Founded by Mr. Harish Sharma in 2021, Plinthstone is a multi-specialty realty advisory firm that prides itself on creating unique solution services for the realty industry.
When were you founded & What is the product/service you provide?
Plinthstone REMA was founded in 2021 with the singular focus of enabling small and medium real estate developers and providing integrated marketing solutions to help projects achieve desired success.
Plinthstone is a multi-specialty realty advisory company offering services that are uniquely designed to solve the problems of brands, businesses, and people we associate with.
We offer a suite of services to developers and channel partners(brokers). We also offer CRM, IT, and Brand and Marketing solutions for the real estate industry.
Some of our key services include Cashflow Generation through Mandate, Brand and Marketing solutions, Finance and Asset Management, Funding for The Project, CRM Tech Solution Product, Customer Interface & Experience Management, Marketing & Planning Services, Customer Sales Engagements, Sales Closure Assistance, Data & Research Outreach, Realtime Cash Flow Tracking & Management, Campaign Management, Creative Transformation, and Dynamic Lead Generation System.
What is the company’s long and short-term vision? Where do you see your industry going in the next five years?
The long-term vision of Plinthstone is to drive a transformation in the real estate industry by building trust and bringing complete transparency between all the industry stakeholders and in all real estate transactions.
We aim to end the opacity that currently exists between the developer and the homebuyer, the channel partner and the homebuyer and the developer and the channel partner.
In the short term, our goal is to work with developers and channel partners and use our unique expertise and technology to help evolve their business processes and bring brand and business success to them.
Our goal for the end user/homebuyer is to guide and educate them and ensure they pay the correct and fair price for their forever home.
How did you get inspiration for the Company? How did you go about researching and validating the idea?
The inspiration for founding Plinthstone came from the desire to solve real estate problems in the industry and to make it a more organised space.
The way the financial sector had undergone a major change and become more organized in the 90s era, the same opportunity exists in the real estate industry towards making it more organised and transparent.
The idea underwent numerous iterations and validation by the past experience of the Management of the company who came together to found Plinthstone and based on research gathered from business associations with decision-makers in the real estate industry.
Is the company funded? If yes, how many rounds & how much funding, If No, then are you open to funding?
We have raised one round of funding from an angel investor but the majority of backing is from the company promoter. We are primarily a bootstrapped start-up
Yes, we are open to funding from reliable sources.
How does the product work & What problems does it solve?
We have many products.
However, the product that is currently helping our developer and channel partners the most is our superior and thoughtfully designed technology platform.
This platform is unique in the way it integrates all the stakeholder teams, data flow, and transactions and makes it visible to all the partners thus creating complete transparency right from inventory to marketing and lead generation to pre-sales and sales to post-sales.
The problem this solves is that it bridges the trust deficit that exists between the stakeholders in a real estate transaction.
What are your USP and innovation? How are you different from others?
Our USP is that we believe in dreams, goodness, and sustainable relationships. We believe in powering dreams for our stakeholders in a way that creates value for brands, businesses, and people we associate with.
To do this we are creating value within our brand and business in a unique way; we are bringing together specialists and good people to build a force that will change the world for good.
Our biggest innovation is in the way we use technology to drive transparency and create value for our partners and in everything we do.
We are different because we Do Not Discount, we Get Fair Market price to our partner developers. This is made possible by our Unique Sales methods by the best minds in the industry that is touched by our unique culture & development models.
We achieve Volumes At Market Price through Unique Product Placements. Amongst other things, we touch technology just as technology touches us.
What difficulties did you encounter when you started the company & were you impacted by the Covid outbreak?
The biggest difficulty at the start was breaking industry stereotypes, shedding old ways of doing business, and adopting new ways.
We achieved this by inclusive innovation through building our people team and having the right systems & processes and technology platform.
Like the whole world, we too were impacted by the Covid outbreak. But we as an organization were resolute that we would not let the business slowdown affect our team.
There were no layoffs or salary cuts for our team and full support was extended to them and their families.
What are your future plans & launches?
In our mandate business – We have a current order book in excess of 1,000 crores inventory.
We are currently working with four developer partners – Shreenathji Group, Garuda Group, Kochra Realty, and Shreeji Group.
Two of these projects are due to launch in the coming month and a few more in the July-Sep quarter.
We have also recently started our new business initiative of arranging debt financing for some of our mandate developers.
Current company size, work culture, Hiring Funda.
Current Company size: 70 (on roll + off roll employees)
We strive to intertwine our cultural tenets in ‘The Plinthstone Way’ of working. Our culture tenet of ‘Goodness’ made us ensure we did not have any salary cuts nor any layoffs during Covid. We always approach all our stakeholders with fairness, respect, and trust.
We try & live our second culture tenet of ‘Empowerment’ by encouraging our people to not only give new ideas but also to execute them. We provide a platform for people to try new things & if they fail, fail fast, learn from their mistakes & course correct.
In addition, we have created a very trusting and open environment for our teams.
We don’t track the leaves of our employees and neither do we track swipe in swipe out times because we believe that productivity matters & not the number of hours you spend at the workplace.
However, we cannot boast of an open-door policy because we have no cabins in the spirit of our third culture tenet ‘Openness’. Hence conversations are free-flowing in our organization leading to more ideas, different points of views, and increased camaraderie.
We have deliberately kept a flat structure & have avoided hierarchy. Feedback is our second nature. we share feedback freely to keep getting better continuously. we ensure we say to one’s face what we would say to their back.
We believe in regular communication as a team & hence have monthly town halls. Our endeavor is to be a fun workplace where colleagues look forward to seeing each other every day & work together on challenging assignments.
To be a Plinthstonean one has to be a dreamer because dreams are the fuel of all Plinthstoneans. We aim to create a dream organization with best practices not only in the real estate industry but across industries.
Hiring Funda: We believe in ‘hire for attitude and train for skills’. We are not a controlling workplace but an empowering one and hence we assess ‘ability to work independently’ and ‘taking responsibility’ as the two most important factors for being a Plinthstonean.