CEL, BITS Pilani

My love for building a business on my own was something that was unidentified until I stepped into one of the finest universities in the countries - Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. I was an average, under confident student for the majority of my life - scared to make a noise. All of that changed when I stepped into the campus. I think it was as good as any of the cringe coming of the age movies. On the first day of our orientation. The Profs were trying to explain us the grading system, they spoke about how A is 10 points, A- being 9 and so on, until they said D is 4 and E is 2. Now for anyone, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I was stumped, I looked around hoping to see someone wondering about why there is no 3 (D-) but no one did. At that moment, I realised that I have an itch, and the itch made me get up on stage and ask the whole admin panel of BITS Pilani, in front of atleast a 1000 students and their parents as to why there was no 3 in the grading system. The whole auditorium burst into laughter (if you are from the 2016 batch, Pilani Campus wondering who that idiot was, here you go). Long story short, that’s how I started my college life. Life pretty much resumed to normal after that very 3-idiots moment. Until in the mid of second semester I came across Bedrock. It’s a competition organised by CEL, BITS Pilani to promote entrepreneurship. It’s a flagship event part of E-week. You get to participate in this in teams of 5 and run a restaurant in Cnot market - everything from serving, kitchen ops to marketing all done by your team. As a qualifier you have to sit for a test - which has an acceptance rate of less than 0.5%  Of course we failed that test. That too, by a thin margin. That always hurts the worst. But luckily, for our batch they introduced a wildcard entry which allowed the team to get in by getting maximum amount of likes on a poster in 8 hours. Ayush, Mayank, Mohit, HARSHIEL and I geared up for an all nighter of reaching out to everyone in our network and we finally got in! The was just the beginning, the second part was an auction. There were only two naive first year teams out of the top 9 and we were one of them. We bid for our restaurant at one of the highest prices, 90k. It’s called Kamal’s. While one team got a restaurant for 20k. To win Bedrock you need the highest profits, which felt like a far off dream now. (Luckily, Bedrock is also the reason why I understood the value of running EBITDA positive business :P ) Since we had bought our bid at very high cost. We had to get more sales. We got Lazeez(a restaurant outside campus) to partner with us. We pulled in to give it our all. And although we did not end up winning the competition, we got the highest sales, maximum number of orders that Kamal’s had seen till date and became undisputed champions of the campus. That one competition was impetus enough to make me question what I want to do in life. #entrepreneurship #love #sales #team