BIO: Amit Kumar Agarwal is the founder and CEO of NoBroker.com, the world’s largest C2C real estate platform with 13 million customers, eliminating brokers and agents in real estate transactions with a tech-based approach.
STORY: Amit decided to be in complete control of his business, and even when he hired people, he hired his juniors, who literally do nothing without him. This kind of control only created bottlenecks, and he couldn’t scale his business until he partnered with a person who had more expertise than him.
LEARNING: You won’t scale your business if you keep doing everything on your own. Hire great people and nurture them.
“If you want to scale up, then doing everything on your own and trying to control things is a very bad idea.”
Amit Agarwal
Guest profile
Amit Kumar Agarwal is the founder and CEO of NoBroker.com, the world’s largest C2C real estate platform with 13 million customers, that is eliminating brokers and agents in real estate transactions with a tech-based approach. He has raised $151m of institutional funding so far.
The NoBroker business model is disruptive, tech-based, capital-efficient, and designed to be scaled globally.
Worst investment ever
When Amit first started his company, he was doing everything on his own. From finance to HR to operations. Everything would have to go through him. When it came to hiring people, he hired his juniors and continued making all the decisions.
Slowly this blew over for Amit. Everything was over the place. His juniors didn’t understand his business, and he would have to be the one making even the tiniest decisions when trying something new. Amit’s team would get stuck because they had to speak to him before doing anything. Things just started going out of control because Amit couldn’t handle it all.
Luckily, Amit was saved from his worst investment ever by a very experienced guy who happened to visit his office. He had gone to the same college as Amit, and they joined hands and ran the company together. Suddenly, there was a tremendous business change. Amit realized that what he needed was people smarter than him.
Lessons learned
- You won’t scale your business if you keep doing everything yourself and trying to control things.
- Hire great people and nurture them.
- Get expertise in each functional area as soon as possible and give them independence and accountability.
Andrew’s takeaways
- When starting a business, work with the $3 million rule. Think about how quickly are you going to get your revenue to $3 million? With $3 million, you now have the budget to have a proper management team, office, software, and infrastructure to scale your business.
- If you’re struggling right now and are overloaded and overwhelmed dribbling it all yourself, stop and think about where you’re at. It may be time to reach out, get help, and build your team, so you’re not doing everything.
Actionable advice
We need to continue learning and reassessing our businesses. As the situation changes, you also need to change quickly, and hence you need better people with better expertise.
No. 1 goal for the next 12 months
Amit’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to keep his customers happy, expand into new services, and make them bigger.
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