Abhiraj Singh Bhal, the co-founder and chief executive officer urban companyIt’s been a busy two weeks. Company – Joe
Topped in Covid-led business transformation category The Economic Times Startup Awards 2021 – has reformed its policies service partner, an important part of your business.

Following
About 100 women beauticians protest, Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) – whose co-founders include Raghav Chandra and Varun Khaitan – has made changes aimed at increasing the income of its partners, and will add more in the coming months.

In an interview to ET, Bhal explained in detail why the company has brought about these changes.

He added that not all companies that employ gig-workers should be measured in the same way.

Urban Company’s monthly revenue is 30-35% higher than before the second Covid-19 wave, which forced another lockdown earlier this year.

It is now recording higher order volumes than it was about six months ago, and its monthly revenue is two and a half times higher than pre-pandemic levels.

“We believe that we are a platform that is really for partners and partners. Urban Company is a platform for big earnings and a very good safety net and we want to hold ourselves accountable for that,” Bhal said last week. Said on the announced policy changes.

“Different companies should be viewed with different criteria. This is who we are as a company, and we cannot talk about others… we have nothing to hide,” he said. “We have put ourselves out there transparently for investigation and we believe our practices are fair and transparent.”

ET reported that the company is
Expect policy changes to result in at least 10% increased income to its service partners by the end of the December quarter.

battling covid-19

Bhal said the company battled the two Covid-19 waves by focusing its attention on new categories that worked well, rather than sticking to traditionally strong categories like women’s beauty, which have been on the rise due to the virus outbreak. Cause there was a hit.

“The challenge was to refocus the company on things that were seeing tailwinds versus the way we’ve been operating before and stick to the categories where we were originally strong,” Bhal said. Bhal said.

The company quickly launched home services in all major markets with a focus on safety, hygiene and vaccination.

Sensing the growing demand, the Gurugram-based startup launched men’s salons, expanded its women’s grooming range to include high-end offerings and launched home hygiene services.

According to Bhaal, all of these gained instant traction.

Its men’s haircut service has been a huge success and the demand for such services continues to this day.

The company has also continued to add categories.

“Historically, on the women’s beauty side, we focused only on skin care services. Over the past few months, we’ve launched a slew of new services including haircuts, hair colouring, hair treatments, blow drys and nails. But we’re also launching specialized services like keratin treatments and skin treatments,” Bhal said. “And then there’s a whole bunch of other categories that’s going to go into pilot or launch phases in the next few months.”

Urban Company experiments with different services in different markets and rolls them across the country after crossing the minimum threshold. For example, it operated an on-demand personal chef booking service in Bengaluru.

Bhal described the company’s adaptation to the Covid-19 induced changes as ‘playing on the front foot’ at a time when business had come to naught with the lockdown.

He added that this approach has helped the company to expand its service partner base across the country. In all, it has about 35,000 partners, of whom 27,577 are active in India.

“My view is when you play the opposite and you win, you win big. In our region, when the pandemic hit everyone was playing conservatively. Everyone was shedding talent, was cutting costs and going into hibernation. We said look, it’s not like the whole sector will disappear because of covid-19. Maybe if people were spending Rs 100 earlier, they are now Will cost Rs 70 to Rs 80. It will not come down to zero,” he said, explaining how being aggressive and focus on customer experience helped it to meet the current demand and capture a larger share of the market “It was as simple as we did.”

Today, women’s beauty is the biggest category for the Urban Company in terms of both orders and revenue. “Men’s beauty is also huge, especially men’s haircuts and grooming services,” said Bhaal.

growth, profit, ipo

According to Bhal, profitability is part of its plan, even though it is focused on growth and has reached certain milestones before going public in about 18-24 months.

The startup closed a $255 million funding round earlier this year led by Prosus Ventures and others,
Its valuation more than doubled to more than $2 billion.

“We want to have a certain revenue scale and a fairly wide footprint within the country. We want to make sure that some of our bets that are in the early stages are a bit over-ripe, especially on the category front, as well. With some of our recent market launches,” explained Bhal.

He said growing the company “profitably and having strong unit economics” is “very important”.

“Equally important is to have a clear vision of profitability, especially for our India business,” he said.

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Urban Company is present in 35 cities compared to 10 before the pandemic.

“Hopefully, by the end of this calendar year, we will be in 40 cities in India. We will continue to add our presence in more Tier II cities. Internationally also we are expanding our footprint. Before the pandemic, we Were only present in Dubai. Today, we have a presence in two cities in Australia, Singapore, three cities in the UAE and we recently entered Saudi Arabia as well.

In June, Bhal told ET that
Platform was doubling in non-metro markets As there was an increase in the adoption of home services in these markets.

In FY20, the company posted revenue of around Rs 216 crore, up from Rs 106 crore in FY19.

It reported a loss of Rs 137.8 crore for FY20.

The audited financials for FY21 are yet to be updated with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

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