My Biggest Lesson: Aashish Agarwaal
Aashish Agarwaal is the CEO and founder of We Are Amnet, an independent global creative production studio and pioneers of Smartshoring(R). He has over 24 years of experience in the world of production outsourcing. He grew up in India, was educated in America and now spends part of the year in London, UK and Chennai, India.
I was born and raised in India. For much of my teens, I spent my summer vacations in the sweltering heat of Madras (now Chennai). It was an odd choice because for people from Chennai, that is precisely the time you don’t come to Chennai. But having the kind of kindred connection that I did with my cousins, it was well worth every trip. And then there was The Wearhouse, the central character of this story.
At a time when the term fast fashion was just starting to be used, the Wearhouse was the epitome already. Stocked with export surplus apparel, one could buy the latest and the trendiest without lightening the wallet. And heck, I was a teenager, with a limited budget and with an even more limited sense of fashion (a reminder, there was no internet then).
My fashion quotient was, at best, a low-grade imitation of the few Hollywood films that were released in India then, and even fewer films which had any sense of style. So, an easy reason to buy quantity (over quality). The Wearhouse was perfect for this. For my time during the holidays, I was a regular there.
On one of those trips, my well meaning uncle who I stayed with gave me a piece of advice that has stayed with me. Grounded, intellectual and well-read, it is easy to confuse him as a professor of good living. I often refer to him as a zen monk. A follower of minimalism, his home and his lifestyle, like his words, are minimalistic and high quality. He was aware of the many trips to The Wearhouse my cousins and I made, carrying back bags of style and hope.
Often, the clothes would not survive three washes.
They became threadbare, a button would chip, or the fit would droop. It was a constant. By the end of every trip, I would usually leave with just one or two new articles of clothing.
He remarked “quality is cheap”. That’s it, no clarification, no explanation, no opportunity to further discuss. Use or lose, that seemed to be the essence of the message.
Over time, the meaning of that statement has had quite an impact on me and served me in good stead. It has been a principle I have tried to consciously apply to all the business ventures or personal consumption habits. In the business world, adages like First Time Right, Zero Defects, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma are all geared towards this idea.
Investing at the outset to produce quality outputs so that the tangible and intangible costs of poor quality can be avoided (read cost of rework, client dissatisfaction, client attrition, low NPS scores etc.). In fact, so defining has this principle been for me at work, one of our leadership principles is Deliver Certainty, the pursuit of making sure our clients can depend on us.
This in turn builds trust, which in turn reduces churn, leading to a lower cost of customer acquisition. This can also lead to potential referencing opportunities, leading to new business opportunities, again reducing the cost of new customer acquisition.
Quality is not cheap, in and by itself. It just renders the total cycle of making something, anything, more efficient, especially if there is a possibility of rejection or rework. Most importantly, while the tangible costs are measurable, the intangible ones are not easily measured. When you consider this, quality is cheap.
