Out of every 100 startups, only 2-3 survive, RG Chandramogan, we realize that luck factor is just 1% while hard work & perseverance is 99%.

Most of us would have come across hard-hitting statistics which suggests that out of every 100 startups, only 2-3 survive, while the rest 97 fade into obscurity. Looking at such data, one cannot help but wonder if entrepreneurship is just a big gamble where only a few lucky survive. However, when we look at the struggles of entrepreneurs like RG Chandramogan, we realize that luck factor is just 1% while hard work & perseverance is 99%. 

Exactly 50 years ago, after dropping out of college, Chandramogan decided to venture into some business where he could "make it big". With Rs 13,000 as funding from his parents (who in turn had sold their ancestral property and family jewelry to arrange those funds for him), he started a tiny factory to produce ice-creams, which he aptly named "Arun ice-creams"  (In Tamil, Arun means Sun).

Every morning, Chandramogan loaded all the ice-creams from his tiny factory, into an ice-cream cart, and would manually push the cart for 12 hours, traversing each and every street & bylane of Chennai, selling his high-quality ice-candies under the "Arun ice-creams" banner to popularize his brand to the masses. Such was his dedication that he carried out the arduous business of pushing his ice-cream cart everyday for the next 15 years!! 

When he began his journey in 1970, his tiny factory was just one of the 40,0000 independent ice-cream factories, each catering to its own street or locality. It was basically a cottage industry, against which he won gradually, one at a time through his rigorous efforts and focus on rural markets. By the mid 1980s, he had already laid the foundation for the organized sector and literally monopolized the ice-cream segment, with a wide variety of sub-brands & ice-cream parlours under Arun brand.

In 1986, he took the next leap by venturing into dairy segment as well. Interestingly, just like how the ice-cream brand was named after Sun (Arun), he named the dairy brand also after Sun. He had initially thought of naming it "Hot-Sun", but finally gave it a refreshing twist and named it "Hatsun", which grew by leaps and bounds, is now the largest private dairy company in India, and is the largest dairy exporter from India, to more than 40 countries around the world.