There's no denying that Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown. With businesses being shut for over two months, several of them have been struggling to stay afloat. But a recent online business event may be a sign of hope. At least that's what Dr Vivek Bindra, motivational speaker and business coach, thinks. His recent webinar broke the previously help Guinness Book of World Records record of the highest number of participants in an online business lesson - 18,693 people joined the five-hour webinar for 30 minutes on Vivek Bindra's Bada Business app.
The webinar was about reshaping the Indian economy and boosting MSMEs in a post-COVID world. "Our initiative was to equip these MSME owners with business tools — they wanted some guidance to manage their business like how to bounce back, how to manage work from home, how to reinvent themselves, how to continue business and so on. This is in accordance to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call for an Aatmanirbhar Bharat," says Dr Bindra. There were three speakers, who spoke about different aspects of business, during the webinar, which was held in Hindi.
During the webinar, the Bada Business app crashed due to the large number of people joining it. "We did not anticipate the large number of participants. However, we could manage to send another link and after a delay of about three hours, the webinar was conducted successfully," adds Dr Bindra, "We had to overcome several infrastructural challenges to make this happen, especially because the team was working from home and did not have access to all the required hardware that could have been possible had they been in the office."
Dr Bindra's YouTube channel, which creates content in Hindi, has over 12.5 million subscribers, making it hat he claims is the most subscribed entrepreneurial channel in the world. The Bada Business app has courses to train entrepreneurs on how to manage their businesses better. Classes are conducted by industry leaders who are able to share their experiences and struggles. "Students graduating from colleges often don't have what it takes to excel in the industry. To make them industry-ready we have partnered with some engineering universities and colleges and are integrating our courses in their curriculum. We want to fill the gap between classroom and industry," says Dr Bindra. Bada Business plans to create 100 new courses that will cater to a larger audience with varied business needs. They also plan to create content in more vernacular languages in the future.
Before being a motivational speaker, Dr Bindra was a monk for four years in Vrindavan. "I used to read the Bhagavad Gita during my university days. I realised that Vedic scriptures had a lot of business management lessons," says Dr Bindra. Speaking about why he began Bada Business, Dr Bindra says, "The big corporates have their own training and consulting process. Online courses were available for students across various EdTech platforms. However, the same was not the case for MSMEs. There was no way to train and upskill employees working in these companies. There was a need to fill this gap and I decided to create the YouTube channel."
