Aiding automobiles

MY BIG IDEA

Ramesh Suri looks a bit unusual sitting in a hotel lobby and talking into an antiquated walkie-talkie. But he clearly has a hands-on approach to business.

A few years ago, after his car broke down, he decided to set up a 24-hour car helpline service to aid stranded commuters whose vehicles had broken down.

Cross Roads has grown over the years to include a variety of services and has recently started a helpline for two-wheelers. The company now has a turnover of Rs 4 crore and over 100,000 members. And though Suri knew little about the business when he began, Cross Roads is today run professionally.

MY FAMILY migrated to Delhi from Pakistan and I was brought up here. My father had a shop in the Old Sabzi Mandi area. However, in 1975 the market was demolished.

The loss of the shop hit us very hard and shortly afterwards, my father had a heart attack and passed away. My brothers and I did whatever we could to keep the family going. My elder brother opened a juice shop and after completing my graduation through correspondence, I even worked briefly as a rickshaw-puller.

In 1978, I got a job with a retail shop in Sadar Bazaar. After eight years of working there, I was confident enough to start something on my own, and got into the business of distributing zip fasteners for various manufacturers. The business grew over the years and is still doing quite well.

A few years ago, I was driving home from office one night when my car broke down. Although it wasn't very late "" it must have been around 9 pm "" there was no service station near by and I was greatly inconvenienced as a result.

It struck me that many others must be having similar experiences and perhaps there would be demand for a car helpline service. On surfing the Internet, I discovered that the concept was common in other countries, and so I decided to act on it.

With an investment of around Rs 5 lakh from my existing business, I bought six second-hand Omni vans and some wireless sets, placed newspaper advertisements and hired a few mechanics to work for me. Thus Cross Roads was born in 1999.

The idea was simple enough: if someone was stranded on the road with no help around, they could call us and one of our vans would reach the spot and fix the problem on the road itself.

Of course, there were hitches. Some of my mechanics fleeced me in the early days, taking advantage of my lack of technical knowledge "" they would misutilise the spare parts and give me inflated cost estimates. But gradually I developed an understanding of the business and since then I have been able to maintain a better control on operations.

Our USP was that we were priced very low "" just Rs 365 for a year's membership. In our first year, we got 100 customers per month and word of mouth helped the business to take off.

Over time, we added more services and also began tying up with companies like Ceat, Exide and Bharat Petroleum. For instance, you can get a 10 per cent discount on certain purchases at a Bharat Petroleum petrol pump if you show our membership card.

Keeping in view the heavy traffic on Delhi's roads, we started sending our mechanics for jobs on bikes, which helped reduce the reaching time and increase efficiency. Then it struck me that we could start a similar help line for two-wheelers, and we did that two months ago.

We've come a long way from our six second-hand vans; today we have 40 vehicles and 70 mechanics, and we work to high professional standards. Our operations are computerised and we keep records of all our jobs and customers.

Apart from our standard Rs 365-a-year sevice, we now also have a premium service priced at Rs 999. Under this, we provide free pollution checkups and oil tuning every quarter, and personal accident insurance of Rs 1 lakh.

We started out in Delhi, but soon included the whole National Capital Region in our canvas. My next plan is to make our helpline available on the Delhi-Chandigarh and Delhi-Agra highways. And if that's a success, we might think of spreading our business to other metros as well.

As told toJai Arjun Singh