Ajay Srinivasan Secrets to Building a Successful Company

Ajay Srinivasan has a long and successful track record of setting up and scaling businesses in India and abroad. He has over 35 years of experience and has played a crucial role in building multiple companies from scratch. His last position was at Aditya Birla Capital. During his time at the company, he built out a full portfolio of businesses from life insurance to health insurance from asset management to wealth management, from SME and retail lending to Housing finance and from a stressed assets platform to busineses in stock and insurance broking. His vision of building a diversified and integrated business led to the company moving from a loss to one of the top 100 companies in terms of profitability in India.

Here, in our blog, we are going to talk about some of the factors in Ajay Srinivasan’s journey behind building  successful companies

Building a people and process-driven organisation:

Since early in his career, Ajay Srinivasan has always focused on building a people and process-driven organisation. Whether it was Ajay Srinivasan Aditya Birla or Ajay Srinivasan at Prudential HK, his mantra remained strong. His view was that we should hire people who will build the role and job rather than hiring people who exactly fit the job. He looked for attitude rather than qualifications. He looked for people with hunger and desire more than people with just experience.  His belief that processes were key for building a scalable organisation helped drive growth at break neck speed.

Maintaining a clear strategic vision with focus on execution:

Whether at Aditya Birla Capital or ICICI Prudential, Ajay Srinivasan strongly focused on maintaining a clear strategic direction across different business verticals. Clarity in goal and direction and a strong focus to convert this into reality allowed Srinivasan to build businesses across 10 markets while he was with Prudential and in several businesses while he was at Birla Group.

He built a diversified portfolio at Aditya Birla Group’s financial services covering verticals like asset management, life insurance, housing finance, equity and commodity broking, wealth management, health insurance, SME and retail lending and stressed assets. Because of this multi-faceted approach, Aditya Birla Group was able to diversify its products and services and also enhance the customer satisfaction rate.

Focusing on long-term leadership development:

With over 3 decades of experience in leadership roles, Ajay Srinivasan has always emphasised the importance of developing leaders within the organisation. He believes that a company can only achieve its goals if it focuses on long-term leadership development.

He is also inspired by Peter Drucker’s Management Theory of focussing on strengths and not on weaknesses. His view is that one of the key roles of leaders is to build more leaders.

Constant scaling and growth:

Under Ajay Srinivasan’s leadership, comapnies experienced strong and sustained growth. During the Ajay Srinivasan Aditya Birla tenure, he helped ensure that the company was able to scale rapidly and offer better while meeting all customer expectations.

Ajay Srinivasan also paid special focus on mentorship programs. He felt that the teams could only be truly empowered with proper mentorship programs.

Delegation is the key:

Ajay Srinivasan believed that delegation is the unsung hero of a leader’s success. It is not a luxury but an engine of scale. A team that delegates will move faster, learn more, and build better leaders across different verticals. Delegation can be used to multiply impact. When a leader hands over the responsibility of outcome to the entire team, the organisation’s problem-solving capability increases.

Delegation also helps in growth and talent building. The opportunity to be more responsible helps in increasing the motivation of employees. Delegation also helps in faster decision-making. It allows the leaders to put their focus on core business tasks while other aspects are taken care of by the employees.

Wrapping Up:

In this way, with skills learned and honed on the job, Ajay Srinivasan helped in building multiple companies from the ground level. This was seen in diverse environments, be it in a foreign company like Prudential or a promoter led entity like Aditya Birla or a professionaly run Indian company like ICICI.