Serving hospitality

Arup Jyoti Gogoi 

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Having previously worked with organisations such as Barings Private Equity, McKinsey & Company etc., Delhi-based Aditi Balbir had acquired extensive hands-on experience in management and business leadership before venturing into entrepreneurship and founding V Resorts in 2011. It was her model of asset light hospitality company that has made this ISB Hyderabad, alumnus a job creator from a job seeker.

Starting from a small team of three, Aditi’s venture has now grown to a team of 755, out of which 55 are working in the corporate office, while rest are employed in resorts located across the country. This is her first venture outside of finance, which has seen two successive rounds of funding raised from known VC investors such as Bedrock & Seedfund. V Resorts is creating jobs for local people where it has its presence. For their sustainable tourism efforts of establishing new destinations in India with local community engagement, the venture was recognized and awarded by the UNTWO recently.

From job seeker to 

job creator

Becoming a job creator is joyful and at the same time quite challenging. When you become a job creator, your take towards work changes in a big way. You have to look at many aspects of your organisation —  from business development, team management, managing capital and many more. 

The genesis

The idea of venturing into the world of entrepreneurship came while I was working in Bedrock Ventures. Many people in India build weekend homes and hotels in offbeat locations thinking they’d spend at least one-two months in these homes. But things usually don’t turn out that way. These houses and hotels lie in the hands of caretakers and are kind of mismanaged. The idea was to take over these resorts and manage them. Bedrock ventures decided to invest in the idea and operations started in the year 2011. I had also put in some of my own money into the venture.

The journey so far

Since the beginning of its journey in 2011, V Resorts has successfully expanded to various offbeat locations across the country. It started with one property and now has 55 properties across the country. It has raised $ 5 million of fund so far for this venture. “We are targeting customers who are looking for a comfortable stay but something offbeat is higher on their priority. We manage our call centre in-house and our internal tech team handles the technology-related requirements. 

Future plans

We want to scale up our operation across the country and abroad. We are working towards increasing the number of resorts to 5,000 by 2020. This expansion is targeted towards covering many other countries apart from India. We are targeting 100 properties from 55 properties by the end of this year. We will be adding more sales and marketing professionals to scale up our offline marketing activities.        

Motivating others

If you are looking to starting up on your own based on your new idea, you should always know about the viability of the idea. There is no dearth of ideas, but viability is what matters. Entrepreneurs should not focus on attracting funding only, they should focus more on creating values in society.