Coimbatore engineer who started on Rs 9,000 a month now runs Rs 8 crore kiosk firm

Shashi Dharan, a 34-year-old resident of Coimbatore, started his business in 2020 from a small 1,000 sq ft basement. Today his company, Kovai Kiosk, has a turnover of Rs 8 crore.

Dharan studied mechanical engineering and began his career on a salary of just Rs 9,000. His pay rose with experience and reached Rs 60,000, but he did not stop there because he wanted to start his own business.

For starting capital, Dharan invested Rs 2 lakh from his savings and took a Rs 4 lakh loan under the government's PMEGP (Prime Minister's Employment Generation Programme) scheme. The government scheme helped him a great deal on the way. For the first year and a half, his wife Dhanu, who worked at an IT company, met the company's expenses and the employees' salaries from her own pay. The two laid the foundation of the company by supporting each other.

In the beginning, Dharan made only kitchen equipment for restaurants and hotels. In 2022, a customer placed an order with him for a fish fry stall worth Rs 1.8 lakh. The product became so popular that many similar orders followed, and these orders completely changed his fortunes. The company recently completed a large kiosk project worth Rs 60 lakh.

The business, where only two people worked at the start, now has 100 employees. What began in the basement of a house has grown into an 80,000 sq ft factory. The company makes small food stalls, large commercial buildings, kitchen equipment and modern capsule houses. Kovai Kiosk now also makes portable capsule houses. These can easily be moved from one place to another and are becoming a new trend for resorts and gardens.

Sixty per cent of the company's revenue comes from kiosks, 20 per cent from kitchenware and 20 per cent from capsule houses. Large companies such as Wonderla, JSW Steel and HCL are among its customers.

Dharan believes success in business does not come overnight, but comes one day if one works hard. He advises new entrepreneurs to be ready for hard work and struggle for the first five to six years. According to him, the struggle never ends, only its nature changes, so one should be patient and keep working.