Nikita Maheshwari

Nikita Maheshwari is an entrepreneur and a business research speaker. As an MBA graduate, she is skilled in research, business management, and business development. She started her entrepreneurial journey at the age of 22. She cofounded "Tatkalorry" - a niche logistics and supply chain management company. They operate particularly in the ceramics and construction material industry and are committed to providing efficient logistical support to the unorganized sector. Nikita is also a National & State Entrepreneurship Awardee 2019.

What is your favourite word?
Resilience. When you're building something and you hope to build something bigger than yourself, there will be problems. The problems may not necessarily come because of you, they could crop because of the market conditions and because of a lot of external variables that are completely unpredictable. Your organization could have been perfectly functioning according to you, but it perhaps wasn't prepared for a flood, for an all-India strike, for covid - and a lot of other situations until the situation arises.

In such situations, first, be kind to yourself. It's okay. You might have made a mistake not predicting right. It's okay you weren't prepared well enough. Tell yourself that you will be resilient and you will come out of it. I could have easily given up on my company after losing time, energy, and money. But what worked for me is that I was resilient about it and I pushed through. There is a Hindi saying that my father used to share with me - "Wakt hai, guzar jayega. Rasthe se rastha nikal jayega" which essentially means, "Time doesn't stay still, it keeps flowing. Keep moving forward and you will find ways out." You have to keep moving.

What was the moment in your life that made you Blossom into the person you are today?
It was COVID, to be honest. Before COVID, everything was deal-able. If there was a problem, you knew that it would end at some point. COVID didn't have that. When is this going to end? How are you going to survive it? How are you going to build around this problem? How are you going to make sure that something you have built for so long survives this?

When COVID happened, half of my team left. What was I going to do? Until then, I was growing exponentially. I never had a breather. COVID gave me that breather. Of course, the first three months of COVID were a blur. But once we went back to work in May, I started understanding my business better than before. I started becoming a better leader because I was now aware of people who were working day in and day out to build this organization. COVID made me a better leader and a stronger person.

What would you want the young boys & girls to learn from your journey?
One thing that my father has taught me and what has worked for me is to persevere and to be resilient. My father told me, "There is no replacement for perseverance and resilience. When you are driven by passion you have to fall, you have to learn and you have to get back up. You will make mistakes and it's okay. Own up to your mistakes, learn and move on. You learn through mistakes"