You have had a remarkable growth in your career at a young age, what were the strategies adopted by you that proved to be the key to your success?

Starting anything new requires one to learn and adapt as quickly as possible, particularly when the benchmarks are already set high. I believe that one has to be open to learning from others and working in a team rather than focusing on being an individual contributor. I feel that my attitude to listen to the people around me and take their ideas into consideration before making a decision has greatly helped me enhance my own leadership skills. My focus has been to curate the team with the right blend of knowledge, experience and an open, transparent culture that facilitates a healthy discussion and results in the best outcome.

How do you stay updated with the advancements in the healthcare sector?

Being in the biotechnology sector means we have to keep ourselves updated on the technological advances and the needs of our customers. Customer satisfaction is deep-rooted within our company culture. Our customer facing teams on ground as well as our scientific and technical teams which work at the back-end are all updated on the recent developments in the industry. In today’s age, information becomes redundant too soon. Staying connected with our customers gives us a competitive edge. So, we constantly keep ourselves abreast of the latest in the Indian and global industry through regular training sessions and dissemination of scientific informative material.

Any key decisions or actions that have made an impact on your career choice?

Commitment and perseverance are the key values that have made a big impact on my choice of career. To start with, it is paramount to have a good strategic vision and execution plan. However, converting a plan into reality takes a lot of commitment and belief. All big projects are long-term projects and take time to yield results. As a leader, the challenge is to keep up the momentum through all the changes and challenges. As humans, we all may feel dejected at some point or other and question the value of the project. But believing in the final outcome and working patiently towards the final goal can yield results. This is something I bring to practice in my day-to-day routine.

What are your key achievements that you would like to share?

With the company already having achieved fantastic success in India, I set my vision to transcend the next level and to be successful internationally. In my opinion, in order to achieve our next goal of being one amongst the top five IVD Companies, world-wide, we would need to leverage our global resources and build on our reputation of offering quality and affordable diagnostics.

I am glad that in my capacity as the CEO of the Erba-Transasia International Group of Companies, I have been able to contribute to the global operations. Today, we have direct operations in 17 countries outside India. Our production sites located in the Europe and the US have developed a whole new product line with technologies and quality comparable to the best US, European or Japanese competitors. Everything within our company has been transformed to be world-class, one that would be competitive in any country around the world.

Our country faced a huge fall back last year amidst pandemic, which created a need for advance and quality healthcare in India so, what were the changes you and your organization went through to deal with the situation?

2020 brought with it a lot of distress not just for India but the world. As a country, we have always known that India’s healthcare infrastructure is severely lacking and needs to be strengthened with better quality products and newer technologies. In my opinion, the pandemic simply accelerated the inevitable and highlighted things that would have otherwise taken years or decades to be seen.

For us at Transasia, I think the pandemic gave us an additional impetus to accelerate our goals and do better. It forced us to be more efficient and evaluate our internal strengths and weakness that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

I believe ‘problem’ is just another word for opportunity. And while we did face a lot of challenges due to the pandemic, we have successfully been able to overcome them. We have been able to re-think and re-build many of our systems and process and this has helped us be agile, and react quickly to contribute to the fight against the pandemic.

The learnings of 2020 will definitely strengthen our company for many more years to come!

According to you, what are the important tools required for successful growth in one’s career?

All of us have our own set of strengths and weaknesses and we need to identify our own set of tools to leverage them. To me, communication is one of the most important tools and can be a game-changer in evaluating the success of a team. As a leader, it is important to clearly communicate the expectations, ideas and plans in order for the team to function as one large, well connected unit and deliver desired results.

Which was the first organization you worked with and how long you have been in the healthcare industry?

I have completed various internships in reputed healthcare companies in Italy, France and Germany, and have learnt a lot from all of them. My first full time and most fulfilling role began in 2014 at Transasia Bio-Medicals Ltd., under the apprenticeship of my father. A year later, I took over as the CEO of one of our European subsidiaries, and have grown from there.