When the going gets tough
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Sheran Corera
This week the Mirror Magazine begins a new series featuring young entrepreneurs who share their stories of survival during a pandemic and inspiration for other start-ups. This week we feature Sheran Corera of Layup
With the beginning of lockdown, online learning became the new normal for students. However, Sheran Corera has been in this business since 2013. Layup focuses on designing LMS and virtual classrooms comprising live classroom sessions, game-based learning, distance learning, social learning, assessment tools, and reporting tools. He shared his insight on the role of online learning while working from home and how his organization is ensuring to secure and provide quality education for all.
How did the pandemic impact your operation?
I think like most businesses, the way that we work has changed. A lot of our meetings had to be done remotely rather than coming to work. So we were kind of adjusting to the new normal, that’s more from an operational perspective. If you look at it from a business perspective, I think our cash flow was quite impacted because people weren’t sure about what was happening. How long is this going to last? How do we even adapt to it? Because it was somewhat sudden and it went for a longer period than what people expect. So I think those were the primary impact areas that we had. Inaddition to that, I think there was just general human concern in terms of people, their families, and the lockdown, and then there was a scare of salary cuts, which we didn’t do. But all of those were going on in parallel as well.
How did you manage to adjust your business according to the emergency situation?
For us, if you look at it from a business perspective, we had our meetings remotely by Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft teams so that we were able to still communicate with our customers and have those going with them, and whenever we could have, face to face meetings with them when it was safe, we adapted to that. We had to look at a rapid strategy on business continuity overall because one aspect was, how does the pandemic affect our customers? How do we work on that? The second aspect was, how does it also affect our people? How does it affect our teams?
As we’re in the IT field for us we still have a lot of processes in place to ensure that there is operational visibility, we also have stuff like Jira boards and other ways that we track information from people and IT teams as supposed to several other businesses. Our manufacturing union has somewhat of a fluid organizational structure and fluid reporting structure, so that worked well for us.
What were the challenges like ? And how did you overcome them?
I think the biggest challenge that we had to face was adjusting to the new normal. As I said, it’s not just about the impact it has on your business but it’s also the impact it has on all your stakeholders, your customers, the organizations you work with, your employees, their families, the way the operational structure operates. So to ensure the business continues, I think we have to look at what is a robust strategy that we can adapt quickly, to keep up our standards in time for customer success. So we have teams that focus and measure things like customer success, which helped us. They look at our strategy more objectively and quantify things that we need to do to achieve whatever goals were.
Interestingly for our business, because it’s an e-learning platform, it tends to have a big boom in terms of interest and adoption, unlike most traditional businesses, the digital businesses suddenly got a lot of interest because of the behavior patterns of consumers themselves changed. So lots of people came to us, even if e-learning was somewhere down in the pipeline they would have looked at maybe in six months, a year or two years later, they wanted to roll it out immediately, so that was positive for us. I think it was challenging for our teams to be able to manage the existing workload, but again, all of that comes with its strategy. So we looked at the new landscape, the new interest as well as the new way of work and came up with a good strategy and adjusted to it.
Online learning gained massive popularity with the lockdown, as someone in this industry for a long period did you observe any new sudden changes in this business?
If you look at digital behaviour patterns, what was supposed to become normal in, maybe 2030 got accelerated to 2020. People didn’t know about Zoom or Google Classroom a year ago now these kinds of terms have become household names.
So I think there was an acceleration in the adoption of digital tools and technologies. Being in that business to a large sense, we saw a lot of interest in our services and products as a result, a lot of people who are conducting and other kinds of brick and mortar types of training moved to digital because it was hard to get everybody into one location or one classroom.
Since we are primarily in the corporate sector, there is massive growth in those segments. Today we are deployed for some of the largest organizations in Sri Lanka. We did a roll out for Pickme for nearly 75,000 of their drivers, we did for John Keells, we did for LOLC, we are in 251 branches of HNB, we are active in all the Keells Super outlets. There are a lot of new interests as well, our sales pipeline has a lot of new potential proof of concepts and demos for customers. I would say, it has been an interesting time for us, since from one end you have the business growing from another, we can manage our cash flow and in the third we have, covid impacting the way business is done.
On future plans?
In our business, change is something that happens quite rapidly. Technology is constantly evolving and constantly changing. Things like backups and adapting to challenging situations are what we build to our processes. So you need backups for processes and operations for many different situations, not just the pandemic, for example, tomorrow our servers can go down, operations can get impacted for some other reason, it might be a second pandemic, or it might be a security vulnerability that’s exploited, or it might be some change in the political landscape that affects our business, regardless of having whatever kind of playbook we assess the situation and then look at what’s the impact and we mitigate that impact. But I would say, overall, when we create processes and operations themselves, we prepare backups if there are constraints and if there is an outline situation, it is something that one should think about and look into closely.
How do you think covid-19 has molded the future of the business field you are functioning in?
Digital trends have accelerated a lot and brick and mortar businesses are getting replaced digitally to some degree. Whatever we thought would happen in like five years or 10 years, has got accelerated to now. Even if you look at behavior patterns of employees having a fluid-structure, people are working from home adjusting to ensure that they are producing high quality of work and reporting in a structured way, even though it’s not where you come in and you work 9 to 5 anymore. Covid gave us a really good opportunity to also look at how we drive bottom-line and streamline efficiency by cutting off the unnecessary spending that we were doing which I think will have a lasting impact on the business over the next 5 to 10 years.
What advice would you give as an entrepreneur to those who are skeptical about initiating a startup due to the current situation?
So there’ll never be the right time to start a startup. Most often what happens is that you start something, and then you figure out how to go from there. Interesting thing is that usually when landscapes change, namely when mobile came or when Web services came and now the pandemic, we always talk about the negative impacts those have, but what those also do is that they create opportunities.
The pandemic as much as it has impacted people and their lives and their livelihoods, has also created new businesses and new solutions in the new age.
So I would say, if you want to start something there’s never a perfect time. You should just go for it and see what happens.