Kishore Kanhere's story: From air cooler business to Rs 66 crore contruction empire

As far as they were concerned, a secure job in a government agency was the best option for a 21-year-old. However, I had made up my mind and began looking for a good, feasible business idea. I finally zeroed in on air coolers. My hometown, Nagpur, is known for its extreme weather, with the temperature soaring to 47 degree Celsius in summer. So, in 1984, I thought of setting up an air cooler business from my home.
With a seed capital of Rs 3,000—I borrowed Rs 2,000 from my mother and added the savings from my pocket money—I bought things like an air box, copper wires and air tubes for assembling air coolers. My first client was a relative, who had been planning to buy an air cooler for a long time. Since my offer price was much lower than that in the market, I convinced him to buy my product. To sweeten the deal, I also offered him a two-year warranty.
That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I made a net profit of around Rs 1,000 per cooler, selling 80-100 units every summer. Over the next four years, word-of-mouth publicity helped me to expand my customer base beyond the relatives, neighbours and friends. While the business was booming, I began to encounter two problems.
One, my business was seasonal, and two, my margins had begun to fall due to the increasing competition. So, by 1989-90, I started thinking of changing the line of business. Fortuitously, around this time, I found out that one of the offices of the Forest Department in Nagpur required minor renovation and repair. The work would have cost around Rs 25,000, and though I had never ventured into this line, I took up the challenge. Since it was my first job in the field, I wasn't bothered about the margin.
  I used the best material and did as well as I could since I realised that if I did a good job, I would be able to procure more work. The successful completion of this assignment gave me the confidence to take up construction-related projects. I started accepting small contracts for repair work and also bagged sublet jobs for several projects outsourced by bigger contractors.
I invested the profit that I made in real estate, acquiring small plots of land in and around Nagpur. So, in the four years that I dabbled in this business, I invested Rs 6-7 lakh in realty. When I started making enough money from the construction vertical, I decided to pull the plug on my air cooler business in 1994. The next milestone year for me was 1996, when I started my current company, Ankit Constructions.
Named after my son, the company set up a small project in Nagpur. We already owned the land and getting approvals for the project was easy due to the contacts I had made while carrying out sublet jobs for government agencies. Over the next nine years, the annual turnover increased to Rs 10-15 lakh annually. I managed to break into the big league in 2005, when I diversified to infrastructure projects. The first major project was a highway at Khamgaon, Maharashtra, which was worth nearly Rs 60 crore and for which I partnered with a couple of other contractors.