An 84-year-old electrical engineer hailing from Tamil Nadu, who worked for Neyveli Lignite, has just joined an online community to offer his advisory services to clients across the country as he doesn’t want his expertise in setting up power plants go waste.
He has a huge company already as over 16,000 people, retired from their respective jobs, who are willing to offer consultancy services to small and medium enterprises and ‘monetise’ their rich experience they gained in a wide variety of fields.
This is going to help thousands of people who worked for private companies and are virtually left with no income post their retirement.
“After retirement, majority of the people don’t do any job. They don’t find any even if they want to despite having vast domain knowledge in different fields,” C Seshachalam, Co-Founder of SeniorExperts.in, told Business Line.
“On the other hand, a large number of SMEs are financially handicapped and constrained to hire senior consultants to help them finalise their business blueprints, manage their finances and guide them in their entrepreneurial journey,” he said.
Sixty-two-year-old Seshachalm took voluntary retirement from SBI when he was 42 to start a mineral export business. He, along with his childhood friend S Anil Kumar, founded Guide’S-ME Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd. (GCSPL) and developed the start-up.
The start-up is attempting to help the SMEs in finding consulting experts in niche areas, while helping the retired employees find an opportunity hitherto unavailable. “The platform allows the retired employees to work at their own pace to complete the jobs assigned,” he said.
Asset-light model
To build the platform, the founders have hit the asset light model by taking the services of software engineers who have been working from home.
“We have spent ₹47 lakh so far on building the platform. We have recently tied up with the Technical Board of IIT (Guwahati) to build a robust platform, with a good functional user interface and powered by Artificial Intelligence,” he said.
After crossing the 16,000-subscriber mark, the start-up has decided to build a robust platform that can withstand the needs when the number multiplies.
Accountability
With a view to ensuring accountability on both the sides, the start-up has built in a feature that offers an escrow account. “The payments will be made in phases as the contracted work gets delivered in different phases,” he said.
Published on
August 15, 2022
