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Doneil Vaz

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Doneil Vaz

CEO

Blue Sky HR Solutions

Doneil Vaz is a member of:

Company Profile

BLUESKY is a pioneer and a vanguard in the concept of HR Function outsourcing that specializes in transitioning organizations to embrace next level growth. Organizations that reach a saturation point after the start up phase and desiring to structure the enterprise to manage scale must have core HR processes in place. These include change management, institutionalizing systems and processes, organization structuring, talent acquisition, accountability systems and performance metrics to name a few. SMB’s are unable to acquire such expertise at an affordable cost. Bluesky fills in this gap for such organizations.
Bluesky presently powers the HR function on an end to end basis for more than 30 midsized organizations with a forward looking plan to integrate more than 100 clients in the next 2 years.
“The Bluesky virtual Cloud”, provides growing Companies with Strategic Design, Direction, Best Practices in HR, Multiple levels of Expertise, Continuity and HR Services support. Most importantly the Company focuses on “Execution” which is the pivot and which differentiates us from pure Consultancy. This Execution framework is supported by more than 40 HR professionals across different levels of expertise, many of them actively working out from the client sites.
D’Oneil Vaz, Founder and CEO along with the support of Alex Kuruvilla-Managing Director of Condenaste, Vogue, conceived the concept of Bluesky in 2006.

My Role

The Company has grown organically from a small equity base and hence I had to wear several caps at different points of time. Initially, I was increasingly playing the role of an operating manager cum CEO and as the company scaled and got more structured, the Company was able to afford professionals. At this time the role changed more towards strategic leadership with a relentless focus on growth of the Company.
Growing companies never follow a pre-set pattern and at un-expected times they encounter air pockets needing the entrepreneur to take charge and deep dive to bring things on an even keel. Presently the role is more of a Mentor and strategist ensuring that the company is self driven with minimal support from the CEO. At all times the role has been to make the system self driving and reduce personal dependence.

Relationship with potential investors

Well we have always had the intent to look at potential investors but always delayed the processes so as to add more value before we reach out to them. Ultimately we need to be internally convinced before we reach out to potential investors. 7 years of credible reputation behind us, we can affirm that this could be an exciting story for investors.

Difficulties faced

I think no entrepreneur can claim to have had it easy and we have had our own share and continue to grapple with them in a difficult environment. The biggest challenge was in managing the present vis a vis the future and focus on enhancing equity. This obviously means sacrificing short term gains for long term especially when the growth is internally funded through cash accruals.
Hence the difficulties were always in attracting top talent, retention of talent, expansions, new product development, marketing, automation etc. In-adequacy of cash is the single limiting factor from where most difficulties emanate until one reaches a threshold. Further the recession has not been kind and has compounded difficulties.

Advice to young entrepreneurs

My advise would be that even though you may be small do all the things that a big company does; have the right processes, structure, accountabilities, delegation systems, performance measuring systems and mind set. These will help you scale systematically.

Never be in self denial of things that are not working because of your infinite passion and commitment to make it succeed. Stop back look in the rear view and feed forward

Your employees can never be as good as you, accept that they are fallible and if they were otherwise they would have been owners

Key thoughts about Entrepreneurship

Indian business leaders must recognize that times are getting extremely uncertain and possibly the entrepreneurs and founders may not have all the answers to every challenge. Apart from having the right employee also have the right partners to support you through the growth phase. Always be open to change and willing to reconstruct even when things aren’t broken.
I would like to share with VC’s that there are quite a few exciting opportunities beyond technology focussed start ups and apart from financial investments, the softer aspects like talent acquisition and employee management are important determinants in the success of a start up.