Girish Shah: A strategic thinker

Mumbai’s real estate developers The Wadhwa Group has recently announced the appointment of Girish Shah as Director. He is a seasoned professional with several years of relevant experience in sales, marketing and organization development. Shah talks to Realty Plus about his joining the Wadhwa Group. Congratulations on joining The Wadhwa Group as Director. How easy or difficult was it to settle down at The Wadhwa Group? It is an exciting opportunity for me to be part of The Wadhwa Group and to be working with Vijay Wadhwa and Navin Makhija closely. For employees, the organization they work for becomes a core and vital part of themselves over time. The values and culture that it represents eventually becomes their guiding principles. After getting a sense of what Mr. Wadhwa and Mr. Makhija personally believe in, I was confident and comfortable, as the skill sets I possess will be complimentary to the current business growth levers and help us grow strongly. Please elaborate on your role and responsibilities? According to me, the most important aspect of moving into a new role is to ascertain what value one can add to the business and what can one contribute to enhance the brand’s equity. The Wadhwa brand, over the past 45 years, already has a strong presence in the Mumbai real estate market. My task will be to enhance visibility for the brand, strengthen its awareness and recall across national and global markets and to establish a strong selling and distribution footprint leveraging the Groups strengths. Since I will also be overseeing the HR and IT departments, another exciting aspect will be to make the Group one of the most preferred employer brands among potential employees as well as leverage technology to drive value across the business ecosystem. How has been your professional journey so far? It has been an exciting career graph so far. I have been lucky to have been able to work with some of India’s top MNC’s and blue chips across the real estate, consumer, and pharmaceutical and financial services sectors. Working closely with some of the industry’s most well known names has helped me enhance my learning curve. My urge and hunger to learn from every experience in my life, is the key factor that has kept me motivated and growing throughout my career. It allows me to be able to dive into a business, its issues and challenges and then to work with available resources to give suitable solutions to deliver set objectives. An effective leader must be able to get the best out of his team and colleagues and be able to push the right buttons and inspire employees at every level to achieve not only their personal best but the best for the organization as a whole. I feel I bring to the table, my ability to rally around large teams and drive them to deliver audacious goals. Businesses are nurtured by strong relationships. In your business how do you attain this goal? Establishing and maintaining strong relationships is the key to any services business. After all, we are not in the brick and mortar business, we are in the business of selling hope and dreams and strengthening relationships with our channel partners, stakeholders, customers, financial partners, architects who are all vital for our business growth. What are the marketing and business development strategies that The Wadhwa Group is looking at? It is an exciting time in the Mumbai real estate market and at The Wadhwa Group we are certainly keeping our foot on the pedal to ensure we are able to spot the right growth opportunities. We are in the midst of strengthening our talent pool and structuring key verticals. We are simultaneously strengthening our business processes in line with RERA expectations and as soon as we are done with that we will announce our strategic sales and marketing plans.