How I built a business after nearly losing my son! | Madhuri Singh | TEDxEuroSchoolKharadiWomen
[Music] i was happily working as a software consultant in sydney australia when i was told that i am an infertility patient so we moved from sydney to mumbai where my husband started his journey with a startup and i started my journey with series of infertility treatments iuis ivf's surgeries innumerable procedures and daily injections for years month after month i must be depressed dejected with no result and to add there will be friends and relatives asking me the insensitive question good news i was so depressed one day that i prayed to the universe that if i do conceive i will stop my dream of becoming the corporate leader and then next month i was pregnant and soon my beautiful first baby boy was born my doctors came and told me that if you want a second child you must not wait all right and then came my second baby boy my husband's company was taken over by a parent company and we were moved from mumbai to pune there i found the top preschool for my son and put him there so that i could spend little more time with my second son i was blissful life was something that i had dreamt of i forgot entire trauma of years of infertility treatment but we all know life doesn't remain the same always and this is where you should pay attention to the incident that changed my life and i changed those adversities into opportunities to start a business and if i can do it so can you on 25th february 2006 i nearly lost my first son was just two and a half year old then i had gone to pick him up from a venue which was at a very very busy location of pune and right next to the location was a very busy petrol pump as i waited at the red light just opposite to the petrol pump i saw a tiny little boy wandering and looking up in the sky and roaming all alone so when i took a turn towards the petrol pump suddenly my face turned white my hands became cold because that small boy was my two and a half year old son wandering in that busy petrol pump i think he saw me he started to run towards me and just that moment a truck zipped between us i felt as if my heart was crushed and then i heard a knock at the back door my two and a half year old son was knocking i opened the door he came inside i asked him did was there anybody with you i said no i parked my car at the entrance of the venue and as i was walking towards the auditorium i was thinking what if he had just gotten lost in this busy city what if he was kidnapped what if he was run over by a truck and as i was walking a lump was growing painfully in my throat i reached at the end of the stage when i saw the teachers were performing for some event next day i think they saw me and they started to run towards me as if they had seen a ghost and that ghost was me because my face was white i was trembling sweating and i was my face was full of tears i don't know what happened i think i snapped i must have yelled and then i took hold of my son and i walked out i reached home by 8 pm the school principal called and she said she was very sorry that this happened with me and that please come to the event the next day and that she will take care i mean that's what a parent wants somebody who listens somebody who will say okay we will take care a week later i was again called as a team of people from mumbai head office of that school had come to pune to discuss that incident with me as i was narrating to them the pain and the trauma that i had undergone of the infertility treatments the insensitive comments and that incident with my son everything just clouded after listening to me they said mrs singh you overreacted nothing happened and so there's nothing that we need to do i felt as if i was kicked from a cliff and as i was falling down i saw those same faces who had promised that they will take care of my two and a half and they will be the parent in my absence i came home i was feeling so helpless disgusted cheated at night i think around 1am i was unable to sleep i opened a blog and i started to write on that platform i felt a bit better slept by 7 am i started getting calls after calls from mothers from across the country of the same school's branches and then a male voice he said mrs singh i'm the ceo of the platform where you wrote your incident and i'm so thankful to you because i was about to take admission for my twins in that school and then i realized i had shared my phone number there so i opened the blog and i saw hundreds of comments and as i was reading each comment i saw there were only two things that every person wanted how do we know about a school before taking admission and what do we do what control do we have once we send our children to a school i started replying and as i was replying i felt i have to do something about it i don't know what but i will be the person to change the situation of lack of information so that no parent has to go through what i went through and that's when india's first school reviewer madhuri singh was born i opened my own blog i used to go to every school i could possibly go wait outside the school i would look at the body languages of the teachers the parents students coming out the chit chats and the gossips of the mothers then i would walk inside and look at a security guard the cctv the approach road the bathrooms the infrastructure the admission officers speak to the every possible person i could and then as it is i would start typing it on my blog and when the parents read my blog and went to the school they felt as if they were looking at a movie and that's where the trust between them and me grew so immense that my blog became so popular that i started getting awards print media interviews tv media interviews bloggers awards and then my sons got through the top schools in pune i was thrilled i blogged about it and next day onwards i started getting comments of the comments what are the school criteria what are the admission processes what answers you gave and so on i used to wait for my sons to sleep and then i would commit answer to these comments for 2 to 3 am every day for years and in the morning parents would be calling me and i would be on phone for 8 to 10 hours also managing my children and then when my once my youngest son he told me mom you said you had stopped your dream of chasing computer science corporate leader job but you're always on the phone so next day i started paid phone consultations a week later one of the parents called me and said would you mind if we come and sit with you and then understand the whole admission process and the questions i said yeah and from then i started my journey of school admission webinars seminars and so on my blog became so popular that people were calling me from uk us and from the interior of maharashtra and then one day a parent called me and said i want to sell my house so that i can take admission of my child in the school where your son is going i felt so bad i felt i was being so unfair to all the children and the parents who were already going to a particular school and could not change and i felt so miserable that i was putting all the schools you know in the same lab i was labeling them actually and i said no this has to stop so apparently i started a group for parents where they could also write their views and slowly today i have 35 all india parenting groups with 1.5 million parents following each and every word that i write if i tell them go to the school they will not even ask me second times with the growth of the group product companies top brands started to approach me they wanted my inputs on new products to launch and then i think they found a person who could also guide them as i was the only combination of a mother a blogger a reviewer a software engineer a business management and i had network of schools and network of parents i'm so fortunate that today i have collaborated with schools preschools parenting companies and product companies and i think in future i do see the need for india to have collaboration with foreign education looking at the kind of unavailability of good colleges for the middle class which is growing at a rapid rate and let me tell you that two and a half year old boy has stepped into becoming a doctor today and the younger one is a social media expert but there are two tips that i have to share as without them i could not have sailed the entire journey my first tip is how i deal with negativity even now i open an imaginary black box i throw in the negative incident negative comments negative people and sometimes kick them also then lock it and throw this box into the deepest part of my brain never to access it again and the second tip which i think you people can start from today is to pray that may you all get ten times of what you wish for me and may i get 10 times of what i wish for you all [Music]