – Mr Krishna Ramamurthy, CEO – Potential genesis

They like to keep it simple, they don’t do aggressive marketing, they believe in Pull approach then a push approach!

But mainly they are approached by the customer because of the flexibility, humility and lastly expertise that they possess.

Any customer remains retained because of the service he has been getting from his provider and people at potential genesis surely keep this thought in high standards. They work very closely with clients to understand their requirements and tailoring their product to client’s requirements.

Reason to become an entrepreneur and a word to fellow entrepreneurs

When asked as to what was the reason Mr Krishna chose to become an entrepreneur, he had this to say “I wanted to go out in the market and experience different industries, meet new people and expose myself to latest market. While working in an organisation use of your knowledge is pretty much confined, but when you really expose yourself to different clients and different customers, you will be stretched to use your expertise and knowledge that really keeps you on the learning agility and it also keeps you hardworking. Finally it helps to check the worth of your professional experience you have accumulated over many years.”

Further he had a very inspiring thought to share with his budding entrepreneurs, “The key words are, being very honest, very sincere, be a product expertise, work with engagement, work with deep level of commitment, passion and put interests of your customers above yours and then I think rest would happen. And it takes hard work because it takes continuous upgrade on your technical as well as business knowledge”.

Krishna closed our interview by saying “We Think Radically and Deliver with practicality at Potential Genesis”.