Leadership Journeys [90] - Sanjay Borkar - "You have to involve all your stakeholders in your dreams"

This is the Leadership Journey series on the Choosing Leadership Podcast.I believe we all have a lot to learn from each other's stories - of where we started, where we are now, and our successes and struggles on the way. With this series of interviews, my attempt is to give leaders an opportunity to share their stories and for all of us to learn from their generous sharing. If you know a leader whom you would like to see celebrated on the show, please send me a message on LinkedIn with their name.In this heartfelt conversation, Sanjay shares his story of starting out as an entrepreneur 27 years ago and the challenges he faced. He shared how he has grown and evolved as a person along the way, and his vision of contribution and serving the agricultural world through technology. He also shares the powerful but often invisible role our co-founders and families play in our success. You can find Sanjay at the below linkshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjayborkar/[email protected] the interview, Sanjay sharesWe were first-generation entrepreneurs when we founded our company, and I would say that the toughest part is we did not have any experience working anywhere. Santosh and I, came from agricultural families but studied computer engineering in the University and we felt we should marry agriculture and IT so software. We were offered to go and work in Brazil by our first client. However, Santosh and I didn't find it very attractive. He even offered to come to our houses and speak to our parents.We approached the Department of Agriculture to see if we could work with the and we fortunately got the opportunity to develop design and develop a multimedia content for them. We learnt that information has to be always given free but the services are to be charged or sold. You have to involve your stakeholders, employees, customers, vendors, your banks or financial partners etc in your dreams and vision so that you can all be in the same page. You need to learn how to communicate with everyone successfully so you can get your work done through a very right way of communication.for next three to five years, definitely we want to be one of the top five companies in the world who are serving agriculture typically as a smart platform. Secondly, we want to add value to all our customers not just by providing them with technical solutions, but also helping them practice regenerative agriculture. So internally in the organization we inculcate a lot of leadership trainings and behavior to create more leaders. We most importantly try to hand over the entire responsibility to a leader and give them complete freedom to work on the projectI'm very grateful For my friend and co-founder Santosh together with my family and his family and definitely not forgetting our employees.