TimesJobs’ ‘My First Job’ column with Kunwer Sachdev: the pens, the fallout, the telecom stint, the cable-TV pivot, and the malfunctioning inverter that quietly started Su-Kam.
TimesJobs.com’s ‘My First Job’ column runs on a simple premise: job experiences teach you things far beyond skill sets, and those lessons quietly steer your future. This edition captures that from Kunwer Sachdev, Founder & Managing Director of Su-Kam Power Systems.
Pens first — while still at school
Sachdev’s ‘first job’ was not a job in the corporate sense. As a schoolboy, he started selling pens to support his elder brother’s business — buying wholesale, cycling around Delhi, learning what customers actually pay for. It was small money and taxing work, but it was where the entrepreneurial instinct first turned on.
Fallout → telecom → cable TV
A fallout with his brother pushed him into a telecommunications company for a few months. From there, he set up his own cable-TV installation business, then moved further up the value chain into manufacturing cable-TV equipment — amplifiers, CATV and MATV gear. He was, by his own admission, doing reasonably well.
“A repeatedly malfunctioning inverter instigated me to look under the hood — and that was where Su-Kam really started.”— Kunwer Sachdev, TimesJobs ‘My First Job’ • 20 July 2017
The inverter that started Su-Kam
The moment that changed everything came in the mid-1990s, when a home inverter in his own house kept malfunctioning. He opened it up, saw how much room there was for engineering, and decided to build in that gap. That single frustration is what turned a cable-TV manufacturer into the founder of India’s biggest power-backup brand.