CEO Insights Magazine

An insightful entrepreneur and a logical analyst, Aditya Dey (Managing Partner, C N Dey Specialties) has a demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both technical professionals and end users to identify and translate business requirements. He is a highly motivated leader who believes in learning over knowing which helped him grow across diverse domains helping businesses in solving problems with data tools and techniques. He has a successful track record in Supply Chain analytics with experience in data handling, modeling, and visualization. A technical analyst turned entrepreneur, Aditya possesses a visceral and insatiable urge to always dig further; it is this enthusiastic attitude that has helped him to challenge his own ideas and prepared himself to go beyond the fear of the unknown. He is constantly seeking new ambitious goals for himself and difficult projects to get involved in. Let’s hear it from him as he talks about his innovative venture in the food industry.

What inspired you to establish C N Dey Specialties?
After my B. Tech from SRM University, I have worked in Cuir Ally as a Web Designer and moved to Mu Sigma and worked there as a Decision Scientist. I have worked for short tenures with Myntra and Swiggy as the Revenue & Growth Analyst and Business Analyst respectively. During these stints, I had a sudden rise in interest in entrepreneurship and decided to

leverage my experiences to start my venture in the food industry. C N Dey is the name of my great, great grandfather, and naming the company after him was an initiative to take forward the legacy of my family. As the Managing Partner of the company, I look forward to leveraging my expertise in analytics to make online food delivery easier and make both online delivery and fine dining schemes better for the customers.

I had a very vast experience at SRM University as it had people coming from diverse backgrounds. The multicultural environment within the university had a strong impact on our learning at various levels. SRM had held in developing more on the Technical Support; the technologies that the industry demand was taught to us during our professional content and it is from there that I developed an interest in working as an analyst rather than a developer. It allowed us to gain hands-on experiences which helped me in going forward in the industry.

How would you define C N Dey Specialties as an organization and its position in the market?
C N Dey Specialties operates various restaurant outlets spread across Bengaluru with a focus on the quick-service restaurant model. Currently, we have taken two franchises; one is of Momo Street and the other is of Wat-A-Burger. The third brand, which is still in work, will be our own homegrown brand. This brand will be focused on traditional Indian spices giving our customers the feel of Indian

authenticity. At this point in time, we are at a very early stage but at the pace that we are moving we are sure that once our brand launches, it will be able to take on the market pretty well as we have got the networks lined up in terms of suppliers, vendors, raw materials, and staffs.

What are some of the challenges that you have experienced in your journey so far? What did you learn from them?
When we were initially launching the restaurants, we faced significant challenges with the quality of the raw materials that we were procuring as well as the staff recruitment because each of the restaurants that we were looking into was not chef-dependent. And we had to train the staff for a long period of time to get them ready. However, I was able to overcome every challenging situation through patience & perseverance in my work. I learned to analyze things, step back and restart. Patience has been my mantra which helped me to place the right step toward success.

What are the changes in market behavior that you anticipate, and what are the opportunities that you foresee?
The market is moving towards dynamic progress; by 2025, it will be close to a 535-billion-dollar industry. So, in that scenario, we as entrepreneurs, have to keep a very close look at what our competitors are doing and, accordingly we have to keep on improvising the quality and the customer experience. It is the effort that will go through each of the fine-tuning of our day-to-day operations and then only we can take on a long leap into the industry.

Aditya Dey, Managing Partner, C N Dey Specialties
An alumnus of SRM University, Aditya is a passionate professional embarking on an entrepreneurial adventure with a Post Graduate Diploma from the International Institute of Information Technology and a Product Management degree from ISB.