Prashanta Manandhar

Prashanta Manandhar was the first one from his family to step out of the family-run business and start his career as an employee of another company. It was a big deal for him and his family. He worked in a few companies before venturing out to translate his ideas into reality with his first startup called Home Supplies in 2008. It’s been over a decade and within this time he has kept himself involved in multiple engagements some of which failed miserably, some survived, some closed down, and some have taken off pretty well. Most of these ventures have been in the marketing field, advertising and digital agency, media industry, supply business, etc. He also undertook a teaching career for a decade and taught at KUSOM, Ace, Presidential Business School as a member of the marketing faculty. Besides these, he is proud to have started some interesting platforms like #PresentationStuffs, #PresentersClub, The Storytellers and The Storyyellers which he believes have created amazing value for the people it caters to. Of these, he is currently most occupied with The Storytellers/Storyyellers which are platforms to share the stories of people from different fields to inspire change. In this edition of B360, Manandhar shares the five things that have impacted his work and life.

Best business advice

This advice is a very popular one by Warren Buffet: Never put all your eggs in one basket. I have tried to keep different ventures in my portfolio, The Storytellers being one of them. I am also involved in a couple of freelancing works, precisely for training and workshops. This advice has played an important role in streamlining my efforts towards multiple spheres and diversifying risks in business.

2 Steves

Two people have inspired me the most. I call them The 2 Steves - One is the legendary late Steve Jobs and the next is Steve Vai, one of the greatest guitarists of all time. I love how they emphasise so much on creativity in a way that people go crazy about it. Besides creativity, I am heavily inspired by their focus on details. The way they give importance to each and every nuance of their creation is just amazing. I guess such details reflect the true identity of the product. Thirdly, they don’t stop creating. They explore, get inspired, create and repeat. Very inspiring to keep yourself on your toes.

The Beginning after an end

One of the most important moments that changed the course of my life would be the decision to quit the advertising agency as a managing partner. It was a huge deal because I had spent the cream decade of my life (23 - 33) in that industry and was pretty uncertain about restarting something new again. Leaving the agency and deciding to solely focus on taking The Storytellers to new heights has been quite an amazing decision.

Storytelling

People need to learn to listen to stories. More importantly they need to learn to tell their stories. Because you never know, the story might be the one thing waiting to bring about change in someone else’s life. The concept of The Storytellers is simple: We all have stories to tell and we need to understand that all these stories have the power to inspire people in one way or the other. The concept is all about getting these stories out from cocoon to the masses so that they can bring about massive inspiration and inspire change among the listeners. One other reason why we do what we do is to keep the stories alive. In the course of our lives we might have lived thousands of stories, some powerful, some very powerful. If we don’t tell these stories, they will simply die. We want to become the repository of those moments in the form of stories that will live forever to inspire people.

Successful people can be humble

It actually was during one of the story rehearsal sessions of The Storytellers. We had one of the legends of Nepal’s business fraternity and had been hearing about him since my adolescent days. Getting to talk to him in itself was a big deal for me. And working with him to frame his story for the session and having him perform a rehearsal in front of our team was an overwhelming experience. During the rehearsal, we wanted to provide him a major feedback which required tweaking and reworking his content. I was quite nervous to tell him about the rework he needed to work on. With a nervous heart I told him about it. I was expecting big time objection from him because obviously he had no reason to take any suggestion from people like us considering his status in society. But surprisingly, he was so humble and open to feedback that he actually noted everything we told him and came to rehearsal the next day with all the changes. I can never forget the humility and the respect he showed. It completely changed the way I started viewing successful people; they are accessible, humble and super respectful to the person on the other side.