Guest AuthorPentagon Tapes is an ISO 9001:2000 company, thus assuring great quality and efficiency. The application being used from Aerospace to nearly any conceivable application offers specialized high-quality products backed by an industry-leading commitment and customer satisfaction. Rahul Rajgaria along with Sarika found an opportunity in to bring new age, high quality, and high-performance tapes into the Indian market, for which they collaborated with American coating companies. Inspired by this thought, Pentagon was established to cater to this budding demand for high-quality adhesive-coated products, and help create this industry.
Sarika is answering some key questions on the current state of the tape industry followed by the effect of the pandemic and more.
Edited Excerpts:
Women are more into communication, fashion, and other industries. What motivated you to venture into adhesive tapes?
Women usually choose to pursue their careers in fashion, communication, or similar industries because their soft skills and knowledge in those sectors excel, and this helps them in making significant contributions in the industry. Talking about myself, initially, even I had planned to become an insurance agent and get into selling insurance policies to my family, friends, and references.
While working on the same, I had also thought of switching my field into either fashion or jewelry business. This seemed like a feasible plan, but at the last moment decided to not go with it, because it would make my career stream very monotonous.
Joining my husband’s business was never a part of my plan, but when I joined the company on a temporary basis while he was unable to carry out some operations, I fell in love with all the challenges and responsibilities the job had to offer, and after learning the whole process and bringing conversion in the company, I was offered a full-time job and it has been the best years of my career graph.
Facing Challenges is a norm in the lives of entrepreneurs. What were the challenges that you had faced in this two-decade journey?
It is a well-established fact that being an entrepreneur is not an easy task. The survival of the company and the well-being of each employee are what are in the hands. I work as a Director of Sales for Pentagon Tapes, but I have seen my husband work closely hence have personally witnessed the stress and dedication which goes into surviving in the market.
The biggest challenge for the establishment is their survival as like in the hunger games, only the fittest can survive. As we observe that while we are striving to grow, even our competitors are growing day by day, which makes it tough for us to maintain stability in the firm whilst also ensuring that we focus on growing without compromising on the quality of our products.
Since last year, we all are bogged down by this pandemic. Manufacturing took a backseat and entrepreneurs here had to make tough decisions. How did it affect your business throughout this period and how is the industry coping up?
Pandemic hit like a shock to each and everyone and till today it is highly affecting the possibility of even surviving in the market. At the manufacturing level, we have to face an ultimate shortage of manpower labor and raw material availability along with a sudden steep in the input cost. At the sales level, we had uncertainty in demand with a lot of price pressure from customers.
We also had to manage supply chain management issues due to the non-availability of logistics in the required time. There had been a lot of delay in executing the payments from customers causing an extra financial burden on the company. Hence it is true that the times are pretty tough, but we are trying our best to conquer through all these challenges and ensure that it doesn’t impact the quality and integrity of our products.
So it is one of the most difficult times we are going through but we are fully coping up with the situation with a lot of positive attitudes as we founded our business to compete for the best and perform best in the worst situation giving utmost satisfaction to our valuable customers who trusted us all this year.
A spirit that every entrepreneur has is not to give up. While tiding over these tough times is not really going to stop you from thinking beyond, right? If so, what is the roadmap for Pentagon Tapes and your personal life?
Speaking about the roadmap, our main aim is to always work with a lot of passion and positive spirit to reach our goal and dream to become one of the best Adhesive Tapes manufacturing and distributing companies giving the best solution to our valuable customers.
We love and respect our whole team and customers as our own family members and this leads to there being a very thin line between my personal and professional life. I have to manage both at the same time as I am capable of doing so because of the immense support I got from my people around me.
Aravind Sundaram
Guest Author
