My experience founding & running an automotive start-up in Bangalore

While my customers are delighted with our service, I am no longer delighted being in this business. I believe it should work both ways.

BHPian sandeep.menon recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

Hi folks, this is Sandeep Menon, Founder at Wheels Wisdom. Team-BHP members have loved Wheels Wisdom since our early days. While they were obviously tough customers because they knew their cars well, they were also an extremely understanding and mature customer base that we were proud to have.

I think the forum will appreciate hearing directly from me on why I took a call to wind up operations when the going was so good. Wheels Wisdom became net profitable in Q3 of last year. That was the milestone I had been chasing since the last 9 years. Of building an Ethical and Profitable car servicing startup. With that goal achieved and out of the way, I now had to decide what I wanted to do next. Scale pan India? I decided against it, and chose to wind up and move on instead. Even though we became profitable and more funding was available, should we want it.

There are three primary reasons for this:

1. Low margins business: While we achieved our goal of becoming a net profitable company without ever compromising on Ethics and Customer Experience, the profit margins were very thin. With prices of vehicle component replacements commoditised, there is no way a company can charge higher for replacement of a spare part, even if the company delivered a consistently better customer experience. A clutch assembly is expected to cost the same, no matter how terribly or beautifully it is installed. We managed to beat this problem by requiring customers to pay a membership fee to avail our service. We had a brand that could command that value. Even with that, looking at projected profit margins from a potential pan India expansion, the returns did not look good enough for me to put in another decade of my life into this business. I still can, but I'm choosing not to.

2. Low tech business: While car manufacturing and design is high tech, service centers and car servicing in general remain a low tech business. After 9 years in the car servicing space, I was missing my previous professional bastion, information security, badly. I want to get back to something more high tech, and therefore exit car servicing.

3. Why not sell rather than wind up? As of this moment, I haven't been able to find a single company that can scale what we've built. Most companies in this space have already shut down, or are on that path. I spoke to most remaining players in the multi brand car servicing space. No one (I spoke to) has the appetite to buy a reputed brand like Wheels Wisdom, because they do not find our attention to detail either executable or scalable. It is incredibly tough to execute what we executed for even a year, leave alone for 9 long years. If there was someone who could actually scale what we've built, it was Wheels Wisdom. Because you not only need the capability, but also the conviction that your model is the right model. But then, I no longer have interest in this space. While my customers are delighted with our service, I am no longer delighted being in this business. I believe it should work both ways .

Someone once told me, you can take Sandeep out of the car, but you cannot take the car out of Sandeep. I think this is true for most of us on this forum. Cars were my first love, and chances are you will find me grinning behind some steering wheel in some part of the world on most weekends.

What next? I'm super excited to jump back into information security, and make a dent in that universe!

So long,

Sandeep

Read BHPian comments for more insights and information.