'Don't get emotionally attached to your business'

As part of our International Women's Day celebrations, we speak with young women who are making a difference to the society we live in. Here Shweta Mangal of Dial 1298 for Ambulance tells Abhishek Mande why she quit her job and decided to start an ambulance service.

Dial 1298 for Ambulance is a popular ambulance service in Mumbai. The service has now extended its operations to the states of Bihar and Kerala and will soon be launched in Rajasthan too.

The beauty of 1298 is its cross-subsidy model that makes it the only self-sustaining ambulance service in the world. It's a simple principle -- patients using the ambulance to go to private hospitals pay the full charge so that those visiting government hospitals can use it on a subsidised rate!

1298 has turned ambulance service, that has so far been perceived as charity, into a successful and professionally managed business. The ambulances are fully equipped to deal with any eventualities and even come with a doctor on board. It was started in 2004 by a handful of US-returned Indians -- Naresh Jain, Ravi Krishna, Shaffi Mather, Manish Sacheti and the 32-year-old Shweta Mangal who left her cushy marketing job and decided to head it.

In this interaction, Mangal discusses the challenges they faced in introducing a concept that is currently a being studied at Harvard.

Sometime in 2003, my friend and partner Shaffi's mother in Kochi choked in the middle of the night. Shaffi had no clue what to do. He did not know any ambulance service he could call and no one to turn to for help. Finally, he drove her to the nearest hospital in his car. This shook him completely. Oddly enough, around the same time Ravi's mother collapsed in Manhattan. Four minutes after they called 911 an ambulance was waiting to take her to a hospital! Later, in another incident a common friend of ours had an accident on a highway in Gujarat. He could've been saved but he bled to death. These series of incidents got all of us thinking. The initial idea was to produce a white paper and give it to the government. But then we thought if we had to do something, we'd rather go the whole hog.

In 2004, we purchased two ambulances and started off. The idea was never to make money or convert it into a business. That was when Sam Pitroda pointed out that we should do this on a sustainable basis.

We realised that anything that runs on charity, unless backed by a big corporate house, eventually dies out. Worse still when people get used to a service such as this and it runs out of steam what do they do?

The biggest expense then was buying of ambulances, each costing anywhere between Rs 18-20 lakh. For two years we kept investing our funds and realised that at an operational level we were making money. Of course it was a lean structure at the time. The directors and promoters were not taking any money. The only people who were being paid were the people on the field.

Having tested the waters for two years, we started approaching venture capitalists. Finally in 2007 the first set of funding came in, which we used to expand our base in Mumbai.

The challenges
Our preferred number was 1299. We approached the minister who was quite impressed and helped us a lot. He signed the necessary papers immediately and passed them on to the lower officer. As it happened, this fellow wanted us to bribe him, which we refused.

The proposal kept getting delayed and finally after a year we got 1298, because he had somehow managed to create a pre-dated proposal and granted the number to some other company.

Then came the question of money. Raising it is always a challenge. Banks kept refusing our proposals. No one wanted to lend money to a company with no history.

In the initial years only friends and family came to the rescue. They helped us a lot. We drew from our personal funds to pay salaries and other expenses.

Later when we came up with the idea of using space on the ambulances to advertise socially responsible brands, we faced hurdles. Everyone praised our idea but no one came forward with the money. How do you tell someone to advertise on something you would not want to use in your life?

The whole process however taught us a lot. You keep reading quotes on how impossible is nothing. We lived it.

Traditionally, public ambulance services across the world are either run by NGOs or by governments. In the UK, the health department runs them. In the US it is partly subsidised and covered by insurance. In other countries (such as Norway) it is on a subscription basis. Private ambulance services exist across the world. But then again they cater only to the extremely rich. There was no service that catered to the entire spectrum till we came in.

The model works on cross-subsidy. People who want to go to a private hospital pay the full charges. Those who go to the government hospital pay upto half the charges. In case of an emergency or an accident, we don't charge anything. We pick up the accident victim off the road and admit him/her into the closest government hospital.

The fact that this is the only self-sustaining model of this nature in the world has caught the fancy of everyone including the people at Harvard who are teaching it as a case study.

Reaching out to small-town India
I grew up in Beawar, a small trading town about an hour away from Ajmer in Rajasthan. However I never went to a day school because there was no school that would provide me good education. I grew up in a hostel, which I hated.

Beawar is where Shree Cement has its factory. Just like my parents people who live and work there send their kids to Ajmer every morning.

The idea of setting up a school was to make quality education available to kids of these families. So I got a piece of land, put together financial resources and started a co-education day school in Beawar.

When we started in 2007 we had 116 students. Today we have over 550 kids! The school is called Newton School and my brother looks into its day-to-day functioning with a team of professionals. We have also taken over the management of another school in a town near Kochi. That one is now called Eastern Newton School. It has 900 students and was being run by a group called Eastern Group.

We started off with the idea to build the Newton brand across small towns in India, where people have the money but do not have the kind of services that metros have.

I finished my graduation and went to the US to study marketing and finance at the Rochester Institute of Technology when I was 20. I worked in the US for two years and returned to India at 24.

Around 2002 I joined Essel Group (that owns the Zee Television network) and became part of a start-up team that was setting up the first malls in India. I worked there for about two-and-a-half years. Meanwhile the insurance sector was opening up and AIG was setting up shop. I spent three years there and learnt everything that was there to learn in marketing. It was here that the idea for 1298 really came through. All of us however were conscious of not leaving our jobs and pursuing the idea nonetheless. We informed our respective companies of what we were doing and also hired a team to roll it out.

Meanwhile I moved jobs and joined Marico, where I headed the Kaya Skin Clinic business, again a start-up. Meanwhile major funding came through and we realised that one of us had to step out. That one was to be me.

Finding love
It is not easy to find love even in a city like Mumbai for an independent person who has her own ideas. Thankfully I have been fortunate to have someone who has accepted me for who I am and what I do.

He works with Earnst and Young and is supportive of my endeavour.

I have always believed that you have one life and you have to live it to the fullest. It is not about how much money you make or how luxurious your lifestyle is. It is the name that you leave behind that matters.

I am glad that the man I have met appreciates what I do and, more importantly, respects it. We are planning to get married sometime in June.

Future plans
Today we have 51 ambulances in Mumbai, 30 in Kerala and another 11 in Patna. Now that the model is stable, we would like to replicate it across the country. So we are hoping to take 1298 to all the major cities in India in the next three years or so. To reach out to the rural areas, we have to work with the government and are bidding for tenders as and when we can.

• Very often people wait for 'the right time' to implement their ideas. The key is not to wait. If there is an idea you believe in go ahead. There will never be a perfect time.
• It is good to take people along with you on your journey. Take the help of friends who believe in your project and you. Hire professionals who are willing to join you. Build a team that you can fall back on and bounce ideas off.
• Be patient and persistent. The first two or three years are the most crucial in starting a business and very often the time when most businesses fail. This happens not because the idea was not great but rather because the person whose idea it was stopped believing in it.
• Be passionate about your idea and have the right attitude. You can be as intelligent as they come but without any passion you won't go far.
• Don't get emotionally attached to your business. Surround yourself with the right people. Professionalise your outfit at the earliest instance. Remember you cannot multi-task beyond a point. Let go and let go to the right people.

Message for Women's day
It is important for a woman to find her identity and move on from being someone's wife, mother or daughter. For this she needs to believe in herself. If a lot of women come forward, India will be a better place to live in for the future generations.

I am always asked if it is difficult being a woman in the corporate world. In some ways it is, in other ways it isn't. Think of it, when a woman does something out of the ordinary everyone talks about it. If a man does it, it is expected of him and doesn't get a lot of attention. Make the most of what life gives you.