Kiruba: Ramesh, welcome to the show.

Ramesh: Thank You.

Kiruba: 61000 members (figure at the time of the interview), and right now Club Mahindra is one of the most biggest and preferred holiday destination around. I’m sure it must have all started with a dream. So how and when did this dream of Club Mahindra start.

Ramesh: (smiling) Just a small correction – we are the biggest and we are the best, not one of the biggest and the best.The dream started actually in 1996. It was a dream indentified by the Mahindras. They saw an opportunity in this business, the business model was perfectly alright but it was being run differently by different people and didn’t earn itself a good name.

Infact one of the first thing I did after joining Mahindra was to do a survey about what the public thought of the Mahindras. And in the research that we did one of the imagery was that the Mahindras was compared with the Central Bank of the country and that is a big thing to start off with I suppose in any business and it had its positives in this business.We started out with those pluses but at the same time we needed to beat the path which is different. You had the oppurtunity – here you had a group with a lot of trust worthiness but you still had to make the business work and make an offering to the customer which is different.So this is where it all began and then we started out itself we said we will do something very very different.

We will not go the way everybody else, and when I said everybody else, it means few people within the country and and elsewhere in the world where this business had grown fairly large. We said we will do it differently and when I said differently not for the sake of being different but offering something which the Indian customer would want and appreciate. That is how we started off initially and I think we have managed, in this brief period of 10 years make a name for ourselves, build a brand and as you said have 61000 customers. Read the full story