RECESSION & REJECTION THAT GAVE BIRTH TO THE RESILIENT WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR OF THE NATION MANJU MASTAKAR

Few words that can describe this fierce lady are- Passionate, Empathetic, Committed, Skilled, Hard Working. Her meticulous approach towards business has made her organization one of the leading and trusted among all. The topsy-turvy journey of an intern to become an entrepreneur of one of the reputed financial firms is mesmerizing! She has facilitated sustainable capital growth of Individuals as well as corporates. It’s often said, Women are best to handle the crisis, and when it comes to financing, they are seriously best! If you need an example to believe this, then look at your home, check out how the lady of your home manages everything, and still, when you ask her, she will come up with her savings. Manju Mastakar represents the new generation of women who have overcome all the negative notions and proved themselves to the world. Manju Mastakar has been leading Armstrong Capital & Financial Services Pvt. Ltd since 2010, and now it is one of the reputed financial advisory companies in India

Female leaders bring unique perceptive to the workplace. How as a woman have you advanced your industry ?

It took me a journey of 2 decades to get to where I stand now. As a woman, it’s easier to connect with clients of diversified age groups and backgrounds, understand their situation and advise the most beneficial financial plan. Women are caring by nature. We have it in us to direct all our natural instincts, including listening, sharing and building a culture of collaboration, to the clients. Putting their well-being before anything else and proposing something solely of their interest comes naturally to us. My financial management business functions very dynamically. The product, advice, service and relationship is carefully tailored to meet the client’s interests.

Why do you think it’s important that we make equality a priority, and what would women bring to the table that you think the world needs most now ?

Equality should be a priority because it’s the necessity of the world, even more so in current times. All humans, men and women are equally capable of presenting new ideas that could benefit the world as a whole. Women bring determination to the table. And it is this determination that fuels the fight for survival and innovation in the long run. Starting from small seed capital, that quickly became ZERO, I worked tirelessly to turn it around into cash flows.

Most women entrepreneurs are driven by fulfilling a dream or a passion, and sometimes even to gain independence. It is this level of perseverance that the world could take advantage of.

Who were or are your female role models? Do or did you have a woman leader as a mentor ?

I believe in learning from others, who may or may not belong to the same industry. I listen to biographies on Audible and learn a lot from them. Other than following successful people, I have also learned from those who failed. Understanding how and why they failed has helped me steer my business through some tough times.

Though I did not have a mentor, I learned a lot from people, books, Audible and YouTube. Not enjoying the privilege to go through any formal higher education, my insights come from continuous self-learning. I admire few women in my industry who have made a mark in the man’s world. They aren’t famous but I admire them and
lookup to them as my role models.

like to mentor young minds, driving them towards positivity and teaching them important life skills. I regularly write articles and give interviews in the hope to give young women with strong potentials some inspiration to come forward and explore new opportunities. At the same time, I regularly mentor my employees, which comprise a healthy mix of both genders.

What policies have you put in place to move your organization toward gender equality? How does your organization deal with unconscious bias ?

Being a woman myself, I completely trust and believe in women’s skills in all talent levels. My employees are an equal mix of both genders and they get accessed and enjoy appreciation and promotions solely on the basis of their skills and achievements within the organization. From the beginning of my organization’s journey, we had to compete with big brands, building credibility to grow a customer base. The main focus for hiring people was raw skills and determinations. We mostly hired freshers, both male and female, and trained them to meet our business’s goals. I have also been flexible to allow women to bring kids to work in case there is an emergency.

What are, from your perspective, the biggest challenges for women in leadership roles ?

Possibly the biggest challenge for women in leadership roles is juggling between motherhood and entrepreneurship. Since both responsibilities come around the same time in life and require plenty of dedication and energy, it’s hard to balance the two.

Thankfully for us, the digital era, boosted even further with COVID, opens up several opportunities to work online, making it easier to fulfil home and office responsibilities at the same time.

The biggest boon that is benefiting women is the e-commerce era, order groceries, ordering food, online doctor consultations, hiring hourly basis cooks and caregivers, taxi on call and may other such sites make a women’s life easier. I thank all the male CEO’s who have worked behind the scenes and build business to make a women’s life easier.

What are some of the most concrete and constructive changes that we can do as a culture, or a society, to improve things for women to become leaders ?

Data analysis shows that of many key skills important for a leader, including empathy, social perception, and managerial effectiveness, women have more to offer, on average, than men. Still, women are yet underrepresented in leadership roles, owing to cultural constraints.
At a cultural level, we can train young minds, both men and women, to shoulder professional roles competently. Both can share responsibilities of home to help each other grow their career.

How do you unplug from work? What are your favorite books, websites, films and, resources ?

I love to listen to music; I like to watch interviews of successful people. I love to travel and explore new places. I also do some bit of fashion designing.

ABOUT ARMSTRONG CAPITAL & FINANCIAL SERVICES PVT. LTD

Armstrong Capital & Financial Services Pvt. Ltd is financial planning and Wealth Management company. Financial Planning & Wealth management – These are the key offerings that Armstrong Capital provides. What makes the company stand out of all are the Financial Plans that are comprehensive and act as the backbone for the Advisory, which helps clients keep referring to the plans and advice the company offers.

Manju Mastakar says, “Every relationship in Armstrong starts with a Financial Plan. Before we advise we try and understand all the financial commitments the client has in the near and far future. For all the investments that the client has done, we show them a complete picture as to how the financials will look 10 years from now and what would the Annuity be by the time he retires. This complete end-to-end financial planning is what we do at Armstrong.”

THE CLIENT BASE OF ARMSTRONG CAPITAL & FINANCIAL SERVICES PVT. LTD

Armstrong Capital & Financial Services Pvt. Ltd has a very diverse client base, and at Armstrong, every relationship starts with a financial plan. “For the clients in the age bracket 30-40, we bring in the discipline to save, for age 40-50 we manage the wealth they have created, and age 50 and above we help them preserve the wealth. In the initial years, the clients like the do-it-yourself approach, and over the years as they become mature investors, they delegate the complete responsibly on us to manage their portfolio. “, says Manju Mastakar.

Entrepreneur Insights is quite fortunate to get a chance to bring the success story of Manju Mastakar to the world. We recently interacted with her and learned some wonderful facts about her struggle journey that resulted in a huge success and a great motivation for all. Here’s the uncut Q & A round with Ms. Manju Mastakar

HOW DID YOUR ENTREPRENEURSHIP JOURNEY START ?

My career began very early in life when I was just 19 years old. I started out as an intern at a CA firm, where I would do audits for stockbrokers and stock traders. Later on, in the early 2000s, I gained experience with reputed stockbrokers as a dealer and advisor. My job was to recommend stocks to HNI clients. From Mumbai, I moved to Bangalore in 2007 and started working with a multinational bank and wealth management firm. The sub-prime crisis of late 2008 brought recession, and with that, I lost my job, just like several other professionals of the time. This was what pushed me to start an entrepreneurial journey of my own. The clients that I worked with before being laid off were left without an advisor. These were the people that became my first clients when I started entrepreneurship. They motivated me to strive. Initially, I was working from my home office and had very few clients. I was also expecting around the same time, so the preliminary stages of motherhood and entrepreneurship had to go alongside. The breakthrough came in 2010 when an investment banker advised me to start a bigger setup, which he offered to fund. Though I had 10 years of corporate experience and has worked at different levels in advisory firms, entrepreneurship came as a challenge.

It required me to handle most of the work on my own and at minimum returns. The firm started to grow rapidly after 2014, which is when we had a strong team and a strong customer base to rely on. Since then, the organization has been expanding, and the one word that makes it possible every day is – struggle.

WHAT HAVE BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES YOU’VE HAD TO OVERCOME ?

Any business in the early stage has to experiment with implementing new strategies, if you are sufficiently funded then you can take risks and pay the price but if you are bootstrapped you can’t take many risks, can’t experiment as these mistakes may cost a lot. My biggest challenge was to run the company in the first 3 years with the very small cash flow that we received. It was like the chicken and the egg, unless we invest in resources, we don’t grow and unless we don’t grow, we don’t generate cash flows to fund it.

WHAT DOES REVOLUTION MEAN TO YOU ?

Changing the preset mindset of the customers means revolution to me. We have influenced their minds; we have inculcated the habit of savings and after following our advice they have seen a revolutionary change in their financials. Dietitians and Wealth Managers have one thing in common only if you follow their advice with complete discipline only then you will see a revolutionary change.

WHAT IS SO UNIQUE ABOUT A WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR AS COMPARED TO THE MALE CEO ?

The first and foremost thing is that women take more calculated risks. They take decisions with a lot more information than men. It’s also very difficult to influence a woman. Women leaders are better in crisis management as they have a more judicious approach, they are thoughtful and deliberate and they will have a backup plan.

HOW HAS THE INDUSTRY CHANGED OVER THE YEARS ?

Over a while, the industry has moved to a more digital way of doing business which is a boon in itself, and most importantly now with a lot of Financial Education imparted clients are well aware of the basics. So now, to advise them, the financial advisor has to be more smarted and knowledgeable. The industry is getting competitive day by day, and differentiation is the only factor that drives sales.

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STRATEGY THAT YOU HAVE ADOPTED AS A LEADER OF YOUR ORGANIZATION ?

Not to be competition obsessed – Our industry is fragmented, and we meet a lot of clients who ask us a question how are you better than their existing advisor. We from the very beginning have adopted a strategy of telling the customer what we do, how we work, how we advise and leave to the customer to decide whether we are better or not but we never speak or compare ourselves with the competition.

HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE CREATIVE THINKING WITHIN YOUR ORGANIZATION ?

I value the understanding of Capital Market in my prospective employees over their academic education. Once I received an internship application from a mechanical engineer, his understanding of the concepts was quite good so I gave him a chance to intern with us. We though him some basics of financial planning, he works on few plans and then came up with a completely innovative process of making a plan. Thus, a complex financial planning structure was born and the creator was a mechanical engineer who had never learned anything about finance in his academics. This is what we call innovation.

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE MOST DIFFICULT TASK IN BEING IN YOUR INDUSTRY ?

The most difficult task is to predict the market and generate returns. We try hard to change this preconception that we create returns, we only create the discipline to save and invest, markets create the returns along with time.
We also work very closely with new couples on how much they should spend on a vacation or which car is affordable and even how much EMI burden can they take

WHICH ONE THING DO YOU WISH YOU’D DONE DIFFERENTLY ?

I feel in the initial stage of the business, I didn’t invest in people, if I would have done that, I would have had a stronger team. I had invested in resources that didn’t have the vision to stick on for the long term. They looked at us as a ground to gain experience, I should have given a chance to people who had a long-term employment goal.

WHAT IS THE BEST ADVICE YOU CAN GIVE TO OUR READERS ?

Be resilient. As an entrepreneur, you’re bound to receive several rejections. It can come from people who initially agree to be the co-founder but back out when the idea starts taking shape. It can come from friends who may have agreed to work with you but did not pursue it as it would risk their career. Even those who you thought weren’t capable of the job but agreed to hire sometimes back out. Your peers who could recommend you since they are aware of your potential may start avoiding you. Clients you rely on can simply refuse to do business with your newborn firm. Remember that this is YOUR journey – take it solo. Develop resilience and be prepared to accept rejections and move on.

Indrani Banerjee

Entrepreneur Insights