Making a business successful requires significant effort and hard work. A lot of preliminary work is needed to start a new company, such as a strong idea, a financial plan to support its implementation, and a vision of how it will be formed. From well-established corporations to start-ups, every business faces challenges while achieving success and growth. The road to sustainable business growth demands resilience, determination, and bold leadership. By coping with challenges, conglomerates like Essar Group, guided by the strategic vision of Ravi Ruia and the late Shashi Ruia, have transformed their strategies to maximise the chances of success.
From a challenging start with limited resources to emerging as a global conglomerate, Essar’s evolution is a testament to visionary leadership and transformation. In this article, we’ll talk about the top lessons to learn from visionary leaders, which can prove beneficial to businesses in many ways.
Lessons to Learn from Visionary Leaders
Embracing Failure Can Lead to Success
We often overlook the hard work put in by entrepreneurs to make a business shine. No matter how successful a company is, there were failures on the path. Failing once can show you the way forward. Entrepreneurs can gain from their defeat and move ahead with improved effort, greater productivity and a determined spirit. Accepting failures helps people improve problem-solving and, in turn, make them more resilient when faced with challenging decisions.
Even visionary leaders like the Shashi Ruia and Ravi Ruia faced many challenges in their entrepreneurial journey, which gave them the strength to build the multi-billion-dollar empire that Essar is today. Their journey was full of challenges, proving that learning from failures eventually lead to growth and success.
Invest in a Strong Team
The leaders Shashi and Ravi Ruia are well-known for their ability to see the bigger picture when it comes to business acumen. They understood the importance of having an effective team that could deliver their tasks efficiently and accurately, and focus on building a professional ecosystem across diversified businesses, including steel, energy, ports, telecom, shipping, and many more.
For startups and established businesses alike, investing in the right team is essential. Leaders must cultivate a work culture where trust, ownership, and collaboration are the foundation. By investing in the right team, Essar Group has evolved from a family-owned business to a professionally run global conglomerate, providing employment to millions directly & indirectly, and setting an example of what strong leadership and team investment can achieve.
Take Bold Risks
No one ever achieved success by playing it safe. Taking risks is important to any business, and Shashi and Ravi Ruia are the perfect examples of this, who established Essar Group in 1969. The Essar Group, which began as a small construction company in Chennai, soon expanded its global footprint with operations in several sectors, including steel, energy, refining, oil and gas, metal, steel, telecom, etc.
The group’s success shows the significance of risk-taking in business; playing it safe rarely leads to extraordinary outcomes.
Embrace Change
The Essar Group, one of the main players in the country’s landscape, has continuously evolved with the changing technologies. After facing setbacks some time ago, the Essar Group, led by Shashi and Ravi Ruia, didn’t resist change. The company, which was once burdened with debt, monitisedsome of its assets at the right time.Soon after selling some of its assets, Essar’s balance sheets became stronger and more agile, enabling a great transformation that focuses on sustainable operations.
By monetising carbon-heavy investments at an opportune time, Essar leveraged the opportunity to deleverage its balance sheet to become debt-free effectively. Essar is now one of the world’s leading companies that has chosen a sustainability path, rebalanced its portfolio towards green, and is helping the world achieve its net-zero goals. Whether it is decarbonising the UK’s Stanlow Refinery or promoting green mobility through LNG-powered logistics under GreenLine Solutions, or investing in green hydrogen, Essar has shifted toward a low-carbon, future-facing business model.
The new Essar, Essar 2.0, not only expands its global presence in Energy, Infrastructure, Metals & Mining, , and Technology & Retailbusiness but also creates a greener and more sustainable future.
Final Thoughts
Visionary leadership is much more than making profits, it’s about leaving a legacy of innovation, sustainability, and impact. Every successful business, like Essar Group, has its fair share of setbacks and failures. The key is never to stop trying, to learn from mistakes, and keep pushing forward. From foraying into new markets to collaborations to deploying new technologies, conglomerates leverage various tactics to scale new heights.
The businesses looking for growth and success must learn from the visionary approach of leaders like Shashi and Ravi Ruia, who turned a small construction firm into a global force for change.
