Chancing at a multi-tiered enterprise

Initiating a business venture and successfully managing all aspects of it are strenuous and often requires a lot of patience and courage. Add in a multitude of business ventures coordinated through the same company and all the businesses being new ideas at that and that responsibility quotient goes several notches higher. But Amit Khanal, chief executive officer of Yellow Planet Multipurpose Company, has been doing just that for more than two months now and, though the task at hand is mind boggling, he intends to give it his best shot.

Khanal and his partner Ram Prasad Kandel – who serves as the managing director of the company – started their business venture with just Yellow Planet Food World – launching it on Christmas 2017. Gradually, the restaurant expanded to food stalls on the ground floor and a bar, then their Patanjali retail mart came into the picture and now they have an air ticketing facility and courier shipment business as well. They also have plans of expanding their domain to sales of NTC and Smart Cell SIM cards and also have two more undisclosed projects on the pipeline. The company currently operates from a four-storey building located in Balkhu, Kathmandu.

Their restaurant space, according to Khanal, is designed to be suitable for any kind of situation, from a single person dropping in for a cup of coffee to a huge birthday celebration or a small private party. The restaurant also provides you with a driver who can drop you home in case you have a drink and can’t drive.

The Yellow Planet has also devised various plans to keep their many enterprises inter-related in some way or the other. Right now, they have multiple coupon offers where you win things from a Rs 100 worth of food from the restaurant to a vacation in Thailand. They have been promoting their enterprise through print media and online portals and now want to make Yellow Planet’s presence felt on social media too.

The biggest challenge for Khanal, an MBA graduate, at the moment is finding innovative ways to develop his company.

Besides working on Yellow Planet, Khanal is the head manager at an automobile company – where he and Kandel used to work together – as well as an adviser at an NGO. So, given his hectic schedule managing everything and brainstorming ideas sometimes get a little too much. And that is where he relies on his staff. They have apparently hired youths with entrepreneurial mindsets who have been valuable assets to the company.

The Yellow Planet building stands out among the other buildings in the area because it is painted a bright yellow color. According to Khanal, that is because he wanted the color to represent the company as a whole as well so they incorporated it into the name. “Yellow is a very pliable and fresh color but companies do not actually prefer it in fear of being too bold and out there. We want to be just that. And since we want to expand the company to as many stratums as possible, we thought a planet would represent the multidimensional aspect of the company,” claims Khanal explaining the reasoning behind the company’s name.

Khanal and Kandel got the idea to start their own restaurant sometime last year when they realized that the Balkhu area – where the automobiles company they worked for is located – did not have a single good place to hangout with family and friends. And since restaurants and cafes are the most profitable business outlets in Kathmandu, they launched Yellow Planet Food World within three months of coming up with the idea. They have been thoroughly researching the Nepali market since then to find other budding businesses to add to their ever-growing enterprise.

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