Ramana Sambu – MBA’2016
Associate Director, Business Development, Droom Technology Pvt ltd
Believer of “never lose hope, trust, trust and trust yourself”, Ramana Sambu shares the anecdotes for a successful career in the corporate world. In the short span of two years, Ramana has risen to the position of Associate Director and is leading a team at Droom Technology. Ramana especially gives credits to Personal Effectiveness sessions, he attended at Great Lakes as his major life changing experience that carved the niche for his corporate career. Let’s find out more about him in his interview below.
Q&A
Q. What is your current role at Droom Technology?
Currently at Droom.in, I’m building a startup within a startup as a head for one of our Proprietary eco system tools called ECO (Auto Inspection). I am leading a team of 17 people and we are responsible for building supply across PAN INDIA with an aim to expand to all metro cities by March 2019 and reaching the team size of 800 people. I am also responsible for managing the End to End operations along with generating revenue of 24 Cr annually.
Q. In such a short span you have reached at the position of Associate Director. To what do you owe your success?
I joined Droom post my MBA at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon as Associate Manager, Business Development in the year 2016, where I worked directly with all the departments (Marketing (BTL), Ad-sales, Operations, Sponsorships and Business Development) and, I also used to network with various other departments at Droom. I was directly reporting to Droom’s co -founder Rishab Malik which helped me in excelling my skills and improving my efficiency manifolds. As a result I was able to establish great belief and trust in my peers and soon I was promoted to Associate Director along with handling a great project like ECO( ECO is an inspection/ verification service provider for automobiles in India). I believe commitment towards my work, passion to grow as an individual & zeal of building something new which disrupts the market led me to grow faster than others.
Q. How much has the learning experience at Great Lakes helped you in carving your career?
One of the great things that Great Lakes has is Personal effectiveness session which I don’t think that any other B-school has. The session vastly helped many students in several ways to build their career and I was amongst the ones who identified their real core strengths and weaknesses during the session, in turn it helped me in re-building my professional career in the field of business development.
Great Lakes exposed me to plethora of case studies, incessant feedback from Professors and internship opportunity. Great Lakes has excellent faculty where every Professor is a knowledge bank in his/her respective field. I was blessed to have an opportunity to do a Live Project at FIPI (Federation of petroleum Industry). The 12 weeks long Live Project developed me as an individual in terms of sharpening my skills and providing me an exposure for working about 12 to 13 hours every day which later on helped me in my job and resulted in achieving rapid growth.
Q. You are leading a team now. What qualities do you think a team leader should possess?
According to me, below are some qualities that a team leader should possess
- Start every day at Zero
- Cross Collaboration and continuous Feedbacks from the team
- Stop evaluating your team based on potential – differentiate between superstars and rock stars
- Decentralize decision making – Drive top-down context setting, not top-down decisions!
Q. Were you an active member of any committee/society at Great Lakes. Please share the experience?
I was an active member for Energy Club and a Passive member of Alumni Committee. I still remember a major life changing incident in my life. Because of our alumnus, me and my friend got an opportunity to represent our Country and College in Indonesia as Indian Delegates at International Student Energy Summit-2015 to present a paper on Restoring of Lakes based on Kakatiya Project (Telangana). There we also stood among TOP 5 teams across 117 countries & it was fully funded by the ISES-2016 team. And the entire credit goes to our esteemed alumnus Mr. Vishal Gajjar who helped us in applying for ISES event.
Q. Do you have any advice for future Great Lakers?
With the amount of exposure I have gained in last 2.5 years at Droom, I can suggest to all my future Great Lakers that “Never ever lose hope and Trust….trust and trust yourself”.
Q. What do you like to do you in your free time?
I take out my time every day to play TT (Table tennis) and read a lot of E-Magazines on Global Startups, Business Tycoons, and veteran Industrialists .
Q. Please share one belief/quote that you follow in your life.
Work hard and Party harder
Great Lakes Institute of Management 