Coming Into Her Own

DAYS BEFORE SETTING OFF FOR A SKI TRIP TO GULMARG, BHARAVI JANI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SCA GROUP OF COMPANIES SITS DOWN TO TALK ABOUT THE LOGISTICS OF HER CAREER.

When Bharaivi Jani, executive director, SCA Group interviewed a candidate for the position of account manager for her company, i3PL, a fourth-party logistics company, (which plans and controls all logistic procedures from procurement to production to distribution of goods and services) the applicant, after meeting Jani, refused the job. His reason? Jani was 21, the same age as his daughter and he simply couldn’t see himself working for someone so young. “The biggest problem I faced was being a woman and a young woman at that,” says Jani, 34, as she narrates this incident and others in which besides employees her clients too didn’t take her seriously at times, often referring to her as the “young, bubbly girl”. This may be one of the reasons why Jani is commited to starting initiatives which will bring young people to the forefront of business.

“I would like to spend a significant amount of time helping build entrepreneurial ecosystems in India. We have to convert our young people from job seekers to job givers,” says Jani. “Also, it’s high time we understand that women entrepreneurs are not a novelty and are here to stay,” she adds. As a fourth generation entrepreneur and the former national chairman of Confederation of Indian Industry’s ( CII) Young Indians division, Jani definitely has firsthand experience to share. Still in her early thirties, Jani has shouldered many responsibilities. Point this out to her and she says, “When I was about eight or nine-years-old, I was two minutes late for breakfast one morning. My father removed my plate from the table and said, ‘Young lady, you can’t be tardy. We’re in the busi-

MY FATHER MADE IT VERY CLEAR THAT BEFORE JOINING THE COMPANY I’D RUN MY OWN BUSINESS WHICH MEANT NO FINANCIAL SUPPORT FROM THE FAMILY. ONCE, I WAS EVEN LOCKED OUT FOR NOT PAYING THE OFFICE RENT IN TIME.

ness of time.’ Being born into a business family meant being groomed for life’s responsibilities from a young age.” Her father, Tushar Jani is former Chairman of logistics major Blue Dart (in late 2004 Global Express and logistics giant DHL acquired Blue Dart). Although, there was no pressure to join the family business, Jani says that her love for maths and statistics had played a deciding factor in what she would do with her life. “I wanted to study statistics and any field that would have its application and logistics is all about applied statistics. So I’ve never thought about any other career,” she explains. However, this wasn’t always the case.

“From the age of 10, my father asked me every three months what I wanted to become when I grew up. He would leave me in a room and I wasn’t allowed to come out until I had an answer,” she recalls with amusement. “If I’d said I wanted to become a scientist he would take me to meet someone at ISRO. If I said I wanted to become a neurosurgeon he would take me to meet a neurosurgeon,” she says. The day Jani said she wanted to be an astronaut her father took her to meet Neil Armstrong, who happened to be on a visit to India. “I think he was trying to teach me to look at the future seriously,” she adds.

But having spent her growing years at shipping ports and courier hubs, it was only a matter of time before Jani formally entered the business of logistics. After graduating magna cum laude from Miami University, Ohio, she joined

KPMG in Washington before returning to India in 2001. “Our family was very clear about how things work. First you are expected to graduate, then you work in another organisation, then start your own business and if you are able to run that successfully then you can apply for the family business,” explains Jani. On her return, Jani put all her efforts into setting up i3PL which eventually bagged clients like Mahindra & Mahindra and Airtel. According to Jani, her father was “very clear that I had to run the business as a first generation enterprise which meant no financial support from the family. I was given an office space for which they charged rent. Once, I was even locked out for not paying the rent on time.” In 2005, when Jani finally joined SCA Group, the company her great grandfather started in 1896, she’d already worked for a global corporate firm in a different country and got her own enterprise up and running. “Today my professional colleagues look at me not as someone who is there just because of her last name but because she has seven years of professional experience already to her credit,” Jani asserts.

While her father has influenced her career in a big way, Jani says it was her mother who introduced her to the world of music and art. Despite a busy schedule whenever she can manage time between two business meetings Jani says she likes to pop into a nearby art gallery. Clearly, she’s one person who’s learnt to master the art of work-life balance.