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Ajay Singh : The Man Who Saved SpiceJet From Vanishing into Oblivion

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What is good in doing business without risks? When one aims for something bigger and more profitable, it is reasonable to go against the odds and take the chances. But, what about the companies whose strategies are failing and going downwards in the spiral of destruction? Should it give up or just hope for a knight in shining armour to appear and be the lifesaver. Well, the story of SpiceJet clearly narrates a tale, where they well resurrected by none but Ajay Singh. After facing excessive loss through 4 consecutive financial years, Ajay Singh finally stepped in to take over the control once again and re-establish the reputation of the company.

SpiceJet is an Indian airline headquartered in Gurugram whose history dates back to 1984.

Early Life

Singh was born into an influential family from Delhi. His father was an established businessman, Vijinder Singh, and his mother was Kalpana. Singh’s family business was mainly about real estate and fashion accessories.

Ajay Singh SpiceJet
Image Source: indianexpress.com

Singh was kind of an all-rounder from a very young age. He went to St. Columba’s School and apart from excelling in his academics, he was very good at playing cricket, table tennis and football. He was also the caption of his school’s football team. After completing his school, he went to IIT Delhi and graduated from there in 1988 with a degree in textile engineering. And, like kids in the family of every other businessman, he went to pursue his MBA. He completed his MBA from Cornell University.

Early Career

At Cornell, he became the President of the Indian Association, and thus, showed a keen interest in the events of India related to government policies. He was also interested in political matters and thought that more educated people are needed in the Indian political system. So, he came back to India in 1992 and pursued law at Delhi University.

In 1996, Rajendra Gupta, a BJP leader who later became Delhi transport minister, hired Singh for Delhi’s transport corporation board. After joining his first responsibility was to stabilize an already bankrupted corporation, which had 40,000 employees. Singh implemented the global transportation strategies and expanded the corporation from 300 to 5000 buses within a span of two and a half years. This was his first achievement after returning to India and stepping into both the political and business world.

In 1998, Singh became an officer on special duty (OSD), where he played a major role in launching DD Sports and DD News. Singh had some plans and suggestions in his mind to reduce the cost of telephony, and thus, persuaded BSNL to drop the incoming charges on mobile. All these developments took place only up till 2004 when BJP lost the general election, and Singh found him unemployed.

Singh Acquired SpiceJet

After BJP lost the election, Singh decided to get back in the entrepreneurial world, and his first move was to acquire ModiLuft and carrying the business as SpiceJet.

Looking back to the history of ModiLuft, it was an airline company established in 1984 by S.K Modi. In 1993, it came into a partnership with Lufthansa, a German airline, but in 1996, it ceased the operations.

So, whatever was left of the company was acquired by Singh after eight years, and this time, he renamed it as SpiceJet and followed the low-cost model to provide a good experience and low fare to the public.

Initially, Singh’s stake was 20% in SpiceJet, but it came to 6% when media tycoon Kalinathi Maran acquired 37.7% in 2010. Eventually, Singh sold his remaining stakes too.

The Downfall of SpiceJet

After Singh stepped down, SpiceJet rocketed in terms of making consecutive losses in three years. In the year 2012, SpiceJet faced a loss of Rs 604 crore followed by Rs 192 crore, Rs 1,001 crore, and Rs crore, in the next three following years.

The market share dropped from 20.9% in 2014 to 9.2% in 2015. Increased number of employees also created a problem, as, after some time, the company was unable to pay them. The oil companies also refused to refuel them, and by 2015, the company was barely able to crawl on the surface with no chance of survival. This is when Singh stepped in.

Bringing SpiceJet Back to Business

Singh was back in the territory of SpiceJet in 2015 and acquired 58.46% stakes of the company. He spotted that over employment was a very big issue with the company and brought down the number of employees to 4,000 from 5,500. After facing crores of loss for four consecutive years, the company finally made a profit of Rs 450 crore in 2016.

Today, SpiceJet has become India’s fourth-largest airline in terms of passengers and operates 306 flights on a daily basis.

Capital One logo

Richard Dana Fairbank : The Founder of One of the Largest Banks in the U.S.

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One of the most influential and financially predominant individual with quality of great leadership is what defines Richard Dana Fairbank. Banking business can make a profit like a spreading wildfire, and that is how Fairbank turned the wheel of his life.

Richard Fairbank, a billionaire in addition to the successful American businessmen, is the founder and owner of the bank holding company, Capital One Financial Corporation. He founded the company in 1994, along with Nigel Morris, an English businessman. Fairbank’s new strategies for credit models changed the entire face of the banking industry, thus, entering into a new era of entrepreneurship.

Education

Fairbank was born in 18th September 1950. In 1972, he graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Later, in 1981, he completed his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Almost 12 years after founding Capital One, he received an award on excellent leadership from his university.

Career Before Capital One Happened

Before founding Capital One, Fairbank worked in a few different companies. He worked as a partner and consultant in Strategic Planning Associates (1985-1990), followed by the head of the credit card unit in Signet-Banking Corporation (1990-1994).

Richard Dana Fairbank
Image Source: knownetworth.com

It was in the 1980s when Fairbank met Morris in a consulting firm, their mutual workplace. Since then, the idea of implementing new technologies to amend credit card plans hovered over their minds. Both Fairbank and Morris wanted to change the entire idea of charging an annual fee for credit cards holders, replacing it with different schemes for a different segment of the population. This is where they needed the contribution of information technology to manipulate data of consumers and their purchase list.

With the help of data management software, they were able to divide the entire population of credit card users into different categories, followed by offering them different plans and offers. They pitched Oracle Corporation for the job of database management, and they agreed to the new strategy of the company. It was due to this credit card model, both of them got hired by Signet-Banking Corp, in 1990.

Soon after the two economists joined Signet, the bank offered around three hundred different credit plans to its customers, charging the interest rate according to the divided categories. This was a breakthrough for both of them, but this was just the beginning. Fairbank along with Morris also developed a new strategy of transferring money from one credit card to another, with a relatively much lower rate of interest. This attracted quite a robust number of new customers, hiking the profit to an unexpected level.

And, in 27th July 1994, Signet announced the credit card division split-off, renaming it as Capital One. Richard Dana Fairbank was made the CEO of the company, and currently, it is the seventh-largest U.S commercial bank by assets.

The success of Capital One

The success of Capital One became so enormous that it superseded the sale and profit of Signet, its parent company. Fairbank made Capital One look like a massive credit card business in partnership with a bank rather than a spun-off segment of a banking business.

By 1995, Capital One completely became an independent business whereas Signet came under the acquisition of First Union Corporation. Within a single year of its establishment, Capital One made a 25% increase in the net income of the company, making it to the list of top 10 credit card issuers in the U.S.

Capital One is an ideal banking company, where excellent business models are backed up by strong database manipulating software. The company first analyses the needs of a customer and then build credit card plans accordingly.

After many years of successful business, during early 2000, people started questioning about the algorithms used by Capital One to access information about customers, and hence, the stock prices dropped. Though ultimately nothing risky was found in the algorithm, Fairbank and Morris saw it as a future threat to the company and decided to form an executive board to make decisions for the company.

Achievements of Fairbank

Richard Dana Fairbank was honoured with the award of Washingtonian’s “Business Leader of the Year” and Credit Card Management’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”. He is also listed among the top ten Bank CEOs, who became a billionaire and have achieved many other things.

Personal Life

Fairbank is married to Chris Fairbank, and they have eight children. They are settled in Virginia.

Reynolds Johnson – The Man Who Created the First Ever External Hard Disk

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Data storage – It certainly does not carve a niche in one’s mind. However, Imagine being able to save only 5 MB data in a machine that weighed a ton and measured a whole room. That machine was the start of a journey that has resulted in accommodating the technology to create better and higher standards of living. It was the first external Hard Disk ever invented. Well, and it was in 1952.

Reynolds B. Johnson was the ninth child of John and Elizabeth Reynolds and was born in Minnesota on July 7th,1906. He was a simple school going boy who displayed a keen interest in technical and mechanical sciences. Johnson was interested in workings of the machines and exhibited his ability to the world by creating and demonstrating a working model of a submarine in a horse trough. He graduated from one of the best private schools- Minnehaha Academy and went on to pursue a BS in Educational Administration as a part of his higher education from the University of Minnesota.

A teacher by profession, Johnson decided to return to his original occupation and improve its status quo. In 1932, Johnson had an idea to create a device that could grade the standardized tests and dissipate horrors associated with it. He tasked two of his pupils to work under his directions to create such a device. He called it the “mark-sense technology”, and this was the official start to his career as an inventor. Technology-giant IBM hired him as an engineer and bought rights over his invention. The company sold his test scoring machine from 1937 onwards. Other companies such as Bell System used mark sense technology to record calls, and utility companies used it to record meter readings. The government organizations used it under the name “electrographic” technology.

Since then, his role at IBM was not limited to an engineer, but further expanded, when he led a research team at IBM’s research laboratory, with the objective of improving current data storage and retrieval solutions. His ideas are being worked on even today.

He created a machine that could store data using aluminium and magnetic drums, making the first imprint of a data external storage device on the world. His inspiring work in the field of data storage made him known as the “Father of Hard Disk Drive”.

Johnson was one of the most influential inventors of this century. His life is marked with almost hundreds of patents relating to storage and technology. He was an influential figure in the toy industry, too. He implanted technology by inventing “microphotography” in simple toys. Fischer Price also used Johnson’s technology in their “Talk to my books”. He is also famous for creating handy videocassette tapes bettering the original ones made by Sony.

Johnson’s visionary mind was recognized throughout the world. He was a recipient of several awards such as Franklin Institute’s Certificate of Merit, in 1996, and the National Medal of Technology, in 1986. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers ( IEEE) established the “IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award” in 1991. The award is given to the inventors for their outstanding contributions.

Today, we dream of getting our desired things without making a splash in the water. It would be a disgrace if we do not remember a person who has provided the world with uncanny inventions, not only in the field of technology but also in the field of education. In 1966, Johnson made a bold prediction and a correct one, too, about the future of the education system: “The classroom of the future will be as different from today’s as the computer centre is different from the accounting room with its high stools of a few decades ago.” Such pioneering vision could only be compared to today’s Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks.