Behind Our Udyog Ratna Award: The Years Nobody Photographed
There is one photo from the day we received the Udyog Ratna Award. It shows our Managing Director, Mr Pooran Mal Agarwal, on a stage in Jaipur, receiving the award from the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan.
It is a good photo. It also hides almost everything that made it possible.
I wrote about the award itself, and what the Rajasthan government checks before giving it, in a separate post. This one is about the years before that stage.
Where did it start?
JPPL was set up in 1995. Production started in 1997, in one small factory. Mr Agarwal grew it from there with hard work and discipline, and with one belief he still repeats. Business must be run with truth, honesty and God's grace.
The hard work part is not a slogan. In manufacturing, there is no overnight success. A tape plant does not care about your mood. If the adhesive coating is uneven at 3 pm, it is uneven, and someone has to stay until it is fixed.
Were there hard years?
Yes, many.
I will not pretend the road from that small factory to a government stage was smooth.
I think every family business goes through years like these. The ones that survive are not the ones that avoid trouble. They are the ones that learn something specific from it and do not repeat it.
What changed in the years just before the award?
In the few years before the award, we made two deliberate shifts.
- We put more time and money into research on products, so we were not selling the same item the same way every year.
- We focused on exports, which forced us to meet stricter buyers, stricter documents and longer shipping routes.
Export buyers are strict. A buyer in Europe or Australia does not know you, and does not forgive a wrong label. Each complaint from abroad shows you a weak point in your own process, if you are willing to look. Over time, we also began making paper packaging alongside plastic, and today we export to 20+ countries with units in more than one state.
None of this was done for an award. The work came first, and the award only noticed it.
What did he say when the news came?
Mr Agarwal's reaction was the same as always. He said the credit belonged to the team and to the family, not to him. He thanked our customers, our associates, our investors and the government.
Who really deserves the credit?
The award has one name on it.
The work had many names behind it.
There are machine operators who catch a fault before it becomes a complaint. There is the dispatch team that packs an export container in the heat. There are people in accounts who make sure every vendor is paid and every invoice is right. None of them were on that stage.
If you buy from PackSmith, the tapes and paper packaging you receive are made by these same people.
What would I tell another small manufacturer?
I am not an expert on awards. I know a little about running a plant.
These are the four things those years taught me.
- Pick one or two things to get better at each year, and measure them.
- Treat every export complaint as free training.
- Give credit to the person closest to the work, in public.
- Apply for recognition only after the work is done, not before.
Thank you to everyone who stood with us in the years before that stage. We will try to deserve it again, one order at a time.
