Ajay Prabhu: An Entrepreneur with Wisdom Date:   Monday , July 28, 2014 This is the story of a 38-year old man who won the Rajiv Gandhi Sharomani Award for his outstanding contribution and achievement in Cloud Consulting industry within two years of setting up his company KVP Business Solutions. He has other sides to him as well. He thoroughly enjoys dressing up his 5-year old daughter and 9-year old son for school, feeding them and polishing their shoes, gets to the gym and frequently cycles to office. This is the story of Ajay Prabhu, Founder & CEO, KVP, who believes in \'Be Humble & Be Foolish\' to achieve the dual purposes of serving and learning, all while running a profitable business. Today, Ajay is a well-known thought leader within the industry, but as a kid, he was quite an introvert. \"As a kid, I never had the guts to question anybody as I come from a very small town Karkala near Mangalore whose diameter is just around 3 kilometers and like many small towns in India, there was not too much choice when I was growing up,\" Ajay says. The journey to being an entrepreneur was quite unexpected for Ajay. When he came to do his MBA, he had to overcome several short comings. He hardly knew English, all languages except his native Konkani seemed alien to him. He shied away from conversations with the fairer sex and was always around his small group of friends. \"I never knew what destiny planned for me but with whatever limited options I had, I always jumped into the situation and took charge of it which encouraged me to be an entrepreneur,\" reminisces Ajay. He did the rounds of a few leading MNCs and worked with them honing his skills in Marketing and Sales. Watching them from up close, he gained the confidence to try the unexplored areas. Like his great grandfather, K. Venkatesh Prabhu was a staunch Gandhian, the founder of K.V. Prabhu Oil Mills and a successful businessman in Karkala town, he always wanted to set up a company that was high on ethics and did not see profit as divorced from ethics. The initials KVP are a tribute to his great grandfather. Like his great grandfather, Ajay too is blessed with the acumen to see opportunities and take the less trodden path. In 6 years, KVP has scaled enviable heights and is going strong. Surviving the Competition KVP offers companies Salesforce.com implementation services through a unique combination of consulting and process re-engineering in the areas of sales and marketing consulting, business optimization and automation. Ajay believes that \"Being an entrepreneur sometime demands more than you can give: time, energy, money and most important yourself\". Determined to do whatever it takes, Ajay knows that a good team will be the secret sauce to success - he largely invests his time with them training and planning strategy. Ajay spends major chunk of time interacting with clients to understand their priorities and needs but being a young company, it is essential to have A+ employees to survive in this cut throat competitive market. \"I feel as long as you work with clients and work with employees, the boat will sail in the way you expect. Today, in a team of 80 personnel, we have a huge chunk working with us since inception,\" says Ajay. Being a cloud consulting company, KVP implements Salesfore.com cloud technology like CRM and cloud platforms. Salesforce.com apps and platforms provide the customer\'s ability to improve customer experience and operational excellence through technology. They give access to the clients to the project management system through a portal to enhance transparency. This helps customers gain confidence in the business while implementing the idea of enhanced customer experience. For their extensive support and successful efforts, KVP was recently selected by Salesforce.com as Partner of the Year and back in 2011, the company was chosen as the Emerging Partner of the Year award. Being a successful person has not taken a toll over Ajay who is grateful to the few people responsible for making him what he is today: his mother, wife, grand aunt and friends from engineering days. \"If not for them, I would never have been who I am today,\" says Ajay. Inspired by his grand aunt and Salesforce.com\'s philosophy to devote 1 percent of man hours and profits earned for charity, Ajay has also founded KVP Foundation an attempt at being of use to the community that the company operates in. Ajay wants to see every employee or member associated with them to be well rewarded in terms of knowledge and remuneration; and help customers serve their customers using KVP technology.