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October, 2004 |
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Young Achievers |
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When
should you retire? ask
ashok Ashok
Pokharel (36) Managing
Director, Rum Doodle (P) Ltd. Turnover:
$7.23 million When
should one retire? If you ask that to Ashok Pokharel (36), who has
already earned a name in tourism business as the then youngest person to
be the Chairman of PATA Nepal Chapter at 30, he says he would like to
retire at 45. Says it gives him something to look forward to. “I
hope by that time I would have achieved what I wanted,” he says.
Earlier his target was to retire at 35. That had to be postponed because
he still had not achieved then what he had targeted. I can say it is
most probably going to be something in mass communication, because this
is my unfulfilled dream,” he adds. When
Ashok Pokharel first went to work for his father’s adventure tour
operator firm (Himalayan Journeys Pvt. Ltd.), he did so for a temporary
job that his father’s partners wanted him to do when he was back from
Delhi after completing his Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) and awaiting
the results. First, he helped the company to bring out a monthly
newsletter. The job required only a few hours work every day. But, in
the meanwhile, as the General Manager of the firm left, they (father’s
partners) wanted young Pokharel (he was about 24 then as he recalls) to
look after the sales while a new GM was being found. But even after
interviewing several candidates for over a few weeks, they could not
find anybody suitable for the job. In
the meanwhile, as he started working with the departments of HMG as well
as selling tour packages he had to learn about the destinations included
in those packages. “When I would sell a destination to a client and
came home in the evening, I would ask my father to tell me about that
particular destination. That way I went on learning more and more about
the business and getting stuck in it. Now I enjoy it.” In
fact, tourism was never in the aspiration of young Pokharel, as he
recalls. “I was dreaming to go into the mass communications field,”
he says. Pursuing his dream career, he also provisionally enrolled in a
post-graduate degree in Mass Communication at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University of Delhi, and was dreaming of doing something in the same
field in Nepal or India. But when he came home, he got stuck in tourism.
But
soon young Pokharel started to take the management of the business in
his stride. In this process he changed the management style itself, as
he recalls. In his view the management structure of the company was
rigid, though it was much more worker-friendly, even in those days, than
the other similar firms are even today. One example of the rigidity was
that the employees were not allowed to come to the office in casual
clothing. Young Pokharel changed that and allowed all the staff except
those who worked in the front office to come in casual dress. He himself
is rarely seen in a coat except at press conferences or similar formal
occasions. “It is not proper for you to be dressed formally if you are
meeting a client whom you want to sell adventure travel products, I
think,” he says. The
second job he did was to, as he puts it, tear and throw out of the
window the job description manual. The reason was that when you have
such a job description in a small workspace the people tend to say
“that is not my department”. The result of scrapping the job
description was an informal looking organization where everybody would
be ready to do anything that came by, at any time and willingly. A
development of the days before he joined the firm helped him in this. As
he recalls, an American partner of the firm who had left a few years
before young Pokharel joined it, was very technology savvy and he had
invested a lot in technology related stuff. “I suggested the Board
that instead of hiring additional people, let’s use the technology and
add more computers. Fortunately, that was accepted.” As
a result, Himalayan Journeys is now a small company manpower-wise. There
are 130 persons together in Himalayan Journeys, Shangri-La Tours and
Avira – the last a trading company dealing mainly in aeroplane spares.
Rum Doodle, a restaurant under the same group, has another 50 persons.
Compare that with the turnover. All the four firms together recorded
about US dollars 7.23 million in sales in 2003. About
the next change he introduced, he says, “till then the company was
wholesaling its products to other tour operators worldwide. I printed a
20 page catalogue and started selling directly to the customers. In the
following five years, one-third of the bookings were being generated by
my own office.” When
young Pokharel joined the company, the American business was going down
and there was no European business. He worked hard for developing
contacts in Europe and compensated the loss of business from America.
“As tourism business is dependent on contacts, I developed such
contacts in Europe by attending several travel trade fairs and traveling
from city to city”.
Penchant
for Change Pokharel
keeps on introducing change in the organization frequently. Sometimes
such changes are introduced not because the old system was not working
but, because a better alternative became available. “When the
Management Information System was changed two years ago in the
organization, it was purely because we wanted to have something fresh
and better than what we had previously”. This
penchant for change is reflected in the policy of hiring people.
Pokharel says he prefers to hire fresh people. “I’m not interested
in the past of the candidate. I’m interested about what he or she
intends to do in the company in the future. If they come from my
competitors they come with some preconceived notions of work which would
be difficult to change. Such people will be resistant to change. I try
to find out whether the candidate is resistant to change or eager to
welcome change. The second important attribute I want in my people is
honesty. I prefer those who have the guts to point out the weaknesses in
my arguments.” Will he follow the same style also in whatever he takes
up after retiring from his present job? And will that work? Let’s wait
for that. |
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