“‘Why do you run to the labour office? I will sort out your issues,’ I told the workers,” recalls Liza Mayan. Not only was she the first woman from her husband’s family to join the business, but also the first to declare a 20% bonus in 2002. A recent recipient of the VPN IBE Dynamic Woman Entrepreneur Award 2019, Liza has successfully run Classic Sports Goods Pvt Ltd, an offshoot of the renowned Western India Plywoods (which was founded in 1945).
Born and raised in Dubai, Liza studied Computer Engineering at TKM College in Kollam. The four years in hoste were tough, but stood her in good stead, she says. She married young into the famous Kannur-based family but was always keen to “do something” apart from being a homemaker. “Having lived in Dubai, I came from a different culture.” She remembers asking her father-in-law if she could have a job and her husband directing her to engage herself with the land around the house. Many years later, her husband asked her to attend to the paperwork “related to the office.”
This took her to the factory at Aadikadalai(Kannur) every day and she was surprised to find that the majority of the workers were women. Once, when asked to inspect something, she inadvertently found some wrongdoing that the management was unaware of. This got her more involved in the factory. She began interacting with the workers and senior managers. She also realised that the factory had no systems in place. She created a flow chart and began to put that into operation. Soon her husband handed her a book with all the factory’s procedures and entrusted her with serious managerial work. “I was taken seriously after six years,”she says proudly.
Liza went on to take some hard decisions: she sacked the main supervisor on grounds of misbehaviour, struck down the walls between departments, encouraged workers to double up on machines in case of absent force, directed women to operate machines, brought in pay parity and made workers’ families part of her philanthropy. Some of her moves did not go down well but she went ahead with them.
From 2003, she increased the production as required by the market but, in 2013, the company received an order that meant manufacturing 8,000 tennis balls a day, as against their capacity of 3,000- 3,500. She took her workers into confidence and urged them to rise to the occasion. They consented and sat through nights to complete the order. “I had the women dropped off at their homes. It was a huge joint effort,” she says.
Liza bought new machines from China as part of her modernisation and expansion plans. Apart from manufacturing carom and chess boards and tennis and cricket tennis balls, she has now added nylon shuttlecocks. Shortage of labour remains a problem but as an entrepreneur who has seen both sides, she says, “if the good times can go, then the bad times too will go. How you stick out the bad times holds the key.”
