Rita Sharma: England's richest Asian woman entrepreneur

Rita Sharma: England's richest Asian woman entrepreneur
Sudeshna Sen, TNN

Rita Sharma should be a public relations delight. She scripts like the perfect heroine of any number of minority success stories. She’s just 47, the richest woman Asian entrepreneur in Britain, a successful mother and CEO, the college dropout who built up her business from the classic garage.

To a level that now puts her worth, according to the Asian rich list, at an estimated GBP 100 mn - around Rs 820 cr last year. Besides, she can give any ramp model a run for her photo shoots. But Britain’s richest Asian woman entrepreneur is elusive. Like most successful women, she’d rather be taken seriously for her work than as a poster girl for any cause.

Described as one of the richest women in London in a rare interview with Telegraph, UK, Rita’s stayed out of media buzz, and isn’t one of the usual suspects who march in the pravasi success parade. “Frankly, I’ve been asked get involved in many, often prestigious public roles. But it’s a trade-off between work and time for family and kids. You have to give up on something, and in my case I’ve sacrificed socialising and networking,” she says candidly.

That hasn’t stopped her from making it to the top 20 in the Asian rich list, picking up the entrepreneur of the year award, or gaining a foothold in the £26bn travel booking industry. To put things in perspective, is worth twice as much as Meena Patak of Pataks.

WorldWide Travels, her travel agency which focuses on bespoke solutions, and its web arm, Bestattravel.com will have sales of around GBP 100 mn this year, up from £65 mn in 2006, with a profit of £7.5 mn, and about 90-odd employees. She’s recently bought over a cruise company, and “it’s turning around now”, she says.

Next year, she expects to grow at 25%. In a country where average growth rates of business biggies are in the low single digits, Ms Sharma’s determination and confidence makes her, well, intriguing. Given how tired we are of the same old faces in the successful overseas Indian women circuit, we coax her out of her usual reticence through a web of informal references for months, and catch up with her in her sprawling offices off Oxford Street.

Dressed informally in jeans and a shirt, no obvious accoutrements of wealth, Rita opens up about where she came from, how it’s like to balance work and family, the whole immigrant experience, glass ceilings, and where she’s going.
First, where she’s going. Home, soon. At 47, now that her kids, 19 and 16, are leaving the nest, she wants to conquer new worlds. And India is ‘after all in my DNA’, it’s the market that’s ‘most familiar’ after the UK, it’s closer to her heart than say China.

“It’s just a seed of an idea,” she says carefully, “I need to do a lot of homework because I don’t want to fall flat on my face. But at this point, India is an engine of growth. It would be a shame for any NRI with an idea not to at least take a flutter in India.”

Ms Sharma believes that the Indian outbound traveller is now discerning and sophisticated enough to want the kind of services she offers, and there is opportunity to replicate her business model. “Of course, I’m going to have to look for some kind of a partner or financing for any India venture. I don’t have the resources that would be required for the huge marketing effort,” she says.

She’s planning a trip next month to scout around for market entry. How about leveraging WorldWide? Well, no. she prefers to raise finance ‘organically’ for her India venture.

“What I have here is my insurance policy. I don’t want have to start all over again at my age.” The lady who, by her own admission has clawed her way out of a ‘ghetto-like’ existence, and been through boom and bust cycles, wants to keep her nest egg safely in her own pocket and she’s dropped any earlier idea of taking her company public.

And that’s where she comes from. Despite the ‘comfort zone’ that she’s achieved, Ms Sharma is deeply rooted in what she calls the ‘mindset of a first generation child of immigrant parents.

We go down memory lane, and she says that she learnt, growing up in a classic orthodox Punjabi immigrant enclave, the lessons they never teach you at Harvard Business School, ‘schools without walls’. “People ask me if my kids have inherited my entrepreneurial genes. I don’t know after all they’ve grown up in a comfortable, plastic environment, I haven’t pushed them to struggle, they’ve had a different life experience.”

Her parents came from Lahore and Lyallpur after partition, and she came to UK as a 10-month old baby. And traces most of her success to the grit and values her mother inculcated in her, and her own determination to get a ‘meal ticket’ out of the life of constant struggle to make ends meet.

“As a child I was a dreamer. I used to watch black and white Hollywood movies, and I just knew I had to get out of that existence. As a teenager, I was very serious, concerned about grades, not having fun, I wanted to be a lawyer.”
She still remembers the day that she, the eldest child, had to send her grant letter for law school at the university of Sussex back, so as to stay home and pitch in with the small family garment trading business after her father fell ill.

In the meantime, battling the community pressure to do the right thing and get married and have babies. “I was in my 20s, you know relatives come in and talk over your head, they think you’re deaf. She’s good looking, she’s getting old, why aren’t you getting her married? What’s wrong with her?” Finally, she says, her mother requested an uncle to give her a job in his travel agency, so she’d be at least be respectably employed, while her father tried to convince her to get married.

That was the turning point, highly inspired by Maggie Thatcher “those were the days when everyone was talking about business sprouting in the backyard, British industry was coming out of its dark ages with their 3-day work weeks,” Rita Sharma begged, borrowed and saved £4000 to start up on her own, “in a windowless room a little smaller than this,” she waves around her fairly Spartan office, in 1986. Just a year or two later, the stock market crash of the late 80s turned her dreams to dust, just like that.

She started all over again, in what she knows is an industry dominated by white males. “Yes, I don’t drink, and I don’t play golf. That makes it very difficult. But I’ve never ever gone in for the pin-striped look, I haven’t tried to be like a man,” she says. “Of course,” she jokes, some women say I’m overbearing, maybe because I’ve spent so much time working around men.’

Over the next 20 years, as her business grew, husband Rahul, a chartered accountant, dropped his career to join her as the company’s CFO. Sharma makes no bones about how hard it’s been to juggle both sides.

“The hardest thing has been to be a wife and mother. There are very few men out there who can stomach a successful partner, and it takes a very strong man to live with it day in and out.” Today the husband and wife duo work together, have balanced their roles equitably. He does the finances, she does the travel business.

And she’s not ready to stop, even though she’s achieved her childhood dreams. “When I was young, I thought anyone over 40 was old. Now I find I have so much to do.” Right now, this lady is planning to clock up her frequent flier miles to go into India.