Subhash Bhaskaran, Founder at Empower Business

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Subhash Bhaskaran:

Nowadays in corporate, HR / Learning & Development departments have a huge challenge in talent management as well as retaining employees.

During my corporate experience, I faced challenges in performance enhancement at work. After moving out from corporate in 2004, being an entrepreneur for over a decade, I thought of contributing in this gap.

During performance appraisals in organisation, a person is reflected upon his challenges to work on. Business leaders are not able to deep dive into the actual challenges faced by the individual as they have their own performance indicators.

Most of the times the employee is left to fend himself which he may succeed or quit the company.

To enhance performance an employee is sent to conventional programs which believe in One size fits all & focus on the how to achieve results with no execution support. Training programs were generic and not a personalised.

HR is clueless as to why attritions are happening in the company. They are focusing in providing tangible perks and not actually looking at the intangible ones like work culture, individual challenges etc nor do they have access to it.

Also Business owners & Start-up founders have challenges in talent management in turning their ideas into reality which is one of the reasons for start-ups to fail though founders have a great ideas and VC funding.

To address this gap in the HR domain/talent management domain, Empower Business offer New age Leadership program which is Online One-on-One/Group, Objective oriented and daily dash board enabled.

We offer an Unlearn to Relearn model to enhance the leadership traits.

Our programs are focussed towards enhancing managerial/leadership skills for the employees as well as founders.

Great Companies: What are the various services provided by Empower Business

Subhash Bhaskaran:

We provide various packages of short term programs like a Personalised data collection/diagnosis to long term programs ranging to 30-days,60 days,90 days and a subscription based model.

These are targeted to CXOs as well as CXO minus 4 levels as well as High Potential Employees(Hippos) in organisations. They could be in roles of succession planning also.

Individuals also join our program on their own to enhance his managerial/leadership skills.

We also act as facilitator to update the business leaders about the internal challenges faced by the individuals which they do not have access.

We also help HR fraternity to develop new initiatives to speed up the business deliverables as well as well being of the employees. This enables HR in being proactive in increasing employee retention.

Great Companies: What makes Empower Business different from hundreds of other similar service providers?

Subhash Bhaskaran:

Coaching requires more of Intellectual capital like a doctors profession. We have undertaken more than 1000 assignments One-on-One and are able to look at the blue print of the participants which is stopping them to produce results as we focus on the Why the person is not able to produce results.

Our USP lies in our Intellectual capital, Online One-On-One/group and the execution support using our dash board.

Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?

Subhash Bhaskaran:

Since this was a new a concept in the talent management domain, it took sometime for us to bring in a paradigm shift in thinking from a generalist training program to an online personalised virtual program.

However the pandemic gave us an opportunity to showcase the uniqueness of our online model versus the conventional offline model of delivery.

As companies are going into hybrid model, they have started accepting our concept.

HR heads were also getting benefited as they were getting access to lot of information from us about proactive measures to be taken inside the organisation to enhance work culture.

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Empower Business?

Subhash Bhaskaran:

We plan to offer more of our services globally though we have few clients from Middle East & US now. We would like to have our presence in more corporate as we would like to contribute in retaining talent in organisations.

As we are offering our service online we find it would be easier for us to scale up globally. We plan to increase our delivery team and also add more technology to our tools like AI in our dash board for monitoring progress.

We would also like to provide certification programs for people who are keen to join the coaching fraternity.

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Subhash Bhaskaran

A person needs to find a problem in an existing ecosystem and solve it. Later he needs to pitch it to scale it up to make it into tangible outcomes.