Aabhas Sharma meets Uday Punj whose twin passions are people and technology. He brings them together in Chimes, an aviation academy.
For someone who has spent a majority of his professional life in the oil and gas sector, it’s surprising to know that Uday Punj has been a part of 11 new entrepreneurial ventures.
Punj, the founder-director of the Punj Lloyd Group, loves the fact that he is an entrepreneur and can experiment in different areas — an expertise in any one area, he feels, doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t venture into other businesses.
Punj’s latest venture is the Chimes Aviation Academy which will train future pilots. Investing in people is something that Punj is passionate about. His other passion is technology and he tries to blend both these in his areas of work.
“My main aim is to enable people and to empower them with skills in various walks of life.” With Chimes, he has ventured into areas which will enable him to do that.
When not busy with people and technology, Punj takes time out for adventure travel. Last year, he went to Bhutan for a 63-kilometre trek, something, he claims, he never imagined he would complete but took on just for the fun of it.
“Somehow, I managed to complete the trek and since then, have been completely hooked on to trekking.” He was initiated into it by a friend who runs an adventure travel company and is extremely delighted to have discovered it.
“It gave me a chance to explore a totally different side of me.” Next year — and he’s eagerly looking forward to it — it’ll possibly be an even more strenuous trek in Mongolia for Punj.
A busy man with a number of businesses to look after, Punj has little time to spare but whatever little he does get is spent with his wife and two sons, aged 16 and 13, who he says are at an age where they need “more of their father’s time rather than their mother’s”.
With Chimes Aviation Academy, Punj wants to create the right environment to train pilots. But isn’t it too late to venture into this business as there are already established players? “There is enough scope for success,” he says.
Though he is clear that he doesn’t want to overload his academy with more students than he can handle. Quality over quantity seems to be his mantra. And he also wants to curb the number of aspiring pilots heading off to foreign shores to get trained. “Overseas, they aren’t too interested in the training methods as they know it won’t affect their aviation standards,” he opines.
Punj, during our interaction, at various points uses a lot of cliches like “quality over quantity” or “slow and steady wins the race”.
He says that he started working at the age of 17, though still went to Sri Ram College of Commerce to complete his graduation, that too because he didn’t want to be classified as someone “who didn’t even attend college”.
However, he says that after ten years of working he felt that there was this need to become more savvy in terms of meeting people and interacting with them as well as learning a few nuances of marketing (which explains the use of marketing jargon).
So he took time out to attend a lot of short term executive programmes at top US universities as well as at the Indian School of Business, which he says have been extremely beneficial for him.
As an entrepreneur, Punj has ventured into infrastructure, IT services, even food (he was on the management board of the venture instrumental in bringing the chain TGIF to India).
Question him about any particular venture that is extremely close to his heart, and he says, “That would be the ones which actually didn’t do too well, to our expectations.” He says that those particular ventures taught him a lot of lessons in approaching newer ventures.
Punj feels that an entrepreneur shouldn’t be restricted to his core competence or any one focus area.
“The beauty lies in exploring new areas of interest and then watching them grow.” It’s safe to say that it won’t be a surprise to see Punj diversifying in other areas in the near future. His entrepreneurial spirit won’t let him stick to any one particular venture.
