A big jump worth taking

As a single mother of two young children, Anvita Arora knew she was taking a significant risk when she chose to leave the security of academia to start her own company. An architect and urban transport planner, with a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Arora had a wealth of academic knowledge, but had not faced the challenges of entrepreneurship. However, her resolve was bolstered by a three-week visit to the United States in 2012, under the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program.

“I hadn’t been to the United States before, and I wanted to understand the US because it has a tradition of entrepreneurship, of people making successes of themselves,” says Arora. “I also wanted to know more about women entrepreneurs in particular. After the programme, I had much more confidence in the choices I had made. In the environment I had been in, I was constantly defending those choices, with people telling me that owning my own business was risky, that I had a good job and why would I want to do this. My time in the US gave me much more confidence—I felt I could make it work.”

She was right. Innovative Transport Solutions (iTrans) Pvt. Ltd, the company Arora founded in 2008, now provides consulting services on sustainable urban transport issues to clients like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Hyderabad Metro Rail Ltd, Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, Delhi Finance Commission and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

Through the exchange programme, which focused on women and entrepreneurship, Arora, who is managing director and chief executive officer of iTrans, met 18 women from other countries and had the opportunity to learn about the challenges women in the United States face in starting and operating their businesses.

“One highlight was the College of Business at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs,” says Arora. “We met with the vice chancellor, who was a woman, and there was a lot of discussion about the practical aspects of running a business.”

 In Portland, they met women who were entrepreneurs and talked to them about what it took to start their own businesses, how they managed their companies and where they were in their own life cycle when they started their business. “Also, as an urban planner who works a lot with cycling, I got to see how Portland handles that, which was fantastic,” says Arora.

Although many people in India aspire to lifetime employment in large companies, Arora found a different scenario in the United States.

“I learned that in the US, most jobs are created by small businesses,” she says.

“There, small businesses and women play a large role in the economy; they don’t stay on the sidelines. The perception back home in India, where people generally want to work in large corporations, is very different. But things are changing in India, with more people opting out of the nine-to-five routine and trying their own things.”

Based on what she learned in the country, Arora made some changes in her work life.

“I realised that I enjoyed managing the projects, that I was far more interested in content than some of the other aspects of running a business,” she says. So, she took on other people in the business whose skills complemented her and let her focus more on what she enjoyed.

“I also realised that my business doesn’t have to be big. I don’t have to have 100 employees. It’s more important to me to have flexibility between work and home, and to have time with my children. Having that flexibility is one of the reasons I started my own business.”

Arora also realised that life in the US isn’t all about work.

“There’s a respect for philanthropy in the country that, I think, is very, very unique,” she says. “The US has a long history of philanthropy, and philanthropy is part of the business and individual culture.”

(Courtesy SPAN magazine)