How Urban Company CEO, Abhiraj Bhal prioritizes customer experience

According to Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Bhal

About 183 employees at Urban Company, across designations & roles, were eligible to participate in the latest Esop transaction at Urban Company, of which about 120 people, ranging from call centre executives to senior leadership, at Urban Company participated.

Existing investor in Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) Vy Capital has picked up employee stock options (Esops) worth about $5 million in Urban Company through a secondary transaction.

The UAE-based fund VY capital, which also counts online food delivery major Zomato, NoBroker and MagicPin among its portfolio, has been an investor in Urban Company since 2017.

It holds 10.3% share in Urban Company, according to data collated by Tracxn.

According to the CEO of Urban Company Abhiraj Bhal, about 183 employees, from different designations were eligible to participate in this ESOP transaction event, of which about 120 Urban Company employees, ranging from call centre executives to senior leadership, participated.

In 2017, UrbanClap, as it was known earlier, had undertaken a $1 million Esop sale round, which was followed by a $2.5 million secondary round in December of 2018.

That coincided with the Urban company’s primary fundraising round, in which it had raised $50 million led by London-based firm Steadview Capital.

The latest Esop sale was around — Rs 1,10,000 per share — at which the Series E secondary transaction held last July, according to Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO.

This also comes at an opportune time for startup employees, who have been hit hard by a combination of layoffs, and payouts as India’s consumer internet companies struggle to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and a lockdown.

“I think in a very interesting way, allowing team members to take some money off the table does two things – it makes the instrument very real, so that there is no longer this view that this is paper money. It is real cash, and they start thinking its better than cash, because they won’t earn similar returns even if they put it in any market instrument, given the value appreciation every 18 months or so” Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO.

Under Urban Company’s Esop programme, every employee gets Esops at a face value of 1rs and the Urban Company’s prevailing stock price has crossed Rs 1 lakh.

“Secondly, we also have accelerated vesting; if Urban Company goes public, or if there is a strategic sale, it doesn’t matter what has been vested with you till date, the rest of the shareholding that is unvested vests in an accelerated fashion, which is very, very friendly for employees,” Abhiraj Bhal, CEO of Urban Company said.

Third, there’s the concept of a no-hold period.

“We have kept an infinite hold period. Urban Company won’t force our employees to exercise any time really. It’s up to them. We have a vesting schedule of 25% each year over four years,” CEO of Urban Company added.

Founded by Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra (Co-founder), Urban Company offers spa, beauty, grooming, repairs and cleaning services via its apps. Urban Company bridges the gap between trained service professionals and consumers seeking services from professional service providers. The platform earns its revenue through a commission fee model based on transactions made on its website and mobile application.

Urban Company’s July revenue was at 77% pre-Covid-19 peak in February, and it expects to fully recover in the next 1-2 months.

Urban Company said it was seeing faster recovery of in-home services like repair, painting, and pest controls, home cleaning – reaching almost 90% of pre-Covid-19 levels in July.

In August of last year, Urban company had raised $75 million in a Series E round led by Tiger Global Management, valuing it at close to $1 billion.

Read more interesting news about Urban Company here:

Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Bhal: the restarters interview

Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO & Co-founder- From resilience to authenticity: Lockdown Learnings

UrbanClap CEO Abhiraj Bhal Emailed him(Now known as Urban Company CEO)

All you need to know about Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap / Urban Company CEO & founder

Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO & Founder (Now Urban Company) Behind the scenes with Kalari Capital

Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO & Co-founder / UrbanClap in an interview with CNBC TV-18

Abhiraj Bhal (Abhiraj Singh Bhal) is the UrbanClap CEO. UrbanClap was renamed Urban Company in early 2020.

UrbanClap is an online marketplace for local services. One can book services like appliance repair, beauty services, massage therapy, pest control, painting, home cleaning, and more.

UrbanClap or Urban Company bridges the gap between trained service professionals and consumers who are looking for quality service from the comfort of their homes.

UrbanClap lanced in the year 2014 offers more than 100 services across markets like India, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney, and more. It has a network of over 50,000 plus trained service professionals and has served over 5 million customers to date.

One can book their services from their mobile application or website.

UrbanClap CEO Abhiraj Bhal, a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical engineering from IIT-K and post-graduation from IIM-A. Post a 3 year-long stint with the Boston Consulting Group, Singapore he started a movie streaming company with a batch-mate from IIT-K Varun Khaitan who was also working with the BCG, USA.

They met Raghav Chandra, a computer science graduate from the University of California Berkeley who was working on an Auto-aggregator platform called Buggy.in

Post-meeting and after some discussions all 3 decided to stop their original ventures and launch a business in the home services space.

And started looking for service providers and people who may need those services.

Which is the idea of UrbanClap. UrbanClap bridges the gap between trained service professionals and customers who wish to avail of quality services from the comfort of their homes.

The online on-demand home services market is expected to grow at a 52% CAGR between 2018-2022. The trio Urbanclap CEO Abhiraj Bhal along with founders Raghav Chandra and Varun Khaitan understood the lack of consistency and consumer complaints and realized that there could be an opportunity to revolutionize the indian service sector with technology.

Urban Company plans to expand in more Indian Tier 2 and 3 cities along with global markets.

Role of UrbanClap CEO:

Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO overlooks marketing and product growth at UrbanClap. When not busy with work Abhiraj enjoys experiencing marathons, skydiving, and more.

UrbanClap CEO has played a key role in building a network of over 25000 trained professionals.

Whereas, Co-founder Raghav Chandra overlooks technology and product development

And, Varun Khaitan oversees operations and service provider onboarding.

Soon after launching the business, the trio realized that it was challenging to bring the best service professionals onboard. Urbanclap had committed to verifying professionals both on their professionals and skills set before they can enroll in the application to offer their services.

They soon also realized the quality of services that the professional provide to their customers is out of their control because the business model ‘light-touch’ where UrbanClap did not insert itself into every aspect of customer service was not working out for them.

They decided to focus on one category of their services to focus and test what it means to own and control every aspect of customer service and quality. Beauty services were chosen. UrbanClap created close integration with the product supply ecosystem. They condensed their service experience into 5 levels to make it simple for customers and service professionals.

They started controlling the products that their service professionals utilize to deliver their services, they also revamped their payment process to make it easy for customers.

In the year 2019, they introduced new services like painting, cleaning, and, pest control.

Urban Company on-boards between 2000 to 3000 service professionals every month and run 100 training sessions at once across the country for their service professionals.

UrbanClap CEO Abhiraj Bhal expects their venture to reach over 50 million homes a month and have over one million service providers in the coming 4-5 years.

Abhiraj Bhal (Abhiraj Singh Bhal) is the founder and CEO of UrbanClap, a home services marketplace launched in November 2014. Which is additionally Asia’s biggest home services platform.

UrbanClap or Urban Company assists clients with booking home services like beauty services, massage therapies, cleaning, plumbing, and so on

The platform is backed by Accel, Saif partners, Ratan Tata, Kunal Bahl, and Rohit Bansal. It has served more than 5 million clients and has a service network of more than 25000 trained service professionals in 24 cities from 4 nations.

Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO is a bachelors in Electrical Designing alumni from IIT-K and a MBA from the IIM-A. In the wake of finishing his post-graduate he began working with BCG, Singapore where he helped fortune 500 organizations across India Germany and South East Asia.

In the wake of getting back to India with his batch-mate from the IIT-K Varun Khaitan who had likewise worked with the BCG, America he began a film streaming start up called Cinemabox.

Post-meeting Raghav Chandra who was an alum from the University of California Berkeley, and had the experience of working with Twitter, and Yelp. Raghav Chandra around then was working on an Auto aggregator called Buggy. in

Each of the 3 met and chose to launch an endeavour in the home services space seeing that the Indian service industry is unorganized.

In 2020 UrbanClap was rebranded to Urban Company. Abhiraj Bhal the Urban Company CEO clarified that this was a stage towards their plan of global expansion. As the brand name Urban Company would go about as an umbrella brand which would carry many sub-brands and verticals. Additionally the word ‘Clap’ could convey a negative meaning in certain western countries.

This is what Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO (now Urban Company) needed to state about his Lockdown learnings according to Forbes

Abhiraj Bhal, Co-founder, and CEO of Urban Company –

Here’s a what Abhiraj Bhal discussed

During these past few months, I have had three key learnings as an individual. The first is that crisis management requires you to be both short-term and long-term in your thinking. When the lockdown was imposed in March, we had to focus on short-term prudence, control costs, and revamp our processes to prepare for a post-lockdown world. Yet, it was also important to recognise that this was a humanitarian crisis, and we shouldn’t forget the humans. Urban Company took the decision to protect jobs, not cut salaries, institutionalised various monetary and health care measures for our service partners, and took each decision with not only the short- but also the long-term picture in mind.

The second learning was to be contrarian. Contrarians sweep the market when they are right. Consequently, even as businesses were shutting down or laying off in our sector, we hired over 300 full-time employees, and on-boarded 10,000 service professionals. We were also aggressive with our marketing and communication. This helped us bounce back to 140 percent of our pre-Covid peak in a relatively short period of time.

The last learning was around time management. Prior to Covid-19, my calendar was always blocked throughout the week, but somehow work from home allowed me to be more disciplined, regimented and focussed on how and where I spend my time.

Source- https://nitesh-viswanathan.medium.com/abhiraj-bhal-urban-company-ceo-co-founder-from-resilience-to-authenticity-lockdown-learnings-4f6ff81510aa

Other articles –

Abhiraj Bhal: What You Didn’t Know About Urban Company CEO and Founder (Urbanclap)

Abhiraj Bhal Urban Company CEO & Co-founder (formerly UrbanClap) Emailed him

Abhiraj Bhal, CEO & Co-founder Urban Company/ UrbanClapin an interview with CNBC TV-18