Risky Business
by Hanna Mills,
MX The Box,
published Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Ambition could have been Shivani Gupta's middle name. Born in India but raised in Australia, Gupta had an engineering degree and MBA under her belt by her mid-twenties.
By the tender age of 27, she was a senior manager at BHP Billiton. But a 2001 trip to Nepal stopped in its tracks her rapid rise up the corporate ladder.
"I grew up in India (and) I was expecting Nepal to be very similar," Gupta says.
"I was expecting kids to be begging for food and money and none of them did. They were a very content race. They appeared to marvel in the little joys that they celebrated each day."
And Gupta found herself wanting a piece of that lifestyle.
"I guess my life purpose became very clear," she says.
"I always thought 'I want to be a CEO' or 'I want to earn this much money' or 'I want to live in this kind of world and I want to drive this kind of car'.
"But it wasn't until Nepal that I thought, 'it's very clear what I have been put on this planet to achieve'."
To teach. Gupta has since taken the lessons she learned from starting her own business into the classroom and on to the box.
Her first book Passion @ Work has also just been released to coincide with the four-part SBS Television series Risking it All.
"We've basically taken four start-up businesses and have followed them for a period of between 9-12 months," Gupta says.
"It looks at the challenges that small businesses face as they go from 'here's an idea' to actually implementing and getting it to happen.
"And my role in that as the presenter was really to guide them, and to coach them into looking forward and thinking through some of the challenges that they face beyond actually setting up the business."
No stone was left unturned as Gupta offered advice on budgeting, researching and marketing to the small business owners.
And in a climate where 82 per cent of businesses shut within the first three years, Gupta says more people should be thinking long and hard before quitting their jobs to start a business.
"(People think) I don't have a good work-life balance and when I am running my own business, I will get better work-life balance," Gupta says.
An incompetent boss also leads people to reasoning they could make more money on their own, while others simply ooze passion, Gupta says.