Running for Cover- Business Unusual At Entrepreneur, we believe the best learning an entrepreneur can get is from an entrepreneur. We asked founders to share a turnaround story of their company
By Punita Sabharwal •
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Problem
In the first quarter of 2020, before Covid-19 struck the world, Coverfox went through an existential crisis as the entire founding and leadership team, including the then CEO and CTO, walked out to join the competition. The company had about 700 employees at the time, and almost hundreds left in hordes. Adding to the challenge, the company faced an enormous cash flow crisis. Just when the situation stabilized a little, Covid-19 became a serious issue as the call center operations were being hampered due to work from home - covid rule.
Solution
Sanjib Jha took over as the interim CEO and took the challenge head-on to stabilize and grow Coverfox! As a first step, he had to quickly get a leadership team in place and find people from outside the company because almost no one from the senior leadership team was left in the organization.
To keep things afloat and maintain business continuity, the newly appointed CTO, Piyush Ranjan, made it possible for Coverfox's call center to operate virtually!
Once the leadership team was in place, the next to-do item on the agenda was to communicate with the larger team, motivate them, and answer their queries and concerns.
"We ended FY22 at a high note of Rs. 7 Cr monthly revenue run rate, which was Rs.1.5 Cr a month at the beginning of the financial year. It took us 21 months to significantly reduce the burn from Rs. 8 crore a month to Rs. 70-80 lakhs owing to our new business vision."
Outcome
From the employees' standpoint, the issue of trust and motivation was rebuilt by Sanjib Jha, CEO, through open communication at town hall meetings, to assure the employees that he would not abandon them and that the company is not being shut down.
Coverfox ended FY21 with Rs 24 crore in revenues after Sanjib Jha undertook a move to change the business model from being a lead-generation platform to a technology company with the capability to simplify insurance purchases and embed its pipeline to various insurers on different digital platforms. Over the past couple of months, the company has increased its revenue and slashed its burn rate by 90%.
Most of this success comes from the company's effective talent strategy, which is now incubating big ideas in its employees. For E.g.- its newly launched insurance infrastructure-as-a-service product, CoverStack, was an idea borne out of a town hall meeting and is now its growth engine. In FY22, the company achieved Rs. 34 Crore in revenue and aims to quadruple it to Rs 127 crore in FY23.
