OYO Hotels:- After all how can an 18 year old child build such a big company in 10 years that even the biggest billionaires could not build in 100 years? This child’s company alone competes with the biggest corporate giants and becomes India’s largest hotel chain network. Pay attention, without much money, without big contacts, without a rich family, a normal middle class boy born in a village with a big thinking sets such an example to the whole world that no child should ever narrow his thinking due to being poor. This is the story of India’s youngest billionaire Ritesh Agarwal.
Ritesh was born in the year 1993 in Bissam Cuttack village of Odisha. Ritesh was the youngest of four siblings. His father used to run a small grocery shop, so there was a shortage of money. When he was in the fourth class, computers came to his school for the first time, but no child below the sixth class was able to use them, so Ritesh would go to a random teacher and say that ma’am, I want to learn computer, can I help you in your work? In this way, in the fourth class, a computer was introduced to his school for the first time. Ritesh got access to a computer first, with which he learned basic programming very quickly. In the same year, his elder sister who was in 12th opened the entrepreneurship section in her college and started looking for its meaning and he saw that Empanel the problem and create a business around it. He thought that this is a very interesting thing.
In school, when teachers used to ask everyone what they want to become when they grow up, the whole class used to say doctor, engineer, astronaut, but Ritesh always said that he would become an entrepreneur. After this point, he started seeing business ideas in everything. At that time, telecom was growing rapidly and BSNL had a monopoly in the entire market.
Then a small company started growing rapidly, ATL. Ritesh sold SIM cards in his free time during his summer vacations. He used to sell SIM cards in the shop of the shopkeeper to whom he came to Kota to study engineering. When he saw the condition of Kota that how the children used to study all day and night, he thought that this is not within my reach, so now he had only one job. This is the only way. He used to go to Delhi quietly so that he could become an entrepreneur.
During this time, Ritesh also started doing internship so that he could travel. Now, if he was short of money, he would write emails to the hotels wherever he went, asking if they would let him stay in their hotel for free. One day, I am going to solve a big problem in the hotel industry.
Now, obviously, many refused and some gave discounts and some even gave free rooms. In this way, this small child visits 100 places in very little money and stays in 200 hotel rooms in total. Now the problem is that he missed his studies in all this. So that his family does not feel bad, he studies diligently so that he gets good marks. But he had to do his own business. When he used to go to Delhi, he noticed that in many houses, one or two rooms were lying idle and the home owners wanted to give it on rent to someone rather than letting the empty rooms gather dust. Cleanliness will be maintained and money will also come from Delhi. A lot of tourists come here, so they will also get good rooms at a reasonable price. So there was a lot of demand for rooms and there is a lot of supply too, but nobody had a platform that could fill this gap. Ritesh had observed this problem very closely. He thought that I can do coding, so why not make a website where families can list their rooms and tourists can book their rooms. After executing this idea, he started working on his startup day and night.
To understand the market better, he traveled all over North India, stayed in different hotels and started observing well. He started noticing small problems and thinking how can I solve this in my startup. In all this, three months pass and college starts. Ritesh is now in a big confusion. If he did college, the startup is over. If he did the startup, studies are over. On top of that, his family will get angry. He went to college for the first two days, but he became so busy with his startup work that he kept skipping college one day at a time. Meanwhile, he I saw a movie called Social Network which is about Mark Jag Buck that how Mark dropped out of college so that he could work on his startup. Ritesh was in exactly the same situation. There was another scene in the movie in which a guy named Peter Thiel gave a cheque of 5 lakhs to his mother so that she could start her startup.
Ritesh did not have much money, so after watching the movie, he applied for Peter Thiel’s fellowship, but there were some conditions of this fellowship, first, your age should be 20 It should be less than a year, secondly you will have to leave your college. Ritesh got very happy, he thought that someone is giving money to leave college, what better opportunity than this to leave college, that is why he dropped college. Here Ritesh gets a great success, he becomes the first Asian who is selected in Thiel Fellowship. The 19 year old boy has more than 50 lakhs in his account.
With this money, Ritesh has to make his business an empire. After a few months, Ritesh’s father comes to Delhi to see how his son’s studies are going. Now that he has got admission in such a good college, he is shocked to see Ritesh that for so long, instead of studying, Ritesh is doing all this. In this affair, Ritesh explains to his family that just let me do a startup for one year, if this fails, then next year he will definitely go to college, he goes to the venture, now he does not want to go to college. The family also agreed and there is money in the account, so he can give full time to his startup. While doing market research, Ritesh saw that there are many empty houses for sale in Delhi. When the houses were vacant, Ritesh thought that he could earn good money by renting out these vacant houses, so Ritesh went to the rich owners who owned those houses.
Now Ritesh was a child and had not even grown a beard, so many people did not take him seriously, but those who did took him were very happy because their properties were lying vacant for 10-20 years and rotting. If they could be put to better use, whoever wanted income from their vacant property would call Ritesh. This almost became an Airbnb type business. While doing this business, Ritesh wanted to solve another big problem, poor hotels. When he used to travel, his biggest problem was finding a good and affordable hotel. He saw that there is no dearth of hotels in the market, but there is a lack of a good experience because unstaffed, bad smelly rooms, sometimes there was no staff for service.
Once when he went to a hotel, the receptionist was not even wearing a shirt. The condition of Indian budget hotels had deteriorated to such an extent, so how to improve it now? Ritesh thought what if he does something that gives a predictable experience to all the guests that if you come here, you will get good rooms. Along with this, Ritesh was going to provide such technology in every hotel that would make their life easy. CRM technology is a specialized technology that is giving amazing results in every business but it is a very expensive software that pays some companies thousands and lakhs of rupees per month. So how will Indian businesses afford this technology.
That is why more than 90% of businesses have stayed away from technology today. This burning problem was solved by this company. Today O2 is providing powerful business management software to India at the most affordable price. Such a magical software that automates every size of business that too in its 70% capacity. With more specialized applications that will easily automate every process like sales, finance, inventory, marketing, business process, you will feel as if you have employed five people, efficiency will increase to such an extent, along with this, you can still take your business online by creating a website for free and all this will be available for ₹ per month, which means at a cheaper price than the internet plan, so that every business in India can easily afford it.
To start, you get an app absolutely free, with which you can start your business journey even now, plus hosting and support lifetime free, so whether it is an individual, a startup or a business, Odoo will be useful in every business activity, that’s why there is a link in the description, definitely try it. Now Odoo can do the work of five to ten people alone, but Ritesh had to do all the work himself. He started with a hotel in Gurgaon. 19-year-old Ritesh goes to the owner of the hotel and says that you will let me run this hotel, I will make it number one, if it is successful, then the profit will be half-half, if there is a loss, then the entire owner is mine. Ritesh hesitated a bit but later agreed because it was anyway in loss. As soon as he got the control of the hotel, Ritesh brought good quality curtains, mattresses, soap in the bathroom and everything. Then he got the hotel deep cleaned. He sat at the counter and interacted with the customers so that he could understand their problems in detail.
After completely revamping the hotel, customers started getting a good experience. Ritesh did good SEO and brought the hotel in the top three rankings online, due to which the occupancy of the hotel started reaching 90%. Seeing this success, the nearby hotel owners who were in loss wanted to partner with Ritesh. Tej understood that the potential in budget rooms is really big because big hotels like Taj Oberoi Hilton which give a rich experience can only be afforded by high class people.
In India, 90% of the hotels have less than 100 rooms which the middle class can afford but the experience in many hotels is very bad. So what if instead of building new hotels, these thousands of loss making hotels are given a chance to buy new rooms. A good experience should be given by bringing them under the same brand name. Now he will not be able to build such a big business alone, that is why Ritesh needs talented people.
He thought that I do not want people from a big fancy college because there is no money to give, neither is Ritesh famous so that someone can come to his business. After all, how will a dropout student attract good talent? Ritesh became active on Lingan and started meeting people but did not find the right person. Then one day he meets Abhinav Sinha who is a pass out from Harvard University and has even worked in a company like BCG. Ritesh tells Abhinav his vision, mission and plan and Abhinav sees the potential. He also had to do some problem solving work, that is why he accepts Ritesh’s offer. Both of them divided the responsibilities. Abhinav took care of the operations and standardization of the hotel and Ritesh took the responsibility of making Oyo a big brand and bringing sales. Till now, only three hotels are under Oyo. By next year, Oyo will have 50 properties.
They expanded. Now Ritesh realized in a year that they would never be able to expand at the speed of 350-100. They needed more talented people. So everyone came up with an idea. The initial team of 4-5 people referred all the best and talented people they had worked with in their lives so that Ritesh could reach out to them and bring them into his team. This trick actually worked. Ritesh formed a good team in Oyo and a total of 50 people formed a team. Soon Oyo became the biggest chain in Gurgaon. Now their aim is to become India’s biggest hotel chain network. But for this, they have to compete with the hotel chains that have been in the industry for 50-100 years.
That’s why they knew that they will have to do something innovative. For example, if a new hotel has to be on-boarded, it takes about 6 to 10 months. If it takes so much time, how will they expand fast? That’s why they did this 10-month expansion through technology The onboarding time of a month was reduced to just 3 days. As soon as a hotel comes under Oyo, branding is done as soon as possible, complete renovation is done and the hotel is ready in a few days. Due to this, Oyo started expanding very fast, due to which some people could not digest the success of Oyo.
They were real estate people because their business was now in danger. That is why they started threatening Ritesh with death, but Ritesh was not afraid. Seeing Oyo, many small startups started copying it directly. To counter this, Oyo started expanding even faster across India. For example, one day Ritesh called his employees and asked how many hotels in Delhi could be onboarded in a month. The employees said that 3035 would be done, but Ritesh said that he has a way by which 100 hotels can be onboarded easily. All was surprised. Ritesh divided Delhi into seven clusters and said that documentation would be done on the first day and on the second day
. There will be an audit of what all will be used in the hotel and on the third day the hotel will be renovated and made live on the fourth day. In this way, they onboarded a record high 130 hotels in a month. Their strategy started working and they tied up with 5000 hotels in a short time. By 2016, it became one of the biggest hotel chains in India. Oyo reached its peak but now they started facing a lot of problems. Oyo’s rapid expansion led to a lot of irregularities. Oyo was not able to fulfill the promises it was making, such as clean washrooms, clean rooms, WiFi and TV were not available, due to which the customer experience started deteriorating. But after a few years, Oyo was going to get into such a big problem which they would not have imagined even in their dreams. Due to Covid-19 [Music] lockdown, Oyo’s revenues are reduced to less than half. Oyo fights these bad times bravely.
They increased sanitization in all the hotels and started giving minimal touch experience. They opened 2000 hotels. Heavy discounts were given on more than 100 rooms so that needy people and healthcare workers could get accommodation during the lockdown. As the time of Covid passes, the travel and hotel industry starts reviving. It was the same Covid that forced many startups and thousands of businesses to shut down, but the leadership of Oyo survived with full courage even after taking a direct hit of Covid. Guys, this success story is a proof that if you want to be successful, it doesn’t matter whether you are in a village or a city, whether your father is rich or poor, because if you think big, you will make your own path. That path will be very difficult, but not impossible.