The Venture Intelligence Blog

Manish Sabharwal, Co-Founder of leading staffing services company Teamlease, that pulled off a successful IPO in the choppy environment of early 2016, weighed in with typical flourish on various issues as part of the inaugural panel at the Venture Intelligence APEX'16 PE-VC Summit  (Bangalore; March 9). Some highlights: "India's Brand is Warm - Not Hot or Cold" India's brand is that 'We won't be Hot or Cold; we will be consistently Warm'. We will be 'between 5 and 8' - in terms of growth rates. If we are growing at 5%, don't worry, we'll soon go to 8%. If we are growing at 8%, then we'll pretty soon we will go down to 5%. I don't think we'll ever grow at 13%. Which is why, for us entrepreneurs, the current economic weather is not so relevant. Click Here  for the related video Lessons from China - Decentralization and Strong Leadership  Decentralization and Strong Leadership are more important lessons to ta...

Manish Sabharwal, founder of education and staffing services firm Teamlease (who earlier founded and sold India Life) articulates in an article in Mint, how he went about choosing his latest set of PE/VC Investors. Sabharwal and Reddy decided to raise Rs. 100 crore to start with. But since both labour and education are highly regulated, Sabharwal was cautious about finding the right financier. “We wanted a domestic investor because they understand India. We didn’t want a tourist investor from the US who would give us a high valuation but freak out every time an article appeared in the newspaper,” he says. Sabharwal spoke to 5-10 investors. “I did my due diligence, about the personalities in the investing firm, talked to people at their investee companies, and other companies that they had dealings with. I tried to get a match of how long we think it’s going to take and how long they are going to give us.” Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on private eq...

Forbes India has an article on how staffing services firm Teamlease is transforming the vocational training firm IIJT that it acquired in March 2010. If the term “university” evokes images of quadrangles, high ceilings and large windows, perish the thought. IIJT centre in Bangalore is a three-storied building not far from the bustling shops of Brigade Road. Inside, students in their late teens or early 20s occupy the classrooms — some so narrow that each row seats only four. The small, sparsely furnished offices behind the reception double up as interview rooms for visiting companies. Not your typical university campus. Yet, this could do what some of the colleges have failed to do — produce employable students. The centres would be small, functional, located close to students and most importantly, cost less. TeamLease has centralised common functions (such as HR, legal, finance and IT) even to the level of trainers. Star trainers are hard to get in the hinterland, and expensive to hi...

Extract from the speech of Manish Sabharwal, Chairman of TeamLease, at a discussion organized by Businessworld , There are basically five faultlines in education but the interesting part is that these five faultlines — quantity versus quality, repair versus prepare, price versus cost, funding versus delivery, and excellence versus inclusion — don’t only apply to higher education...How we handle the trade-offs in these five faultlines will actually decide the difference (between growth and underdevelopment). ...Finally, we have to deal with excellence versus inclusion. John Gardner, then secretary of education, US, asked a profound question: can we be equal and excellent at the same time? That’s an important question in the context of reservations, but now I think about it in terms of quality versus quantity — the entry gate versus the exit gate. So, you can be like the IITs and IIMs, with tight entry gates and wide open exit gates. Or you could be like the Chartered Accountants’ Instit...