RAVIZUTSHI

In 1971, I graduated as an engineer from Delhi College of Engineering. Some years later, I also completed a part-time MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi — one of the finest management institutes in the country. I had no idea that decade would turn into five and a half.

Since then, I’ve worked inside chemical plants and power plants for ten years. I’ve managed operations in polymer plants. I spent another ten years at Xerox, deep in the world of photoreceptors and copier internals, learning how precision manufacturing actually works when the tolerance for error is close to zero. Then five-plus years in an electronics company, manufacturing picture tubes and electron guns — a world where invisible physics has to translate into a working product, every single time.

Somewhere along the way, I even packed a bag and tried my hand at a cable and wire manufacturing venture in the United States. The catch: it ran on reconditioned, secondhand machines, and the whole process never sat right with me. I came back to India within a few months — and that experience taught me as much as any of the successes.

Then I did something most people told me was too risky at my stage: I started my own company, with very little capital. Today, that business trades and manufactures ESD (electrostatic discharge) control and cleanroom products — workstations, bins, trays, crates — serving industries where a single spark of static electricity can destroy a product worth lakhs.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize.

None of these industries — power, polymers, imaging, electronics, or entrepreneurship — talk to each other in most people’s careers. But I’ve stood inside all of them. And what I’ve found is that the real problems businesses face — discipline in execution, quality control, managing people through failure, building something from nothing — look remarkably similar whether you’re running a power plant or a two-person import business.

That’s the perspective I now want to bring to other business owners and leaders: not theory, but five decades of having actually been in the room when things went wrong, and having to fix them.

I’m building a new chapter — as a business coach and consultant — to pass on what fifty-five years in the trenches taught me.

If you’re a founder, a plant manager, or a business owner wrestling with execution, quality, or simply “how do I make this work with what I have,” I’d love to connect.

— Ravi Zutshi