William Nanda Bissell was a rather nervous 15-year-old when he arrived from his native New Delhi, India, at the elite prep school Loomis Chaffee in Windsor.
Now, 30 years later, he’s one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs who heads a New Delhi-based company with $100 million in revenue. He’s also an author and co-founder of a school in India modeled after Loomis Chaffee. And on June 8, he’ll make the commencement address to his alma mater’s newest graduates, outlining his views on the importance of education and his approach to measuring business success with two different yardsticks.
Bissell leads Fabindia, a household brand in India and among its dispora, which today claims to be India’s largest private organization for products made with natural materials and through traditional techniques of local artisans. It’s a company Bissell’s father founded in 1960. On son William’s watch, Fabindia has grown its sourcing network to nearly 45,000 artisans. In addition to an online store, there are 150 retails outlets in India and eight in Dubai and Italy. Revenue has risen 33 percent since 2010 from $75 million to $100 million. The company also has a majority stake in British retailer EAST, which has revenue of $65 million.
But Bissell is not driven solely by sales and profitability. He believes that a strong balance sheet does not have to come at the expense of social goals. However the process of getting there is far from easy.
“It’s very stressful because you’re trying to balance two seemingly contradictory aims,” Bissell explained. The way double bottomline is practiced by conventional businesses is they pull out a certain portion of their profits and make a donation to some cause. But that’s not really a double bottomline the way I see it.”
“You introduce two sets of goals in your business — a profit goal and a social goal and say everything we do has got to meet both these criteria. And often these are in opposition,” he said.
When private equity partners step in, it becomes even more challenging.
While the Bissell family owns 50 percent stake in the company, L Capital, backed by LVMH, has an eight percent stake. Another eight percent is held by Azim Premji, often referred to as India’s Bill Gates. Fabindia employees own the remaining shares.
Artisan Micro Finance Private Limited, a Fabindia subsidiary, promotes community-owned companies among artisans in rural India.
“Our community-owned initiatives will bear fruit and go from a social enterprise to a very commercial enterprise,” Bissell said. “But the critical thing is to ensure that investors know what we’re doing and they understand it. It’s about constantly communicating that we’re running a business in three dimensions — short, medium and long-term.”
Having gained much from education himself, Bissell believes that investing in education and creating a regulatory environment that supports entrepreneurship are key requirements in a global economy.
“A globalized world is a whole different game,” he said. We are truly entering a different age in which there are no borders to capital. There’s no Chinese capital or American capital — it’s just capital and it’s moving around the world at an incredible speed.
“The second is skills. Earlier, skills were confined to developed countries. Today skills are globalized. The world is very different from 20 years ago and will be very different 20 years from now. And that can be dehumanizing at the local level. But it’s not the fault of business or government; it’s technology that is driving the change,” he explained.
So how can people navigate this global terrain?
“You need a population that is highly skilled to compete in today’s world. You need people to have marketable skills that allow them to move easily. And in order to do that, you need to have a well-educated, increasingly specialized workforce,” Bissell said.
Like many successful entrepreneurs around the world, he has great appreciation for America’s culture of innovation.
“Take education, medical systems, IT, technology, entrepreneurship, the U.S. has literally done things nobody even thought was possible 20 years ago and that continues to be the case even now,” he said, adding that much of this success stems from an education system that instills critical thinking and encourages innovation.
He cited a personal example.
As a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Middletown, he and a classmate decided to launch a travel company that would show parts of India that were not known to those abroad.
“In any other culture, we would have been told that we were just students and should focus on our studies. But at Wesleyan, in every step of the way I had encouragement. Nobody said our idea was worthless or discouraged us. Everyone took us seriously,” he said.
Another incident, which he described as a culture shock, was when he found upon arriving at Loomis how easy it was to open a bank account — it took just five minutes.
“What the world has learnt from America is to make life easy. In my first few months, I learnt that things didn’t need to be complicated because everything in India was so complicated — getting foreign exchange, opening a bank account. Now America is getting more and more complicated whereas the rest of the world learnt from America to simplify — make it easy for people to open a bank account, start a business, take a loan, finance a kid’s education,” he said.
India, he believes, should make better progress on social goals. In his book “Making India Work,” he suggests higher taxes for the wealthy, a system of exchanges for forest preservation and biodiversity and an expanded role for the government in helping the under-privileged.
“If there is a community or state that is working to preserve, say a forest, then they should somehow be compensated for it,” he explained.
Bissell will speak at Loomis Chaffee’s commencement on June 8.
“I feel very honored that the school has considered me worthy of giving the commencement address,” he said.
On its part, Loomis is thrilled that it inspired Bissell to start the Fabindia School.
“We’re flattered! What institution wouldn’t be to have an alumnus start a school modeled after the one he went to?” asked Nat Follansbee, a former teacher in whose dorm Bissell stayed during his time in school.
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