Beyond the Comfort Zone - Interview with Mallu Huralikoppi of Printform

[Music] so we are on this wonderful episode of beyond the comfort zone i have here ceo of print form malu copy and joining us today and talking to us about his entrepreneurship and leadership thank you for joining us mallow thanks harry it's a pleasure thanks for having me on your podcast absolutely um so you know i know we were just talking about your business and how you got to print form and all of that can you just tell our audience a little bit about what print form does what type of manufacturing sure uh print form is uh you know a prototype to production that itself is a punchline so we help customers uh you know who come with the new design uh with their prototype needs um to the stage where they go back to actual production so the classic example would be let's say any automotive industry which is planning parts for the new electric car might come with a new complex or just a need-based part and that's where we come in and help them and then once they come back with maybe 10 more parts then we still exist and once it goes to actual mass manufacturing that's when you know we we don't have a role to play then it goes to their ancillaries or they do it in-house so we cater to different industries uh from automotive uh aerospace uh consumer products um robotics and oil and gas so we pretty much cover all the industries which basically need any manufacturing and prototyping part that's very exciting so you get to be on the front end of many new products yep we get to see the first awesome um and print form was founded in 2017 correct of december yep and um can you tell us just a little bit about its growth in history yes we started in 2018 we went live in april of 2018 and i brought in the seed money to start all the operations uh we started with typically any other startup would do bootstrap i brought in some people from the industry brought in different subject matter experts to start the company and then started had office in alfred started with regis easy plug and play and started with like a combination of different softwares to use online to track the crm we started with salesforce for the accounts we started to use quickbooks and different platforms for digital marketing and uh beyond 2018 of august that's when we um started to get actual customers um so we ended the year with half a million dollar in the next eight months that was for entire of 2018 and uh you know from there on uh business has been good growing and we almost grown about 400 percent in the last four years so that's where we are and uh and we continue to grow at least about more than 50 to 100 every year that's absolutely incredible hopefully some of uh your secrets for fast growth can be shared to other leaders who are watching us yeah we believe in scaling more than you know growth and that's been our mantra uh you know that's the term we use in india that's a secret uh what you call ingredient uh to focus more on scaling right so and that brings in a lot of innovation so that's our strength now what would you say is a common myth about your field of expertise uh but it's very new uh people are still not aware of what happens in the led manufacturing or 3d printing world i think people are aware but they always get confused between when you say 3d printing they think that we are like any other printing company which makes you know either brochures or you know that's the myth what we come across in most of the times when the moment we say oh print form so you do printing right so then we say no no we do printing but we use 3d printing as a technology and forming is we form the part so it's a technology used to form the part so that's when you know people say oh okay now we understand so that's a you know we always come across that because we when we say printing then people think it's different printing yeah the assumption is still 2d for about everything what would you say is the biggest challenge that your business or industry is facing right now i think that it's totally uh getting involved with the technology right so code what it did was it did affect a lot of industries which would do innovations like you know aerospace and uh you know but it opened up other markets like consumer products where a lot of healthcare companies started to do research and what should be the new you know ways of working around the code you know so uh i think the the data is there i think it's more moving towards how do we use this data so even in this industry people have started to realize that um you know rpa or machine learning ai is the way to go right so technology is going to be driven even in this industry as well tell me you know a leader such as yourself um found this company tell me about the most influential person in your life and how they impacted you into who you are today i think it's uh not just one person right so i keep telling people you know when i reach out to um i'm on the board of a couple of networking like the ceo council in atlanta i'm part of i'm the board of thai which is again a networking group um and these people are very successful right they've done well and i'm on both sides sometimes i'm talking to them as a you know mentor and sometimes i'm talking to them as a you know entrepreneur so it depends on what platform you're in so what i tell usually people is that i look up for friends more than mentors right so your mentors are your friends because first they have to listen to you without commenting anything on how it should be done and that's where that comfort zone is so i think i have more people like if you look at thai itself it's a a network of people like sid mukherjee was done very well sold companies uh he's the name in the retail world today in startups like he's tied up with atdc georgia tech you name it you know tech village so they're they're people who are there so he is a brand name raj palin swami who's again been very successful with what he does um you know of course there are a lot of people whom i reach out to i just don't hesitate talking to anybody right so i think that's that's my strength is that i don't feel afraid to ask people hey am i doing it correctly what do you think so taking your opinion is always important so it becomes difficult for me to say that i just look at somebody as one person who can help me versus you know i try to network with people and see what is their strength right or learn from a couple of things which they think that we should not be doing right so you know that i think that's that's how i as an entrepreneur look at things you know maybe maybe i'm a little different than the rest but i think that's it it separates us right as each individual well it sounds like you validate you collective knowledge and wisdom from others yep yep that's important right so it's very difficult to have in one person you know whether it's uh you know if you look at all the successful people whether it's uh bill gates uh you know or just deaf business each one of them has their own right journeys right so you can learn pick up the best thing and i'm sure when you try to connect with your story there is always that dot which gets connected when you listen to those like i was listening to yesterday on friday to the sea of green light right so uh i was able to connect like how you know exactly he was looking out for partners and how he the network helped and how you know people like atdc thai came into picture so it's the same path we are all taking in different ways but ultimately the success is something which gets there depending on the you know how focused you are how passionate you are in that journey excellent i'm curious if you could go back and tell your 18 year old self one piece of advice what would it be succeed uh at the early age in entrepreneurship uh you you it's good to take risk uh when you're in your you know either late 20s or early 20s uh because you have a free of mind right you're nothing to lose so that's one advice i always tell the next generation because i teach entrepreneurship now for high schoolers what he said was tell high schoolers uh to succeed early it was last thing yeah succeed or fail early right so they need to know both right so what happens is then they they can define it and if they succeed then they can do a lot of good things for the world right because now they have the bandwidth money name everything so i think entrepreneurship we succeeded at an early age uh then you know uh people like us what's you know we have done many things right but what is success mean to you today is it you succeed to an extent where you can say that i don't have to work from you know eight to six i don't have to worry about things i can still play golf on any given day and still do what i want to do right maybe be an entrepreneur but now you're more of a mentor slash friend to a lot of these startups so i think you can do all that when you succeed early is that what success means to you right now yeah i think i can do like a lot of that uh my experience with angsters because i like the way they're fearless their knowledge is amazing you know they're go getters you give them something and they will come up with 10 different ways of solving a problem so you know that's that's i feel that's very exciting you know i get excited when i see such kids now you talk about you know fail early as well um what would you say your biggest failure is and what did you learn from it um maybe the way we think right when we start uh we are worrying about how to run the business you know instead of focusing on what you're good at right that's one of the things i tell my angel group right i'm part of angel group that we need to bring in expertise into any company we invest the reason for that is when you have a subject matter expert it becomes easy for the entrepreneur to focus on what he entrepreneur always comes with the idea he doesn't know how to market he doesn't know how to sell he doesn't know how to you know run the payrolls all that experience is not there but he tries to learn it because you don't have the help right so i would say that if we can bring in that right well that's where i felt that sometimes it takes a lot of effort and that becomes either that defines your success or failure in the journey so i would say that if you have that eco cycle then it becomes easy for the entrepreneur to focus on what he's good at makes a lot of sense focus on what you're good at and bring the right resources around you sure without adding too much of cost right then it boils down to where's the money yes especially in startup right right so if you can network around it right that's what we've been saying to in fact one of my ideas is to see how we can knock on to the doors of the startups instead of their reaching those pro saying hey what are your top three problems right like there are many startups in mary you know whether it's atdc uh you know tech village anywhere you just go find the list knock the doors and ask hey what help do you need where do you think are your biggest challenges i think that's how that's those are my takeaways saying that nobody even you know i was not able to reach out to anybody who could even think about it you know because everybody is trying to say no no you need to hire the best guy but that comes with the price but ultimately i don't have the money so it's it's a situation where you know if it's network it helps each other to flourish and then that's how these startups will become you know succeeding more than you know failing so really the power of a network and resources yes over internal hiring and you know kind of standard business practices right awesome um i'm curious what you know business one thing you know in this process of forming print form and bringing it to where it is today um happens that you did not expect i think the growth right um what we didn't expect was that um which will be much faster you know uh hiring people or the growth of getting business right so in this whole journey i found out that the only way we can you know grow is scale it right the scale was all about innovation as i told you bringing in those right tools and help the people like so in our line of business the most difficult part is selling when somebody comes to the door and how because the response time has to be quick there are competitors who are trying to compete with us and a small 200 customer can become a million dollars so your risks are very high if you don't treat them if you see a gmail or a yahoo you say hey i don't know whether this can be a prospect you know is a good prospect or is it going to give me a million dollar if you do you know you start evaluating that person maybe you're losing a big customer right so and also the the focus areas like the time taken to create a core time taken to create a invoice you know all those things which are more of a data work so we took them away we said okay one click click click it should be automated and that helps the sales guy to focus on what he's good at right it's a good problem to have now if he's able to reach 15 customers in a day with all this data work i would see that how can you reach 30 people now it's a good problem for any company's growth right individual growth so instead of adding people now you're adding technology which will help them to grow and in turn it helps the company to grow and your cash flow looks good at the end of the day what are some indispensable tools or um resources that you have that um you know make it honestly indispensable for you to do what you're doing or your sales people your team to do what they're doing so i think the research in every aspect of the business right if you look at digital marketing uh there are thousands of way of doing out or reaching out and we know that this is a big country and too many customers and you can't have business development people going around the country right so the only way we could reach out was through digital marketing now even there when you break it down there are six or seven ways of doing it right like you have meta tags for your organic searches you have adwords you have email campaigns social media all those now what is the best thing for you i think one thing we did was we put a team to do a research for six months so we found out tools which are going to be a subscription based and we will test more than one suppose for example if it's meta tag we found out three tools which could tell me which meta tag is the one which is working and based on the data after six months now we have our own uh a blue book i would call where we know okay for meta tags i use this for adwords i use this for my competitors keywords and competition i use this tool so i think that's the strength we have when we pick up something right if we look at digital marketing that's what we did and same thing we did with our sales so if the sales people came and said that i have a customer a and how do we reach out to more people so what we did we took that one customer who is uh you know started small became big we went and found found out similar 10 customers right or 10 prospects so now what happens is and we built the content around it so now when you actually look at it as a prospect you say okay this is what i want this is my need and i'm looking at a content which has been already worked on and that connects right and that's the memory which remains with you so we're trying to be a little bit you know i would say creative and innovative in every aspect of the business we do right whether it's sales digital marketing uh the way we we follow up with the customer in terms of you know getting paid on time right so we are more innovative on those where it helps with the tools right so that's our strength it sounds like you've brought in a lot of technology to really improve the processes of your business correct today if i if i want to know what is my return on investment on a ad which was clicked i have the tracking system which tells me how the customer came in whether it's a word of mouth or you know i i'm able to track all that i'm able to track that and then also give my sales people a forecast of you know leads based on the rating right so we have a color combination saying that it searches the moment you click and you come into our database it searches whether you are a new customer existing code you know different levels and puts you based on the coloring we have so if you're already a customer then it puts you at the top three top photo so that we want to respond back quickly and there is a story to narrate right so i can start my conversation with you saying that hey we see that you already have bought some parts from us tell us you know are you part of the same team or did you talk to this person who placed an order so what happens the conversation is at a different level all together so there is a comfort zone between the brand new prospect and us because we already know that they have there are customers so we start the conversation based on at what level they are in so use coloration to then help prioritize uh response essentially and then the types of responses that need to go back out correct awesome that sounds very um i know very helpful i guess to your team to be able to have that kind of information and data before they go make a call also we give them enough data like for example when i search for one customer i'm able to tell them what is the size of the company how many employees are there what are the industries they focus on so all that data is available to them they don't have to go to any website search for when they're called customers so the highlights automatically written some you know python script which pulls up the data and puts it in front of you right so basically when somebody has data in front of them the whole conversation with the other person is different because now you know that you're talking about them which makes the other person feel you know happy because now you've done your homework right so absolutely it's always better to know about your customer or potential customer rather than have them share it with you um so you know you're very process oriented very technology lots of tools i'm curious what's your favorite productivity hack for entrepreneurs productivity what's something you could share with others that might help save other people sometimes i think they when you write down right if you have five things you do in a day what are the things which will help you to automate right so that i think will help your productivity because everybody has certain bandwidth in a day where you can put in your 100 and then it starts going down right by the eighth hour maybe your energy is not the same or your brain is not working at the same pace at which you want it to work so one is prioritizing what you want to do for the day and then find those tools to help you to automate some of them because there are a lot of you know tools available they're not expensive but it's just that you need to find the right match of how to you know help you so very focused on automation right what's one question you wish i'd asked you that i haven't what is the reach of this podcast right how will it help different entrepreneurs talk and look at my inputs on automating their processes which will create more success stories you know that is one question i would definitely want you to ask me you know what does this automation mean why i'm so passionate about automation and will you tell my audience why you are so passionate about automation i think it it brings in a lot of discipline in the way business is done and you're on it's the thing is that you're continuously thinking different ways to get your customer into your door right the standard processes don't allow you to do that and today data the data allows you to do that like for example if i have two years data and i know when you came in as a customer last year instead of you reaching out if i give you a call two weeks before saying that hey listen you had reached out to us last year can i help you now so that itself is a big thing for the other person right so that's only possible when you have those tools in place which will help you to do all that right today i think the business is being done a lot of on the connect now right it's not like earlier because now earlier what is to happen was people used to not interact much because you would be let's say in the area i'm in the east coast we used to never see each other but with zoom one click you see each other so there is a connect yeah now face connect you know whom you're interacting with so what happens is with all these automations it just helps you to you know sell better connect better that relationship is built and i think this is a lot of many times business is done on the comfort and relationships right you talk a lot about relationships um and networking and building those can you give me you know one or two ways in your career you have worked to build those relationships that's been really successful for you what i was trying to say is whenever i meet anybody whether it's to network or one-on-one meetings i never tend to ask business with people no matter who they are i tend to you know connect with them to understand what is it that they are expecting from that whole discussion is it that they have something on the table do they have any you know concerns which they are wanting to talk and then you know i think the first meeting is all about just understanding what and why they are here to meet us right so and then the second one i would allow to talk about myself about the company what we do and the third could be a meeting where you say okay now i understand your problem i have a solution to it what do you think about it right it's always good to wait uh in business that the other person comes to you saying can you help me instead of you always going and knocking because people don't like it then they feel that hey every time malu calls me i know what's the agenda right he just wants to ask for more business or wants to see how can i get connected with the network of people he or she has so i think that's something which i tell people don't ever do that right so i think that's one takeaway and i would tell the entrepreneurs i know it's the human tendency to jump on the opportunity but i think waiting sometimes helps i think you're right you build a relationship first and then you can start figuring out how to help one another right so well the show was called beyond the comfort zone because i truly believe as entrepreneurs and leaders it's important for us to get out of our comfort zones and try new things and grow to always get to the next stage in our life and our growth so i'm curious what is the next thing that you want to do that's outside your comfort zone be more innovative uh again so that you know i can use that same time to help the budding entrepreneurs right so i think that's one thing i always look at if you if you see in the last seven days at least six different new startups have reached out to me seeking help from nowhere i i don't know them i haven't spoken to them they connect on linkedin and they say hey this is where i need your help so i think when they come to me i need to still unlock at that time and that's only possible when i'm trying to finish up my work and still have the frame of mind and i have to prepare myself right so i think that's where i try to focus more on in the same amount of time you know because i can't stretch hours beyond certain hours right i don't want to lose out on the things i do right so at the end of the day so i think it's good to work around what you have without affecting your primary thing you know what you're trying to do well that sounds great i really appreciate you taking the time to join me today on here and tell the world a little bit about yourself and the cool things that you are doing at print form and um some of the really cool ideas around automation so it's been great learning from you and thank you very much [Music]