Steering the Wheels of Entrepreneurship

If there is one thing about
successful companies, it
is the steady leadership
required to build a solid
foundation from its strongest,
standout qualities. Such
companies know all too well
that with overconfidence and
impatience, a good thing can fall
flat and fizzle out without a trace.
Launched in 2003, PakWheels
is now Pakistan’s best-known
platform for all things with wheels
and an exhaust pipe. Given the
fact that the company has been
around for 22 years, the co-
Founders certainly know a thing
or two about dogged persistence
in business.

“Well before Orkut and
Facebook, PakWheels was
Pakistan’s first social networking
platform,” Suneel Sarfraz Munj,
the portal’s co-founder, tells me.
He isn’t wrong. Orkut came
to Pakistan in 2004, a year
after PakWheels and Facebook
followed two years later in
2006. “For anyone who has
a car parked in their garage,
PakWheels has been there,” says
Munj with justifiable pride.

Sharp as a tack, Munj, in his
early forties, has an ‘old soul’
quality about him. You would
never have guessed it. I mean,
he is crazy about cars. Even the
‘About’ write-up on the PakWheels
website states that he “eats,
drinks and sleeps cars 24/7.”

What would a motorhead
know about anything other than
cars anyway? But he does. He
is a treasure trove of knowledge
when he gets started, reeling
off little wisdom bombs with
abandon, sprinkled with some
self-deprecating humour.

“I never expected PakWheels to
blow up the way it did. It was more
of a hobby, never a full-time job.”

Enrolled in an MBA programme
at the Lahore University of
Management Sciences (LUMS)
in 2003, Munj says that back
then people had an avid interest
in swapping notes about their
cars. “If you are in love with cars,
you would know that people can
speak for hours and hours about
them.” As a result, he set up a
basic HTML chat forum where
car enthusiasts could register,
create their own nicknames and
chat with each other until the
crack of dawn.

Then, in 2005, two years
after the forum was created,
a user mentioned he had a
car he wanted to sell. Within
hours, the car was sold. “It was
a low-hanging fruit to launch a
classified ads section on the
website,” reflects Munj. “It’s not
like we reinvented the wheel or
anything. We were just the first to
start an online classifieds section.
It worked because the life of a
car ad in a newspaper lasts a
day, and the next day you find
your ad wrapped up in a paper
cone filled with channas.”

When Munj speaks, he talks
rapidly – a reflection of his
sharp, quick-thinking mind. Also,
he rarely ever smiles. While his
expressions may be deadpan
and stoic, the content and
cadence of his speech match
that of a skilled orator. Minus
any airs and graces, there is
a deep-seated humility about
Munj too, especially when he
speaks about his parents and
growing up in Lahore, where he
was born.

“My father was a self-made
man who would often tell me
that his sole job in life was to
give me an education and after
that, I would have to figure
things out on my own.” It was
this upbringing, he says, that
helped him gain an ingrained
sense of independence early
on. “Once, when I got my car
windows tinted (something
which was not permitted in
Pakistan at the time), my
father stopped a traffic warden
and asked him to fine me.
These were the kinds of reality
checks I was exposed to at a
young age.”

However, it paid off. Today,
Munj has considerable clout. In
fact, he is a brand in his own
right, even outside of PakWheels,
where he is regarded as one of
the most respected voices in
local entrepreneurship.

With Munj, what you see is
what you get. He is authentic and
outspoken at the risk of landing
himself in a hot soup. Fiercely
private about his personal life,
he does reveal that he has two
daughters who live overseas –
but that is as far as he goes. His
personal life remains under wraps,
although when it comes to his
public life, he is an “open book.”

Given his success, what
makes him stick it out with
PakWheels? What was the
secret sauce of his staying
power and what has stopped him
from exploring new pastures?

“Nowadays it’s very ‘in’ to talk
about founders and start-ups.
When I was younger, if we talked
about launching our own startup,
we would get slapped by
our parents and told to become
an engineer or a doctor! We are
slaves of the schooling system.
Kids become ratta [memorisation]
machines. Even my grey parrot
can memorise stuff. I keep
telling young Pakistanis that
start-ups are not easy. They are
cash-burning businesses. But
to inculcate staying power in
yourself? Do what you love.”

Having gone through the
rigmarole of job-hopping after
grad school, he even gave
joining the family business a
shot, but he felt ridiculous sitting
in front of an Excel sheet day in
and day out. “My brother would
get annoyed and ask me why
I was wasting their time. Then,
one day, he sat me down and
said, ‘Suneel, what do you want
to do with your life?’ I answered,
‘Cars… I love cars.’”

“When you take the plunge to
launch a start-up, you have to
roll up your sleeves. You wear
different hats all at once. We are
a big company today, but when
we started out, it was only the
three of us. You cannot have
illusions of grandeur thinking
you will be comfortably sitting in
an air-conditioned room. I had to
juggle multiple jobs to keep my
kitchen running in 2012. I would
even clean the cars myself. I
remember my brother calling me
to say, ‘You have an MBA from
LUMS and there you are on the
street in DHA washing cars!’ But
I kept at it.”

Speaking about Pakistan’s
auto industry, he says, with a
touch of disillusionment, that “it
is the infant who never grew up.
Look, if you want an industry to
flourish, you have to encourage it
instead of depending on imports.
No doubt, it will be expensive
initially, but given time, the
industry will be able to produce
cheaper cars like India.”

Clearly, the question has hit
a nerve. “Over the years, the
local auto industry would show
signs of growth, but then a new
government would come in
and change the policy. It is a
constant seesaw. Whenever a
new government comes in, the
auto industry becomes a method
to gain popularity. These shortsighted
policy changes have gone
a long way in hurting the industry.”

Despite all his other
commitments, Suneel Sarfraz
Munj is also dedicated to
philanthropic work and in 2008,
during the dengue outbreak,
he spearheaded Pak Donors,
a website aimed at becoming
a blood donor library. “This is
something very close to my
heart, but it has remained on
the backburner. I hope one
day I can turn it into a single,
go-to blood donor repository
for people in need. When
you walk into a hospital, your
perspective changes. You
realise health is everything.”

Sonya Rehman is a writer
based in Islamabad.