Genslin Vinodh: Founder, Farm to Home

1. What is your philosophy of efficient leadership in a corporate setting?

Leadership is, at its core, the ability to map out the best route to success. It can be with a team or a company, but it is always dynamic, inspiring and designed to excite others into action.

Running a business successfully means being an effective leader who can both manage operations and inspire employees to achieve their best results. Effective leaders know how people need to be motivated to change and to create a positive working environment.

When you’re aiming for the top, you need to set your bar high. Take the time to determine who you are, your values and priorities. Be bold, stand upright and speak out your thoughts. Your performance as a leader must inspire, motivate, and bring out the best of people around. A great leader posses a clear vision, is courageous, has integrity, honesty, humility and clear focus. I strongly believe that leaders should be true to their character. They should be committed to doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason. When people know wholeheartedly that the person leading them will always do what they say, they in turn will work tirelessly to help the leader achieve a goal.

To put it more simple, leadership is the ability to take control of any situation and guide people around us in a positive way to stay motivated to do their best work.

2. Given the chance, how would you redefine woman entrepreneurship?

Being an entrepreneur is a tough journey and being a woman entrepreneur adds another layer of complexity due to the additional responsibilities a women has to handle. Women entrepreneurship is all about striking a balance between your business and home. It’s common to lose focus while we strive to strike a balance between work and family, but what ultimately matters is our ability to bounce back and stay focused on achieving our goal. The perks of being a women entrepreneur is the financial independence which puts in loads of self confidence and self esteem in you.

Today, more and more women have started chasing the entrepreneurial dream and are succeeding in their ventures. This is empowering other Indian women who are still confined to the traditional homemaker role to think for themselves. Women entrepreneurship is steadily increasing and businesses run by women has started lending voices to the world of entrepreneurship. Women have started achieving in ways that surprise even themselves and realize that their stories are worth telling as well as being listened to. And that’s the thing about women – we adapt. We work, we’re moms, we’re homemakers, we’re bosses; we can be all these things.

I always believe Empowered women empower the society. All you have to do is to identify a skill that can be converted into a home based or an online opportunity, Put your heart and soul into whatever you do, Believe in yourself and sky is the limit – Up, up and beyond you go.

3. Tell us more about Farm To Home.

Farm To Home – A Mom’s Promise is a home-based Organic Food Brand, serving 10,000+ happy customers across India and overseas. We started with a very few homemade food products and today right after 1 year and 10 months since our inception we are proud makers of 180+ homemade products out of which every single product has been a super hit among our clients. We deal with a wide variety of tasty, healthy, hygienic and nutritious organic foods like Baby Porridges, Instant health drinks, Millet noodles, Millet cookies, healthy laddus, millet snacks, natural Sweeteners, honey based products, organic beverages, immunity boosters, herbal powders and many more – carefully curated for Babies to people of all age groups. We have dedicated variants for Babies, Toddlers, Pregnant Moms, Lactating moms, Diabetics, elderly people and many more.

We at Farm To Home, have tried to give a modern avatar to the age old recipes with a healthy twist. I love creating new combinations and experimenting with food without compromising on the food legacy and all our recipes are self learnt from lot of trial and error methods and we have taken special care to keep the taste, the aromatic flavour and the nutritional value of our products intact without adding any kind of food additives.

We also make no use of machinery to ensure that our supplies are handmade. So, the main idea of providing handcrafted food products is to capture the essence of home made food which is prepared by our mothers with great love and affection in a completely hygienic atmosphere using pure ingredients that are free from adulteration. Our products are prepared using the choicest ingredients that are handpicked so as to maintain an excellent quality.

4. What are your organization’s vision and core values?

FARM To HOME – A Mom’s Promise – didn’t begin with the aim of expanding, or building a company, or even moving it out of my own kitchen. It began with the simple desire to help my family eat better by cutting off the processed foods that was taking over our shelves and replace them with ingredients I knew and trusted. And gradually things changed when my hubby came up with an idea of Farm To Home and from then I found myself navigating new spaces, growing in ways I hadn’t imagined or foreseen. And today with all our efforts and hard work I’m very happy that we are growing consistently with a strong customer base every single day.

Our vision is to see ourselves to be amongst the leading brands in the field of health and nutrition and to be present in every house and become the first choice of health conscious consumers looking out for a healthy yet an utterly delicious treat. When I say to become the leading brand, it is not only concerned with capturing the market so as to make good money. Making money is great and important too, I would not deny that, but in the process how many are we truly able to help is what counts. My venture, therefore, works as a catalyst to help the millions out there struggling with health problems who could consume our products which are healthy and nutritious.

Creating millions is a great feeling but helping millions is a state of complete bliss. Working upon this policy, we want to leave a mark as a leading brand in the field of nutrition with a great social cause.

Our core value is, We value and respect everyone who comes through our doors, be they our clients or our staff. We consider their experience with us and their well being as our highest priority.

5. What would you choose between following your passion and being practical? Why?

For me it’s my passion rather than being practical. When you are fueled by that inner-fire called passion you will never run out of motivation or inspiration.

I think probably one of the main factors on deciding whether to pursue passion or practicality would be one’s financial security. Unfortunately, it would be very hard to pursue passion over money if it’s a struggle to keep our finances afloat. The sad truth is that privilege plays a huge part in our decision-making. Pursuing your passion would be a great piece of advice for some people, but not for everyone. I’m lucky to have my hubby who has always given me the privilege of following my passion and I chose to use this privilege for good.

I can very well say that Farm To Home is a Mom’s tale of passion and grit. The idea of having a passion for something is empowering. We all want to find a career one day that will have us jumping out of bed in the morning, excited to get to work. That’s one sole reason why I’m holding my passion tight. We may need to fight a lot to make people around us to understand our passion, but at the end of the day it’s all worth it when we follow something our heart loves to do.