“As an entrepreneur, a person’s responsibilities go beyond fulfilling his/her individual aspirations. One must hold the accountability not only to your own dreams but, the dreams and aspirations of your team as well. It goes much beyond, as your responsibilities extend to your customers, your employees, industry value chain, society and the environment. Your vision must transform not only the industry but also the community on the whole. Every decision that you take impacts so many lives that you need to be absolutely focused and true to the cause,” says Deepak Garg, Founder and the CEO of Smart Utility Systems (SUS).
With regards to SUS, his focus has been on delivering innovative solutions and value-added services to the utility clients that can help them in their journey of digital transformation. For the end consumers, the company wants to empower them by offering user-friendly, intuitive platforms that provide self-service capabilities. With smart global energy and water platforms, Deepak wants to revolutionize the way the world approaches energy and water sustainability.
Getting out of the Comfort Zone
Deepak who is responsible for the innovation, vision, strategy and leadership at SUS, had a successful career with top multinational companies, so the biggest hurdle in his entrepreneurial journey was to be mentally strong to push himself out of the comfort zone and convince himself to pursue his dream. Moreover, considering the information technology’s landscape in the energy and utility industry, he had to come up with solutions that could really disrupt this industry where business processes, workforce collaboration and even customer services operations were manual, paper-based and very traditional. However, he feels lucky to have received a big support from like-minded industry leaders.
Why Energy and Utility Companies?
As an entrepreneur, Deepak wanted to contribute to the bigger cause of an energy and water sustainable future. He strongly feels that for the energy & utility companies to be able to deliver on energy efficiency and water conservation, customer involvement is of utmost importance. Thus, through the user-friendly and intuitive platforms developed by SUS, his team is helping utilities establish real-time, two-way communication with their customers to bridge this gap. At the outset, the company’s mission was to enable digital transformation of utilities and transform the traditional utility-customer relationship. Their platforms allow end users to manage and monitor their electric, water, gas consumption in real-time; enroll for energy efficiency, demand response and water conservation programs; and, thus be proactive in making better choices with regards to their usage. Deepak’s vision has always been to lead by example and the result is that their platforms are recognized as the No. #1 Global Smart Energy and Water Cloud Platforms.
Summing up, the reason why Deepak opted for this business was to become a part of the ecosystem and be able to drive this change. The uniqueness of the business lies in the fact that he is able to positively impact the entire value chain of the utility sector.
Attribution
His passion, his determination and his belief in the dream are the reasons behind his success. He had an idea and wanted to bring a difference to the utility-customer relationship and energy habits of the people by leveraging technology. Deepak also strongly believes in his team and shares that the support from his team is one of the biggest reasons behind the company’s success. Their talent, perseverance and the faith they showed in the idea, kept Deepak motivated and are the reasons why they are growing exponentially and are the best in the industry.
Lessons from his Journey
“During this journey, my biggest lesson has been ‘to keep your eyes & ears open to the latest trends and advancements, from around the globe, in not just your line of business but other industries as well,” says Deepak. This has helped him build a team who strongly believes in his ideology of innovation and focus on delivering excellence. Deepak and his team are driven by a vision to help revolutionize the way, world approaches energy efficiency and water conservation. Thus, product innovation and development is a key focus area of his organization.
Deepak thinks that one cannot define a set of qualities that one must possess to be an entrepreneur. Yet, he strongly feels that passion and perseverance are a must-have for any entrepreneur. He says, there may be testing times when things might not fall in place as you expect, or you may be left alone in your journey, at such challenging times, perseverance is a must have ingredient to be a successful entrepreneur.
His advice to the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs is — read a lot, build new skills, go out in the field, reach out to different people, interact with customers, and most importantly don’t be afraid to ask for help. The more knowledge you seek, the better equipped you would be to face challenges head-on. While it is important to have the grit to succeed; but you should have the self-discipline to be persistent to sail through. He personally abides by an important lesson in life – to always remember that in humility, lies the key to success.
Deepak Garg: Revolutionizing World’s Approach to Energy and Water Sustainability
