From working as a banker, losing around ?8 lakh in his ice cream shop venture, to building a ?18 crore momo brand, it's all a part of Debashish Majumder¡¯s story.
Throughout this journey, the ¡®momopreneur¡¯ held onto the words he heard from his grandfather ¡°Do something to make a name for yourself. It is not the money that people remember, but the name you create for yourself and the number of lives you touched.¡±
Debashish recently shared his never-before-told story with?The Weekend Leader.
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¡°Coming from a Bengali family, one is supposed to become a banker, doctor, or engineer and settle down with a respectable salary, so I went ahead and did the same,¡± says Debashish.
¡°I landed an off-roll job in the post of Business Development Officer with the Axis Bank in 2014.¡± Debashish was rehired as an on-roll employee after a year due to his outstanding performance.
By the time he got married in 2017 to Ritashree Chakraborty, he had risen to the post of cluster sales manager with a monthly salary of around Rs 1 lakh.
But during 2016-17, while still working at Axis, he started an ice cream shop which ran into severe losses and he lost about Rs 8 lakh in the venture. He closed the shop in one year.
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And then, one day he visited a momo outlet in Guwahati and found that the momos were nothing great.
So he thought ¡°Momos are the speciality of the northeast, and if a non-north eastern brand can sell momos in Guwahati, then I can serve better-tasting momos than them.¡±
His wife and mother supported his decision to start the business and take a second shot at entrepreneurship after quitting his job at the bank.
About a year after he shut down his ice-cream shop, the 30-year-old started his first outlet of ¡®Momomia¡¯ at GS Road in Guwahati, with Rs 3.5 lakh that he borrowed from a private lender at 10% interest.
The first three years were tough and business was very slow. Debashish said ¡°I will never forget how I convinced my loan lender to pay him back daily, rather than on a monthly basis", he said. ?"There were days when I gave him Rs 300, 400 or 600out of the Rs 35,000 monthly EMI", he added.?
And then after the initial three years, the business scaled up quickly in the post-pandemic period when he opened 55 stores in the span of just 12 months, i.e. between February 2021 and February 2022 to register a turnover of Rs 18 crore during FY 2021-22.
There¡¯s no looking back since then for the momopreneur and founder of Momomia!
Taipo Foods Pvt Ltd, which owns Momomia, now has outlets in the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, UP, Gujarat & MP to name a few. The outlets are located in cities like Bhopal, Kanpur, Guwahati, Itanagar, Ranchi and Balasore.
Truly, Debashish¡¯s journey is nothing less than an inspiration for people to never give up on their dreams!
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