Ambur Iyyappa – the man who saw tomorrow.
If Ambur Iyyappa had not lost his job in 2009, he probably would not have been a dollar multimillionaire today. And if Flipkart had not offered a job to Ambur Iyyappa on that fateful day in 2009, the company’s fortunes may have been quite different.
For both the man and the startup, that simple twist of fate became a tipping point.
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who founded Flipkart in 2007 and began running the path-breaking online bookstore out of its first office in Bengaluru, delivered their first online order in October of that year to V V K Chandra, a customer in Mahabubnagar. Since that historic sale, the volume of orders began to grow. A time came when the fledgling startup, growing exponentially, handled about a hundred orders a day. Sachin and Binny realized that they could use a helping hand. They put the word out.
A delivery boy with First Flight Couriers, a logistics company with offices in Bengaluru that partnered with Flipkart, informed the duo about one of his colleagues who was recently out of a job.
“I had been with First Flight Couriers for about four years,” recalls Iyyappa, who was then working as a Key Account Relationship Manager with the firm’s branch in Madiwala, Bengaluru. A native of Ambur, a town in Tamil Nadu’s Vellore district famous for its biriyani, he had worked with the automotive manufacturer Ashok Leyland in Hosur, about 50 km from Bengaluru, and later trained at Hindustan Motors. As he wanted to further his education to improve his prospects, he approached his employers for a few months of leave to study for a diploma course. His bosses dithered. Iyyappa was told that his position could not be kept open for three months. In his absence, if someone else was found to replace him, the vacancy would be filled.
Iyyappa risked four years of job security for a three-month stint at self-improvement. It proved costly. When he returned after completing his diploma, he found that he was out of a job. His former colleague, who was acquainted with Sachin and Binny, recommended Iyyappa to the founders of the new startup.
“We were not looking for much,” admits Sachin. “All we wanted was a person who could speak some English and use a computer.”
“He was out of a job and had no prospects,” adds Binny, who hired Iyyappa. “He came at a very low salary of about Rs 8,000.”
Almost immediately, Flipkart’s first full-time employee made his presence felt. “For the first two or three days, I was very confused,” he recalls, explaining that the new job was a big shift from his previous one. “We were working with about 10-12 big publishers in Bangalore and shipping something like 100 orders a day.”
Not only did Iyyappa confront these challenges, he took great delight in doing so.
In the early days of Flipkart, Binny handled operations while Sachin managed the technology side of the business. They didn’t bargain for any more time on their hands after bringing on board their first full-time employee. However, the weeks that followed were a revelation. In Iyyappa, they had found more than just a helping hand. He was destined to become the engine of the business, the lodestar that would dictate the company’s trajectory in years to come.
“Within the first week, he knew everything about everything we were doing,” remembers Sachin, adding that Iyyappa had a photographic memory of every business incident that transpired under his watch. “We did not have an order management system at the time. Iyyappa was our order management system. He remembered every status, every order.”
“After a month of Iyyappa joining, we gave a referral bonus of about Rs 5,000 to the First Flight person,”
No pain, no gain
Modest and unassuming, Iyyappa underplays the effort he put in. “Sachin and Binny were my role models. They would teach me the work sitting right there. We handled everything among the three of us,” Iyyappa remembers, adding that the founders also helped with the packing and labeling. “Those days, it was all manual. The technology came later.”
With a phenomenal memory for details, Iyyappa rattles off every step of the old, manual order management process as if it was happening right before his eyes. “We had a JIT (Just In Time) procurement model. We divided the work among ourselves. Once we got the orders, we entered them manually into [Microsoft] Excel, entered the quantity and MRP, where to procure it, then took printouts, gave it to the packer who would go to suppliers…”
Listening to him, it is hard to fathom how one man could contain so much information in his cerebellum, process and retrieve it at will, and invent processes to tackle problems that appeared impossible to manage, leave alone surmount.
“When Iyyappa came in, he intuitively took away my workload,” says Binny. “He took up almost 80 per cent of my professional load within a couple of weeks. This freed up my time to add more selection, to automate order processing, to grow the business.”
Taking over the reins of customer service came naturally to Iyyappa. Soon, his mobile phone number was listed as Flipkart’s de facto customer support hotline. According to Sachin, Iyyappa was the go-to guy for all day-to-day operations. From taking customer calls and calling up vendors to coordinating and following up, he never dropped the ball.
“We never kept inventory during those days,” Sachin remembers. “Every day, as orders came in, we would send our pick-up boys to pick up books from our vendors, return to the office and pack the orders.”
Iyyappa’s prolific memory came to his aid as he devised ingenious ways of coordinating with the delivery boys to ensure that customers were kept delighted. If a delivery boy reported that one vendor did not stock a book that a customer wanted, Iyyappa would lose no time in calling up another vendor who had the book in stock and arranging it to be delivered to the customer. Then he’d promptly call another delivery boy who was on that route and ask him to collect and deliver the book.
“In 2009, we started to sell books from international publishers and the loads would arrive at odd hours,” recalls Iyyappa. “We had to extend our night shifts, come in on weekends, and pack the books ourselves so that they would be delivered on time.”
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