From Aspiring Pilot to Renowned Entrepreneur

Praveen Vijh : 0:00

There was a burning desire inside me. I remember this feeling that there was nothing that was going to be able to stop me from working for myself. Clients other customers of ours were bringing in nuts and dried fruits. I thought we have access to all of this product. He was a production engineer, so I thought that he is somebody who actually knows how to make these things. I knew how to design it. He knew how to make it, so it was a perfect combination. Started selling, but it was a consumer driven or a customer driven product and this was something that we knew from the beginning wasn't just to be sold in health food stores. It wasn't just to be sold in newsagents.

‍Praveen Vijh : 0:31

It we knew from the beginning that this product that we've created needed to be everywhere.

Amardeep Parmar: 0:41

This is Praveen Vijh's story of how he built his company over 25 years, bootstrapped and sold it to Ferrero. Praveen's got a great story that's different to many of the ones we share, because he built his company up slowly over time, reinvesting his profits and many of you might have seen his bars in Tesco, in Sainsbury's, in shops all across the world, in over 40 countries and he built the revenue to the tens of millions before being acquired. And we'll see what's life like on the other side After Praveen worked so hard, built this company he was so proud of, and now he's able to do in the life after acquisition and after he's exited. This is an episode you don't want to miss.

Amardeep Parmar: 1:18

I'm Amar from the BAE HQ, and this podcast is powered by HSBC Innovation Banking. So great to have you here today, Praveen, and I've actually eaten thousands of e-natural bars myself, I think, over time, but I'd love to see where this journey started from. Like when you were a kid, what did you want to be? Did you have any idea one day you'd be doing what you do?

Praveen Vijh : 1:38

Gosh? No, of course. I always grew up from the age of five. I wanted to start e-natural. No, of course not.

Praveen Vijh : 1:47

I mean, I think the earliest memory that I have of wanting to do anything or be anything was um at gcse level. I wanted to be a pilot, but I told my chemistry teacher about it, who, of course, just laughed at me. Firstly he said you can't see anything because I was wearing glasses at that time. And he said and he was quite I. I just remember his reaction being that you know, you're never going to be able to make it. And I think since that time that's actually been such, it was such an important thing. It's so important.

Praveen Vijh : 2:16

I mean, I've had many failures in my life and I'm quite proud of them. Now, you know, I'm very proud of it. That's something which kind of sets you up for failure. It just sets you up to say, well, you're not good enough, you can't really do it, and in these ways it makes you work harder, it makes you want to do that more. And later on, when I actually said I want to run a business, my cousin said the same thing to me. He said, well, you're, I want to, I want to tackle business in a different way, not the way that my cousin or my or my friends or people who have these slightly more cutthroat type businesses did business, and we want to approach it in a different way so okay.

Amardeep Parmar: 2:57

So once you decided, okay, I can't be a pilot, and you had that dream crushed a bit, what was the next step? So what did you then? Decide to go and study, and what path did you initially think you're going to go down?

Praveen Vijh : 3:09

Again, of course I am, I feel terrible saying generic things, but let's sort of continue the path and I'll put in my perspective. Of course I, you know, I grew up in a family where my mother was a doctor, my father was an accountant, so it's a very typical thing. So there was a very limited choice of how many things I could do. So I didn't at university, of course I had to go to university. Of course I've got to do all the the normal things I have to do. So I studied engineering and and I studied engineering just because a friend of mine said oh, why don't you do engineering? Nothing else to do so, not out of any kind of passion. So that was the next step. You continue, you know, do one thing, you try to find your way. Fate sort of guides you in one direction. You do one thing, you try it see if it works.

Praveen Vijh : 3:53

And within engineering, I went to brunel mainly because it began with a B. It was like in the, the thing, the, the first option that came to, it was not done with any kind of precision or any kind of premeditated plan, it was just that. That's kind of how I landed up. I think always you end up listening to your heart. If you listen to your heart and you listen to where your body and your mind tells you to go, then that's where you end up going and that's what you end up doing. So it was engineering.

Praveen Vijh : 4:27

And then, during the course of engineering, there were certain modules in there which had a business element, and I found that very fascinating, you know, when at that time, we had to develop, like their projects for developing your own washing machine or relatively dull things, but they were very exciting and that, wow, I could, I could do this and that, in fact, I was.

Praveen Vijh : 4:47

Actually that was the one part of it. I didn't know how to build bridges very well, but I knew how to build washing machine in a way that was commercial and make it saleable, and that was exciting. So I thought, well, okay, there's a glimpse of something interesting here. To listen to yourself and think, well, okay, okay, well, I could possibly do something. And at that time I knew that whatever I wanted to do would end up being a brand of some sort. So we studied, you know, you studied Bosch and we studied other big Whirlpool and understanding how they build their brands, and even though the technical equipment behind the machinery and everything was sort of fairly similar. The impact that it made to the consumer of having a brand and that sort of got me very interested in marketing and brand building and, uh, business at that time.

Amardeep Parmar: 5:37

What was the first thing you tried to do then after university?

Praveen Vijh : 5:40

Well, a friend of mine who I subsequently worked with, had a magazine called Tan, which was it was actually it was the first British Asian. I say first, it was one of the first British Asian magazines. So I worked with him. He was also. He was an entrepreneur from the very beginning. So I worked with him and I learned something about journalism. And then the first thing I did on my own was to set up a business where we imported rice from India. I just started again.

Praveen Vijh : 6:15

I don't know how I got into this. I kind of sort of met somebody and someone's and a friend said, oh, why don't you? You started, I think I made a trip to Amritsar or something. He said, oh, I want to sell some rice in England. So I said, oh, don't worry, I'll sell it for you. So we started importing rice and that grew very, very fast. I set up a factory in England because to bring rice into the UK you had to make sure it was clean, you had to make sure it was packed properly. There were certain environmental regulations.

Praveen Vijh : 6:49

So I started in business very soon after coming out of university and very quickly I ended up with a relatively decent turnover, and that was, I mean, it was easy to have a big turnover because there's rice. You know it's a community, it's a commodity, and we started selling it. Well, but it taught me a lot about how to sell to. At that time there was rice being sold to the asian community, to the chinese community, indian community, and the business turned into something which was fairly decent in size but no profit. So I then ended up with some equipment that we used to make machinery to make rice. I thought, well, this is not making any sense, we're not making any money out of it. We're selling loads of things, loads of having a large turnover. But it was. You know, my car was being depossessed or repossessed or whatever they call it, and it was all a very big disaster. I ended up with the equipment to make it and with that equipment we ended up basically acting as a laundrette for other people who wanted to bring their rights, their pulses, their nuts into the country where we cleaned it for them, acted as basically a commodity broker.

Praveen Vijh : 7:54

That then gave us a bit of time, gave me some time to sort of stop and think, meet some interesting people with clients, for example people with clients, for example and we just came across this idea to think, well, we're bringing in and other clients, other customers of ours, we're bringing in nuts and dried fruit. I thought we have access to all of this product. Surely we can do something to it. And there was a great concept at that time of value adding. Everyone would say you know, whatever you do, you've got a value at it. What's the point of bringing in nuts and packaging them and setting them on? You're not adding any value. I thought, okay, well, there has to be something in this. So also, I mean, I love cooking and one of the things we thought of, what happens if we stick these nuts and dried fruit together. And what happens if we do this in a way which is in a slightly more natural way than products that were available at that time, without the use of additional starches, without the use of additional preservatives, so that products lasted but lasted out of its natural goodness. So that's how we started the concept.

Praveen Vijh : 9:07

I remember going home one evening. We took some walnuts and some dates from what we had in the warehouse and went to Holland and Barrett or another health food store in my high street and thought, okay, what can we get from here that is natural, that we can use to hold this together and that will last. And that was the origins of the first bar and that's how the concept started to get into that. So a little bit of meandering, a little bit of interest.

Praveen Vijh : 9:42

I then went to a friend of mineie who is a childhood friend and he was sort of in a position where he didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life either. He was changing the way he wanted to do things and he, uh he was a production engineer. So I thought that he is somebody who actually knows how to make these things. I knew knew how to design it, he knew how to make it. So it was a perfect combination. He was interested in the backbone. He was interested in how you could get things to be made, and not just in my kitchen, but how are you going to make this in a more industrial scale? So something that was in my mind became something practical.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:19

So it's interesting as well. So it seems like there was no real consideration of the traditional path. It right. So you did engineering then into the journalism aspect of tan. Then you were importing things at that time. Was that normal for people on your course, for example, of studying engineering with you to go and try and do these different things, or were you quite a rebel in that sense?

Praveen Vijh : 10:40

I would never classify it as being a rebel, but there was a burning desire inside me. I remember this, remember this feeling that there was nothing that was going to be able to stop me from working for myself. I knew straight out of university that I was not going to work for somebody else. I tried it during university. I tried working for others. It was a sandwich course, you know. We had three different employers. I worked for British Gas, I worked for some engineering company and it was all wonderful and lovely and I love the use of being able to jump in a company car and go and do things whatever. It was all wonderful. I remember coming back. Of course, my parents were very concerned and worried about it and they didn't think I was capable of getting a job and my mother's no longer here.

Praveen Vijh : 11:18

But if my dad hears it, I'll tell a story that he hasn't heard before either, which is that they said you know, you at least just have to get a job. And I said, okay, fine, I'll try my hardest, I'll go and get a job. I went for interviews with Arthur Anderson, Anderson Consulting as they were called at that time and I remember going to all of the interviews. I then had a letter back from them saying the usual story, which was for me dear Praveen, so nice to meet you, but we regret to inform you we can't offer you a job. To my mother I showed her that letter, but I had tippexed out where they said we cannot offer you a job, and I changed the typing on there to say that we are delighted to offer you a temporary position at Anderson Consulting. Um, your start date will be xyz, whatever. So I changed the letter and showed it to her. I said mom, look, this is what I've done. And she said, oh, great.

Praveen Vijh : 12:08

When she said, I said look, I've been thinking about it, mom, I just don't want to work. I don't want to be that person who works it and consulting it doesn't do anything for me, it's not interesting me. Please can you give me a chance? I've got this opportunity to import six million tons of rice into the UK and just play with that for a while, and they were very gracious. I'm very grateful to my parents for having the trust and the ability in me, or the feeling that they gave me, which was that okay, fine, try it out, see how it works and they supported me very well, supported me financially for some time and they allowed me to be able to pursue this. I will only describe it as a, as a burning desire. There was nothing else that could possibly that I could possibly have done. I couldn't have worked with somebody else.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:03

And once you created the bars, right.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:04

So there's one thing to create the bars, but you also need to get people to like them, stores to stock them. There's all these different steps in trying to like, now make this into a business. How did you go about that at the beginning? Because if you've created this yourself and now you need stores to take you seriously, you need people to try something which maybe they weren't used to as well. Right, and to get consumers to be like yeah, this is a new concept in some ways. How did you go about that early stages? Just get it off the ground.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:32

We hope you're enjoying the episode so far. We just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners HSBC innovation banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what it is you've been trying to do. HSBC have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true.

Amardeep Parmar: 14:04

So if you want to learn more, check out hsbcinnovationbanking. com.

Praveen Vijh : 14:26

Ofcourse, I thought that well how complicated can this be? I will get bars, I'll talk to Holland and it'll be in their stores. Ofcourse Holland and Barrett are going to take it, why would they not take it? When you're finally hit again with rejection and you realize you can't get through to the buyer, when you realize that I don't even know the telephone number. I don't know how. It's. How easy. I've never done this process before. You have to start making the most of everything you've got.

Praveen Vijh : 14:40

So we took our bars out, we shops in our local area around where we built up what we call our makery, around Halstead in Essex, in central London. We went round to all of the convenience stores, the health food stores, and if any store said that they wouldn't want to stock it because they didn't think they could sell it, our product was expensive. It was selling for 70ence, 80 pence or 90 pence, which is twice or three times the price of a Mars bar at that time. It was a lot of money. So if they thought that well, they're never going to sell this, we said to them can you please just take a box, put it on the shelf. We'll come back a week later and we'll see how much you sold. It was a sale or return. And we went back and time after time, store after store had sold the product and they were happy enough to be able to take another order. So it starts very gradually and we were very happy to sell five boxes, 10 boxes, 20 boxes, and it wasn't an exponential growth. It was very, very slow and slowly we started building up sales.

Praveen Vijh : 15:46

I remember going out to every Whistle Stop store in London, every Europa Food store. These are all stores that anyone who's young listening won't remember. They don't exist any longer, but they was. These are tiny little convenience stores or the 7-eleven type stores that we you know we have health food stores, so you go around to each one of those and sell on the ground. You get direct feedback. And what is very important, what I found the most important at that time is that by doing that, not subcontracting it to somebody else you get direct feedback. And what is very important, what I found the most important at that time is that by doing that, not subcontracting it to somebody else, you get feedback from your customers, not just your family, because of course, your family is going to tell you this is the best thing that's ever happened. I mean, that's wonderful to be able to get your friends and family to love what you're doing, but it's irrelevant. The only place where you want to get real information back is from your customer and your consumer. So the consumer being the person who actually eats the product and the customer being someone who buys the product beforehand. So that could be the gatekeeper, the owner of Tesco's or whoever else that's going to be they're the ones who are going to tell you. So if they tell you this product is, but it needs more almonds in it, or it needs to be sweeter, or why don't you put chocolate on it, you go straight away and say that's a fantastic idea, what a brilliant idea. I've never thought of it myself. I'll get you this bar and it's going to have more chocolate on it, or you want it to be bigger, you want it. Mold your product to what the consumer wants and you go back and show them look, this is what I did. I listened to you. Here's a product that's going to work, and from that we made some tweaks, we made some changes and it started, started selling, but it was a consumer driven or a customer driven product.

Amardeep Parmar: 17:20

And you know there's early days where you think that those shops think they couldn't sell it, but they were selling it.

Amardeep Parmar: 17:26

What do you think made made the end customer look at that and decide I want to get it. What do you think in those early days really made you stand out?

Praveen Vijh : 17:34

We had no money to spend on marketing. We actually, throughout the entire of our business, we spent very little on marketing. I'm talking about marketing in terms of posters, television, whatever, whatever. It was nothing like that. We believed in one very simple thing we have no money.

Praveen Vijh : 17:51

Let's give it a name, so that tells the whole story. You know, you don't have to think very hard. What is it? Oh, what is the product? Eat, natural. What is it? Oh, you can see it. You know it's a clear packaging. You can see all the way into it. It's just nuts and dried fruit. Oh, it looks quite nice. I can see some whole pieces of almonds in there, or walnuts, whatever else you can see. You can see what it's going to be like. You don't need to do very much. Consumers hadn't seen that before and if you seed it in the right place in the right way.

Praveen Vijh : 18:16

So again, at that time it was possible for us to go to a newsagent, for us to be able to go to a health food store and discuss with the shop owner, and we had the guts and the confidence because we had nothing to lose. Today, I couldn't do the same thing because I'm too proud to be able to do it, but at that time you know you have nothing to lose. So I'm going to take this and I will convince whoever's standing in front of me to say just please, take this and put it on the front of your shelf next to your cigarettes or mints or whatever else you're going to sell. Put it right there. So it was in everyone's face, right at the very front. It was constantly replenished, the product looked good and it tasted good and we also had to convince the owner. So you know, if they, if they had their friends coming and they would tell everybody sampling, getting people to taste it and being able to show the product.

Amardeep Parmar: 19:06

Well, I guess what's really hard at early stage too is if we're getting so many different pieces of feedback from different people about who to listen to, because, let's say, tesco is saying, oh, you should make the bar bigger and Sainsbury's is saying you should make the bar smaller. How do you deal with that kind of all these different inputs?

Praveen Vijh : 19:21

There's generally common themes. Everyone actually says the same thing. Ultimately Not Ultimately, no one's going to say that. So make a big sum. It's never that extreme. Some people just like coconut, some people don't like coconut. So you make a range of products.

Praveen Vijh : 19:35

So we started off with four in our range. We quickly expanded to six in our range and we tweaked the products, listening to customers and we made them feel. So. There were special deals for individual customers, to make sure we listened to them, and some might have been around pricing. Some might have been about buy five, get one free. Some might have been, you know, a lot of customers at that time. It wasn't just about the product, but they said, oh, I'll buy five boxes if you give me a free T-shirt. So off you go making T-shirts. I mean, where did that even appear in a business plan? You don't think you're going to need toothbrushes to give away or whatever else you end up doing. But it was just about that. It was kind of giving them something extra umbrellas or something else that would make them feel, oh, someone from track has just been in and he's given me a free umbrella, whatever it was and you think, oh, okay, well, let's do that. So everyone you listen to and certain things. Of course you have to buy a certain amount.

Praveen Vijh : 20:31

There has to be some kind of sensibility in what you listen to, but generally the customers say the same thing, thankfully. That's why mass concepts work for things, and you also want to make sure that it appeals to the broad brush of people, because you can't have it just being, uh, super streamlined. So the one it's not just for one person, it's for everybody, and this was something that we knew from the beginning wasn't just to be sold in health food stores, it wasn't just to be sold in newsagents, it we knew from the beginning that this product that we've created needed to be everywhere it. It needed to be in petrol stations, it needed to be in health food shops, it needed to be in airplanes, airports, it needed to be everywhere where consumers could buy a Mars bar, for example. It needed to be next to a Mars bar in every possible location or anywhere. It needed to have any reason to be sold in any particular place.

Amardeep Parmar: 21:28

And you mentioned, in the early days it was you going into the shops yourself to try to convince people. When did the tipping point start to reach where that was no longer viable anymore and you had to kind of take the more leadership perspective and have people working for you to outreach and do those different things? And how has that transitioned from the scrappiness on the ground to now? Okay, I need to take a more high level picture.

Praveen Vijh : 21:51

That's a very interesting question and I actually I would. I never. I don't believe in that actually so much. I'm a strong believer in customers. So we, at when we, when we, by the time we finished, we ended up having probably around about 250 distributors in the UK alone who sold the product. We had 40 customers overseas. We had all of the UK supermarkets, big and small. I knew almost every single one of those distributors and customers personally. Of course, all of the main supermarkets.

Praveen Vijh : 22:31

I would go to myself with whoever would work with us, all of our, all of our sales team. I would be there on the ground working with them all the time. It's the most important thing. I don't I don't know how many times I can tell this to anybody who starts a business or does anything customers are the most important thing. You can sit behind and do your product development, you can do your marketing, you can sit behind putting things on social media, but the only thing which is actually going to make a difference is getting out there and talking to customers and being close to customers all the time.

Praveen Vijh : 23:03

And consumers we would never cut off from consumers. I would pick up the phone, if a telephone there were. How many five people or 10 people, or 15 people in the office. Anybody could pick the phone up. But I would pick the phone up and we would have customers call up and say, oh, you know, I ate one of your bars and there was something wrong with it or something right with it. I just want to tell you some story about it, force of why I think the business actually went, you know, continued to grow, and why customers had faith and belief in us because we stayed close to what they had, we listened to and what they had to say.

Amardeep Parmar: 23:40

And like in their scaling journey, right?

Amardeep Parmar: 23:42

So I said there's more people in the office. Now, how is that for you? Because if you started off right at the beginning there, but as you had a bigger team, what side of things do you think that you developed the most on during that journey yourself? Like, which were the hardest bits for you to upskill in, I guess, to run a larger company that was in so many different countries and in so many different shops?

Praveen Vijh : 24:03

I don't know about any of it being particularly hard all of its natural progression. We never wanted to grow. Let's not say we didn't want to grow too fast because we would love to if someone came to us with. Actually, even that's not true. We did want to grow at a certain pace. We had opportunities right from the very beginning where Walmart came to us and said that they could buy X number of containers from us and we thought about it and we said we can't do this.

Praveen Vijh : 24:27

We were going to kill ourselves trying to get this kind of growth in the business at an early stage. We needed to set the foundations and once you set the foundation, everything becomes logical. We didn't employ people for the sake of employing people. We felt like we'd reached breaking point. We therefore needed to get people in to be able to bring the skills in that they needed that we we didn't have potentially or that we needed in order to grow the business. It was always a pleasure to employ somebody. It was always a pleasure to be able to delegate something that I didn't want to do, I couldn't do, didn't have time to do or any of the other people in the business needed. So that support structure was built up out of necessity, as opposed to trying to create a structure that we'd read about.

Amardeep Parmar: 25:17

And you did all of this as well without taking outside funding or minimal outside funding. Can you tell us, through that journey, what made you go down that route, rather than, let's say, trying to get investment, which a lot of people tried to do in the early days?

Praveen Vijh : 25:28

We didn't need to get outside funding because we didn't overspend. We went out to go and get an additional salesperson once we had the business in place or once we knew our business could sustain that person. We only ever believed in reinvesting back what we earned. We only ever believed in spending what we had and therefore, that's why the business took 25 years to grow. I mean, potentially, today we could have done the same thing in five years. We can go and get a large amount of funding and you can scale up very quickly, and that's the way a lot of people want to do it today Wonderful, fantastic.

Praveen Vijh : 26:03

But that was not the way that we did it. We didn't think of it in the same way. We only grew the business because we wanted to grow it sustainably and we were not in any rush. We were enjoying the journey. What's the rush? Why do you want to? If going to work is a pleasure, why do you need to rush to grow any more than you're growing? We knew that we didn't want to have too much stress. We knew that we wanted to be able to be home in time as much as we possibly can. You know just. Of course, the first three, four, five years were stressful, but once it started to be able to pay some salary for us, we were not so ambitious that we needed to go and buy anything. We're not particularly material-driven humans. We're much more motivated by building relationships, building family, and that's probably why we didn't want to grow too fast, and I think that's why we managed to avoid having to go to venture capitalists or trying to sell, give away part of the business before we needed to.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:07

I'm really glad you shared that because I think that's a very healthy perspective for so many people to hear, because sometimes people they have that stress about like I want to go as fast as I possibly can, but you were able to grow and scale significantly over time, while also being able to have that balance which so many people lack, and you also mentioned as well. So, later on down the journey of 25 years, you then were able to exit. And how did that come about? Was that something which you were thinking, okay, this is now time for us to leave, or did an offer come in, or how did that scenario play out?

Praveen Vijh : 27:39

I think there's. I was always. I personally was always very resistant to sell the business. It was my baby, it was something which ran in my veins. I loved every bit of it. I loved the office that we'd built, the physical space that we'd built. I love the people we worked with. Every part of our business was just wonderful.

Praveen Vijh : 28:04

But we hit a time when, you know, my business partner was really not keen to continue, when business was a struggle. We had the cost of doing business was different and there were a few ways that we could go. We needed to have at that point we needed to think about what would be best to grow the business sustainably for the future. And as much as I resisted it, Covid hit and things became complicated and we thought do we? We? And we had been pursued at that point by by some, by some people who wanted to buy the business, one of whom was very charming. I mean I couldn't really. You know we finally sold the business to Ferrero and Italians. I mean you know the Italians are very charming people, you know, and very disarming. It was really nice to chat to him. You know the guy who we worked with, guy called Giovanni, lovely, lovely man, you know he, you know he would be very down to earth. He would sit and chat to me in a coffee shop, down to earth. You know we were not taking you know we.

Praveen Vijh : 29:21

I really didn't want this whole thing about going to smart places and having bankers and all this kind of horrible stuff around. I thought let's keep it real, sit and have, um, you know, maybe we have a ball of pasta together and have a chat, talk about what they want to do with the business. What would we want to do with the business? How would they take it forward? Would they nurture it? Would they keep, keep you know what? How would they, how would they look after the staff? And all started to feel comfortable.

Praveen Vijh : 29:50

So, finally, when we decided to sell, they were ready and we had been nurturing this contact for maybe a year, year and a half, just in the what-if scenario, without any commitment from either side. They also changed their perspective of how they could get involved. We also changed our perspective in thinking that, okay, now you know, we became comfortable with the idea and it did help that the people we were thinking of talking to were nice people, were people that were human, really were in a fabulous place. You know they were in Alba in italy, one of my favorite places to go to, where the food is fabulous, the wine is great, the past is incredible, so you know what's not to like.

Amardeep Parmar: 30:35

And one of the things about an exit obviously is you.

Amardeep Parmar: 30:37

They said this was your baby, right? So how is it after the exit, like how has your identity shifted? And your own like, I guess, psychological state afterwards is it the elation of okay, we've had this exit. It's quote unquote like success, or is it like what do I do now? Or what was your mind like?

Praveen Vijh : 30:57

For me. I wanted, I made a very conscious effort that I didn't want to do the same thing again. We have one life, the part of my life where I expressed myself and that burning desire that I talked about at the beginning had been fulfilled and I could go and do the same thing again. But I didn't want to get dragged down into that. There was an opportunity now to explore a new part of life, a new part of me. I knew that at that time you had to look at yourself. You had to look at your own desires and figure out what is it that will excite you, what are the things which you're going to be missing For me? I knew that I wanted to have some kind of contact with young people continuously. As I'm growing up I'm 55, I wanted to make sure that I had an ability to express my creativity and I wanted to learn.

Praveen Vijh : 31:58

I learn a lot. I read like I'm reading. I read constantly three books, four books in a day, not books, I mean variety books. I'm reading, I read a lot. I study a lot. I study photography, I study yoga, I study cooking, baking, but it's a particular part of it. I write, I'm writing a book and I spend a lot of time developing the interests that I have, but it's been a conscious journey to be able to do that.

Praveen Vijh : 32:23

You know, you have to say I thought, well, why am I ever going to be interested in this? But why am I? How can I develop photography? Because when you have to say I thought, well, why am I ever going to be interested in this, but why am I, how can I develop photography? Because when you have done something well, you want to do everything well. So I don't just want to be able to bake bread, I want that bread to be the best that could possibly be had. So there's no bakery in London that can make bread as good as the bread I can have.

Praveen Vijh : 32:43

It may not be true, but for me it's true. I want to be the best photographer that I can possibly be, that I can possibly be. That expresses my own interest. I want to be the best yogi that I could possibly be. But that's wonderful because for me it gives me a sense of yearning, it gives me a sense of purpose and it gives me a reason to be able to develop my the skills they may not be skills, you can judge for yourself. Um, going forward of what's interesting. I just didn't want to do the same thing again.

Praveen Vijh : 33:13

There's far more inside that needs to be expressed and to be enjoyed in life.

Amardeep Parmar: 33:17

I think it's often quite common where people don't realize that the fire that's inside you. Obviously it doesn't have to just be business, like you said, and I've seen the opposite side, for example, where people who are incredible like martial artists or they're incredible at sport or something like that, before they go into business. And it's that same underlying desire, like you said, there to be the best at what you do and that's going to help you in business, but it's also going to help you outside of business too, and it's about being able to differentiate your identity away from that. And was there that period at all? So, like now, how long has it been now since you left e-natural? Three or four years. And then like how are you doing now? Like is, are you in a good place?

Praveen Vijh : 33:56

I'm loving my life, but there's no, there's no doubt that there have been times when, when you sort of start questioning yourself and thinking well, there are times that I'm at home and you wake up and think, oh, I don't, have I done, I've not achieved anything today, and these will happen a lot. But if you can give yourself permission that actually reading a book, even if it's a fiction book, even if it's whatever it is, is acceptable, it is definitely a change of pace because you feel like you haven't necessarily achieved anything, which is why, for me, if I'm doing my photography, I want to be judged, I want to be critiqued. I want people to be able to look at that, and not just again, not just my friends and my family. I want people other photographers to look at that and to say what they think and give me some feedback about what I've done, so that I'm constantly growing. So you have achieved something, because you have to change the mindset. Yes, I haven't gone to work and I haven't come back with a pay packet, but I have achieved something that is of value to me and if you can identify what gives you pleasure and to allow yourself the freedom to give yourself that pleasure. And, by the way, one thing I was going to mention as well is that this process can also start at any point in your life. A balance and what I see happening all the time everybody who runs a business not everyone people run businesses and they work very, very hard.

Praveen Vijh : 35:22

They're working hard all the time. So, basically, when they come to sell the business or change the business or whatever they do and change their life, they have nothing else to do because the only thing they've known is that business. If there are other pleasures, if there's any hobbies I never thought that hobbies were interesting. When we grew up I thought why would you ever want to have a hobby? And that time hobbies are only about Airfix models or running a model railway.

Praveen Vijh : 35:44

If you can develop some other interests in and an interest where you are partaking, so you are the participant in that hobby not a hobby which means you're watching something else, but you are the creator, you are the person who's doing something then that holds a great stead going forward. But everybody has to be on that particular journey themselves and everybody has to find for themselves what other reasons there are, because it gives you. You have to think about what, what is the purpose of being here on earth, or what is it, what is the purpose of this life? And it brings all those questions into play, and for me this is how it has transpired, and it will change again. You know, I'm sure that in five years' time something else will be interesting and there'll be another reason, but you then have to be open to what the world is like. I think that's very important too, just keeping an interest in the world.

Amardeep Parmar: 36:40

So just before we go to quickfire questions now, I think so many people listening to this are going to see your journey and that you've been able to also like retire gracefully, in some ways right. It's like you haven't exited and then been lost and you've been able to find some girls passionate. If somebody say, 10-15 years behind you but they're running their business now, they hope to do an exit, what advice would you give them?

Praveen Vijh : 37:03

So there were some very practical things that we needed to do and I wish we, I'm glad, we had you know, we went through the process of selling the business and some of the most simple things that we needed to do were to get all your books in order, make sure that everything you know don't lose anything. Make sure you have very simple things. All your basic, your basic company hygiene must be in place. Keep detailed records, because when you end up selling the business you'll need all of that. And although they say keep it for seven years, we needed it for 10, 15 years. You know we needed to make sure that we knew what was happening. What are the contracts? Have you got contracts with all your customers? Have you got all the basic things that maybe a corporate or maybe somebody who's bigger than you would be would want to have in place? So get all that right. So get that's all the basic things you want to do. And then, as far as your, I think you have to have.

Praveen Vijh : 38:00

You know, not everybody wants to sell the business, and there's no. You know, maybe had our business been structured in a different way, maybe we would have kept going. I don't know. See, I think everyone has to think for themselves as to why they want to sell the business. And if that is, there's nothing wrong with it.

Praveen Vijh : 38:19

To sell the business and you want to sit on the beach in Cornwall or in Florida or wherever else you want to go to, then that's wonderful. There's no right or wrongs here. But you need to figure that out for yourself. But you need to be curious about your life and start that curiosity from an as, to be honest with you, you should be starting it now anyway, no matter whatever part of your journey you're on, because work's not everything. You need to go home in the evening. You need to spend time with your family, look after that. But you also need to develop something which is of your own, which is outside of. I say you need to, you don't need to do anything. But this is what I think is important and was interesting for me to do, and had I I wish that perhaps I had spent more time developing these alternative interests from an even earlier age and that's very important.

Amardeep Parmar: 39:07

So thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your story. I think I've learned a lot myself as well. We're gonna have to get to quick fire questions now with the time to go, so first one is who are three B ritish Asians you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout them out today?

Praveen Vijh : 39:22

I don't know too many British Asians, I have to say I there's a. There's a lovely man who actually happens to live near me in Epping who I talk to regularly. His name is Shameek Upadhya and he is in a natural pharmaceuticals business called Omvitz. He's starting that up. I think he's doing a very, he's got a very nice attitude to his life and he's trying to build that up well. My wife, Monika Vijh, is a transformational coach and she is also trying to do something out of passion because she wants to change people's lives and she wants to bring all of her knowledge and understanding to the world and that's fascinating to watch that journey. And my childhood friend, Preet Grewal, is now part of doing shout-outs for the Nolan Trust and that's something that he's particularly interested in. The Nolan Trust is a body that helps with finding donors, particularly for Asian stem cell donors. Really, I think that's what they do, but know it's it's one for they're working hard to do all those different things in diverse ways.

Amardeep Parmar: 40:34

And then if people want to find out more about you and what you're up to, ah, where should they go to?

Praveen Vijh : 40:39

Please. I I really need to get up to seven to ten million followers on instagram, so I'd like all your followers, everyone to follow me, please, and then give me feedback. You're welcome to tell me. So that's at Praveen Vij. I think that's right. Yeah, at Praveen Vij on Instagram. So, yeah, that's all I do. Tell me how much you like my photographs and come and see them when they're at the tape so we'll put that in the description as well, so people can find the link there.

Amardeep Parmar: 41:04

And is there anything that you need help with right now yourself?

Praveen Vijh : 41:07

No, not really. No, I think I'm always interested in seeing how other people's lives go. I love to listen to how other people do things I'm always happy to have a chat with. I think the sense of community and being part of community is really important.

Amardeep Parmar: 41:22

So I think it's a learning street, so we're always learning from each other, so thanks so much again for coming on today. Any final words? What are your ambitions for? It's a learning street, so we're always learning from each other, so thanks so much again for coming on today.

Praveen Vijh : 41:31

Any final words? No, I would like. What are your ambitions for your podcast, for the work that you're doing?

Amardeep Parmar: 41:36

So the podcast is essentially one element of it, right, but the idea for this is this has now given us a platform where we're now able to go into schools and universities. So the idea is, in 30 years time, there's people listening to this podcast right now who then go on to one of our internship schemes, one of our mentorship schemes. They come to our events, they build a community. Maybe they don't have any connections themselves, but for us to get that connections, that community, and then they build business, they change the world, and that wouldn't have been possible if they didn't have inspirational figures like you to hear from, to make them believe that they could do it too. So that's the dream in, say, 30 years time, is people have come in now and they're coming on this whole journey.

Amardeep Parmar: 42:17

We've been along that way with them.

Praveen Vijh : 42:18

That's fascinating. Well, thank you for asking to come on, and I'm very happy to learn more about BAE as well and know what it's all about. It's been a very interesting session today, thank you.

Amardeep Parmar: 42:30

Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

‍