Anvar Jay Varadaraj – Product Marketing Manager – ELGi Compressors USA, Inc.
Young and raring to go, Anvar Jay Varadaraj leads the product marketing team at ELGi Compressors USA, Inc. to not just find a place in the market but to push the company to the second spot in global rankings. What he has is the legacy and business genes of his family to give him the vision and ambition, says Sarada Vishnubhatla.
He is one who is extremely clear about why he does not want to be in the limelight. In that context, being featured in this brand new section of the magazine – just the third person to be in the spotlight here – itself would be a contradiction. Yet, it was a coup of sorts and we got Anvar Jay Varadaraj to explain why at ELGi Compressors USA, Inc., it is the entire team – across geographies – which deserves praise rather than the efforts of a single person. As a reflection of his mature approach to marketing, he says, “I love watching people succeed.” The eldest son of Dr. Jairam and Jaishree Varadaraj, Anvar has been working hard to ensure that the legacy of his family continues to be taken forward in the right spirit.
Dr. Jairam Varadaraj is the second generation upholder of the foundations laid by the legendary businessman L G Varadarajulu who set up an automobile garage equipment and air compressor business in 1960. He later served as the Chairman of the ELGi Group. Anvar Varadaraj (33) was born in the US but completed his schooling from the Kodaikanal International School in Dindigul district, Tamil Nadu. He later returned to the US to pursue graduation in Economics and Philosophy, which he followed up with an MBA in Marketing in 2011. “Since my siblings and I were at a boarding school, as a family we spent qualitative time. I was a teenager then, so I was probably too young to appreciate the business side of things in the family,” he recalls.
“But I was always aware of the fact that both my parents worked hard at their respective businesses and I also knew that my grandfather was highly respected in the business world. The most important thing at that time was that we children were encouraged to make our own career choices and instilled with the same values of hard work but in a different context,” Varadaraj says. He recognises now the remarkably high propensity of his family to be entrepreneurial and feels that the ability to take risks and allocate capital to standing or new ventures is deeply ingrained in him. “This is something that is governing my thinking as I become older,” he says.
Not having any fundamental exposure to the family business in his formative years, in a way, has done him good, he thinks. “I do not necessarily have some of the preconceptions of institutionalised knowledge. The obvious advantage is that I can always fall back on my experience of working elsewhere to provide an objective view to the company when needed,” he explains. Working at a popular family-owned confectionary brand in the US gave Varadaraj an insight into his own entrepreneurial mind. The self-enquiry that he engaged in then led him to realise his interest in joining the family business.
And the shift followed a fresh acquisition in the US, France and Italy with a huge challenge in the shape of establishing the ELGi setup abroad. This career transition from a popular chocolate brand to an automotive equipment company is something that Varadaraj terms a “violent move”. “Initially it was not interesting, but I realised that whether it is chocolate or automotive equipment, we have to fulfill a customer’s need. So, my goal as a marketer is really to understand the behaviour that leads to that need, to think about how the product will fit that need, and how we communicate that,” he says. The first three years at ELGi India – from 2014 to 2017 – saw him building a robust marketing team and fulfilling a strategic role.
However, taking up reins of the US business in 2018 proved to be a challenge because he understood that the immediate need of the young company was not just restricted to marketing. “Out of the six years in the US, it is only in the past one year or so that we have done any deliberate marketing. Our operational team has been on its toes and done a fabulous job in understanding the dynamics of the market. Collectively, we realised that we needed to connect with our distributors to make them aware of ELGi and our products. Here, the customers accept the word of the distributors who are highly technical people. They know machines inside out and they are aware of the future trends. So what we learned was that a product that is easy for them to install and service, backed by a solid customer service, is what to look for. The utter simplicity of it floored us,” he explains.
For Varadaraj, there are only ‘valuable learnings’. And as he puts it, “Equality of opportunity and humility is what my father believes in. He says that in India there is a big divide between the blue and the white-collared employees. He believes ELGi must help bridge that divide by empowering the blue collar workforce so that they get better and bigger opportunities. And as responsible owners, we must ensure that the company is always sensitive to this because this is what will help ELGi to be respected as an institution.”
The transition that ELGi is currently making is on the lines of what his father believes in, reveals Varadaraj. “The next generation comprising my siblings and I will not take active ownership in the company or in the day-to-day management. The real intent is that we want talented leaders within the company to feel a sense of ownership. We believe that better than merely sharing it, it is more powerful when they actually feel it. And a part of being able to convey the message is to be humble about the fact that though born into an illustrious family, I am no different from anyone else,” he says.
The one striking thing about his personality is that Varadaraj moves forward with incisive clarity and he knows that the resources he has on hand helps him to not only clear the roadblocks but pave a definite way for a professional organisation to function with a competitive advantage.
What he holds close to his heart is that both his parents have always been uncompromising with their deep-set values even in the face of high business pressures. And pressures are aplenty! One such is that people expect ELGi products to be cheaper than their competitors just because it is an Indian company. It’s a challenge that Varadaraj has taken head on to find a resolution for.
He elaborates, “We have been working to arrest this trend, and the first thing to do was to make an internal shift to identify the value proposition of our machines. Our products offer best-in-class energy efficiency, warranty, and are the easiest machines to service. This exercise gave our team the confidence to create marketing plans around the value proposition.” Varadaraj and the entire ELGi team are now investing all their efforts to make the company the world’s second-largest compressor manufacturer. Given this scenario, what it that keeps him in sync with the universe at all times? It is his ability to laugh at a good joke – and why not, since he is one who has dabbled in being a stand-up comedian before business took priority.