Ramco goes bullish for global conquest

It was a chance but eventful meeting at an airport with Ramco Group’s top boss 5 years ago that changed his life. A few more interactions led Aggarwal to arrive in Chennai, interact with the Ramco team and share his pearls of wisdom. Then came a time for him to be fully engaged. After taking on the reins of the city-based Ramco Systems, he is like a man possessed. Shuttling between Singapore and Chennai frequently, he is driving the workforce to adapt, change and become nimble enough to provide new-gen technology-oriented IT product solutions to marquee clients globally. 

He tells us, “Generally, I am like a bull in a China shop! I just don’t seem to see what the other person might be thinking or doing. I have a sense of urgency to get things done. If not, then I feel out of place. The thing that helps a person in this endeavour is the absence of desire. I don’t have any further positions to aspire to or seek favours from anybody or own any money or stocks. In fact, the first set of investors saw me as the biggest risk given that I had so little stock in the company and what if I ran away? But I feel a sense of purpose and vision to build a global brand and that’s all that matters,” says Aggarwal, who operates in a company, that was traditionally resistant to change. 

“When I joined, a lot of decisions had to be taken in a great hurry. We had to cut manpower, cash losses and let some redundancies go. We had to cut salaries, product lines and take painful decisions as there were people who had worked with Mr Rajha, from the beginning. He was very emotional about them. But I persisted.”

He adds, “The business of Intellectual Property (IP) is such that you can’t be too brutal. So, in that sense my hands are tied.” He feels that the task of building a global brand is proving to be more difficult than he envisaged and hence, he is unable to specify the timeline to achieve the goal. 

A matter of pride is Ramco’s ability of having 3 Fortune 500 companies as clients and winning bids for a large European Bank from 14 countries amidst tough competition from $12 billion and $7 billion-sized entities, he says. 

“My aim is to make Ramco a global brand, which is recognized anywhere in the world. That is my ambition. Creating global brands is not a child’s play,” says Aggarwal. Ramco has taken 50 per cent of the advertising space in Mumbai airport. 

“Once we have money, we will make sure every airport in the world has our name or we will popularise the name through what we do. For instance, every pay slip of our client companies, carries our logo as we process salaries globally. Even the logistics bar code carries our label. That’s the ambition – whether we realise or not remains to be seen,” he adds. 

While the Singapore govt has sanctioned $3 million for the exotic work Ramco does, back in India, he faces situations which highlight the lack of trust.

“There’s no trust in this country,” he laments, citing some of the unsavoury experiences involving bureaucracy. 

“In India, we don’t brand, we don’t position. We, as a country, as a group of people think in doing and not in communicating. Small companies in Sweden have many global brands – Scania, Volvo – but we have nothing. Even a small country like Singapore has Singapore Airlines. We don’t have a single brand for a country of this size. Primarily because we don’t focus on branding, packaging, positioning which holds back companies.” 

“The crime of delaying a decision is as much as a person taking a decision,” he opines. 

He claims he doesn’t work hard. “I don’t stay late in office. I lay tremendous emphasis on starting the day early. My attention span is extremely small. 

A person who is not able to work with minimal instruction is not someone I give any work. I surround myself with people who are sharp, intelligent and understand quickly and get the job done. I have zero patience for bureaucracy, says Aggarwal, who has even empowered his personal secretary to makes mistakes.