Karthick Kumar Chinnaraj is a man on a mission. His numbers are solid, his optimism is infectious and his yen to drive employment about people who need it most — youth from under-served and disadvantaged communities — makes him one of those rare entrepreneurs whose bottomline isn’t about last quarter’s revenue.
But then again, one couldn’t have gone from a single car care centre in Coimbatore ten years ago to over 400 service centres and car rejuvenation spas across south India. That is 5K Car Care’s greatest calling card. That they’re good at getting the job done and expanding so rapidly that they’ll leave you in a tailspin.
After the TNIE-FICCI Start-up Stars Awards, where KarthickKumar walked away with top honours as the founder and CEO of the network that 5K currently is, we caught up with him for a quick chat. This is what he had to say.
Excerpts follow.
Why do you think your company stands out? This retail space is quite cluttered, isn’t it?
At 5k Car Care, we have 25 lakh customers and we have a vision of reaching 600+ outlets by 2023. We do car polishing, detailing, sanitisation and a whole lot of other treatments for vehicles including decarbonisation.
When did the idea to start such an enterprise come to you?
We started in Coimbatore, in 2012. I was born in Palani but studied in Coimbatore and during that period, I read a lot of books by Swami Vivekananda and Abdul Kalam, and this thought that I should be a job creator stuck with me. And that is a need for society. I started with three employees back then. Today, we employ over 1,500 people.
How did the pandemic hit your business?
Like all businesses even ours slowed down during the pandemic. One of the most important innovations we have done is a unique sanitisation technique to keep the driver, passenger as well as the co-passengers in a car safe during this Covid period, developed by our R&D team. We were able to sanitise two lakh cars during this period and this created 450 new jobs and we were even able to give my team an increment during this period. We used Covid as an opportunity.
Congratulations on receiving the award. What does something like this mean for you?
Entrepreneurs tend to look for opportunities in everything and such awards bring us the recognition we deserve. Other entrepreneurs will also be inspired to do more. It affirms the fact that we are on the right path. It makes us want to expand nationally and even globally and it is a lot of motivation.
You’ve spoken quite a bit about your carbon reduction processes. Do tell us a bit more.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said at a global summit that we will try and reduce our carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2030. Even our chief minister MK Stalin has given a lot of incentives for electric vehicles. We have taken a pledge to eradicate carbon monoxide from 10 lakh cars using our processes. We have even offered to remove it from government vehicles and school and college buses free of charge. This has to be done every 10,000 km for it to be beneficial to the environment.