Manav Garg is the CEO & founder of Eka Software Solutions, a software product development company that provides IT solutions (commodity trade and risk management software) to companies involved in export, import and trading activities.

One of the most beautiful things in life is when one's dreams get realised. It is even better when one goes above and beyond what one has dreamt for oneself.

My dream of starting my own organisation came about whilst I was working for the GP Group, a billion dollar conglomerate with interests in trading, shipping and aviation.

Part of my responsibility, while managing the Coffee Desk of the group, was to manage key accounts like Nestle Worldwide, P&G USA, Lavazza and Kraft Jacob Suchard. This gave me extensive exposure to the coffee markets of Italy, Korea, Japan, Germany, Vietnam and the US.

During my extensive interactions with various clients, I noticed most of them were using outdated technology or really large spreadsheets, which were highly cumbersome to manage and prone to errors, eventually generating significant, untraceable losses! I felt that there was a lack of a comprehensive commodity trading solution in the market that met the clients' requirements entirely.

This prompted me to work towards creating a software product that would cater to the needs of these organisations. This was how Eka Software Solutions came into being.

I proposed the idea to the GP Group, who gave me their support to go ahead with the project. I travelled extensively to learn about the various business processes in this industry, pertaining to various customers and their size of business, sometimes being on the road for 20 days in a month. A comprehensive, in-depth study and analysis was undertaken before we built the initial prototype of the product.

We faced a lot of initial hurdles such as raising capital, getting the first customer, getting a multi-billion dollar company as our customer and convincing them that they could trust and rely on us, a company from India that had created a software product to manage the complexities of commodity trading. We overcame these challenges by relentlessly focusing on customer pain points, creating winning relationships, and persevering through the hard times.

I do believe it is very important to try to find out early what you really want out of life, where you want to go, what you want to do and become. Once you have that figured out, you can build your competencies and skills around it. You have to follow your dreams, and work hard and persevere to turn them into reality, as dreams do take time to achieve, but are definitely achievable.