The overall business is evolving with the changing needs and competitive environment. Accepting such changes in his company, Rajiv Sharma, CEO and Founder of Radma Research believes in focusing on self rather than on his competitors. Further, Rajiv says, “If you do get better, then the business scenario will automatically turn out to be the best.”
He has an overall experience of 20 years including 16 years in Market Research. With deep strategic knowledge, he consistently embraces the core values of integrity, innovation and growth to work towards client’s development.
Many large research firms are facing various challenges such as impactful reporting, data management and technology. Radma research have converted these challenges into their strength and have been able to successfully deliver quality data towards such demanding projects. With this, and the adoption of innovative research techniques, Radma aims to consistently deliver quality data in order to meet the expectations of their clients.
Radma Research and Consulting belongs to the elite five percent of market research companies globally that performs high-end qualitative research and has successfully completed 75 projects in the last one year.
In an interview with Business APAC, he explains his journey with the company and how he handles the challenges in this dynamic market. Here are some excerpts.
Transforming Leadership Skills
According to you what type of skills are required to transform the current landscape?
Talking about the leadership demand in current transforming landscape, I think the biggest transformation has to be with respect to evolution from being a Chief Executive officer to Chief Evolving Officer. With so many dynamics involved and continuously changing, I as a CEO have to be TASK oriented (Technologist, Adaptive, Innovative and Kick-ass) all at the same time.
Educational and Professional Journey
Tell us about your education and professional background.
I believe education lays a good foundation in career growth and keeping that in mind I pursued BE in product engineering from MIT University, 1999 batch. Today I possess more than 20 years of industry experience, including 16 years in Market Research. My domain expertise lies in ICT, BFSI, oil & gas, retail and the automotive sector. I am also a business partner of the Economic Times, collaborating together to provide end-to-end research solutions across large corporate organizations, globally.
Evolving and Reforming the Research Market
Please enlighten us about your company’s offering and its present and future focus areas.
At Radma Research, we just do not provide data; we help clients with insights to enable them take informed decisions. Apart from the conventional and traditional research methodologies that we work on, we are continuously working towards evolving and reforming the way research is carried out leveraging digital marketing, social media campaigns, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Enlightening on present and future focus areas for expansion; we use robotics for conducting short IVR based surveys, we leverage artificial intelligence platform to derive sentiments and emotions captured in video surveys, and we have a local team of natives in 28 countries who execute the fieldwork for us in a collaborative way. We provide live reporting link and interactive dashboards for self-administration and analysis.
Sustainable Growth Focusing on High End Technology
How are you planning to sustain the growth in the long run?
Growth is part of life and without growth there is no survival, especially in long run. We have had an exponential growth in past 2 years, we would now want to sustain that growth in the third year with focus on leveraging technology led research solutions as value add, developing client relations in a strategic way and further automating our internal processes.
Creating Future Leaders
How different is your approach from other leaders in your industry?
Being a leader in the industry, I understand that leadership role in every industry is very different and complex. In my opinion Vision, Ideation, Strategy and Deliberation are extremely important to be an effective leader. Creating future leaders and entrepreneurs from your own team is the best one can do for business community.
Creating Milestones
Enlist your Key milestones that you have set for Radma Research over the next 5 years?
Speaking about milestones, we have our interim milestones and benchmarks for us, which helps us in raising the bar every-time. Every year, we want to celebrate our achievements meeting those milestones and move closer to the bigger vision and picture we have of making Radma a strong qualitative premium research partner with one of the strong task-oriented team high on skills and will. Then perhaps we don’t need to set the milestones, as we will create those.
Offering High Quality Services
How different is your service offerings from your competitors?
Our main differentiating factors are those of the processes and the technologies that we use. With respect to processes, it is mainly our ability to promote and enable the effective use of research methodologies in a more qualitative way rather than following mere traditional ways. Through brainstorming and validation of prior assumptions, we are able to design credible questionnaires, deliver original insights and findings into broader market content and give guidance and advice in a clear and respectful manner. The technological aspects include a client portal to access projects on a real time basis, 100% call recordings and remote barge in facilities.
Positive Mind equals to Positive Life
What keeps you positive in your daily life?
For positivity, many people read books or watch movies or TV shows to get inspiration, but for me, I take inspiration by the people around me who have made an impact and have brought positivity.
Promoting Meritocracy and Encouraging Employees
Team plays a crucial role in organizational development. Tell us about your team’s strength and how you ensure their continuous development?
As a CEO and Founder of the company, I believe in appreciating each and every team member in the company as it keeps the moral of the company high. The company consists of handpicked team of people who are provided with access to state-of-the-art technologies, and coupled with a strict process-driven approach. Radma predominantly focuses on the strength of the team rather than its size. At every level, Radma promotes meritocracy and also encourages its employees in learning and developing new skills.
The crux of Radma’s prowess has always been its robust and experienced team which is specialized and trained in domains such as ICT, Automotive, Consumer Products, and FMCG, among others, and above all, acts as the client’s extended team. All these domains act as a backbone which is combined with flexibility in adapting into technologies based on the needs & requirements allowing the company to decipher the complexity of demanding projects. We have been able to successfully deliver such demanding projects. To emphasize, an effective feedback system, in addition to timely training & retraining, compliments its endeavors towards improvements and building strategic relationships with clients.
Word of Wisdom:
“Motto is to deliver quality through intelligent efforts consistently and it’s not just a habit, but second nature.”
