Nina Gupta
Sees the Light
by Robin Roberts
When Tarana Nina Gupta enters a room for the first time, her eyes are not drawn to the design or decor. They’re drawn straight to the lights. And what she sees often disappoints. But as a savvy entrepreneur, she’s turned that disappointment into opportunity.
As founder and president of Montreal-based Greenlite Lighting Corporation, it’s Gupta’s job to see the light — and change it. Her mission is to convert consumers from Edison-era incandescent lighting to Gore-era compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Why? Simple facts: one CFL lasts 10 times longer than a regular bulb and uses two-thirds less energy; a 26-watt CFL generates the same light as a 100-watt incandescent; CFLs emit 75 per cent less heat than conventional bulbs; and, in terms of the environmental impact, Gupta says if every Canadian household were to replace one incandescent bulb with a CFL, the switch would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 400,000 tonnes annually — the equivalent of leaving 70,000 cars parked for a year.
So why are we still using those old-fashioned dim bulbs? In a word, cost. CFLs are more expensive, although not as expensive as they once were. They’ve dropped from about $9 each to roughly $2 each. By comparison, an incandescent bulb can be had for about a buck. Plus, there has been lots of reporting about their supposed hazards, specifically mercury.
“ I really think it was a ploy by the incandescent makers to try and create a tempest in a tea pot,” says Gupta.
But Nina, as she prefers to be called, is not easily blown off course. She shoulders the weight and reputation of a family business that tracks back 20 years, when her father first began producing CFLs in his New Delhi factory for the Asian market. He had intended his eldest child to join the family business, but Gupta had other plans: She wanted to be a fashion designer.
“My husband was disappointed at Nina for taking up a job,” says her mother, Priya, from her home in New Delhi. “People from business families normally do not like their kids to work for anybody else. Nina has always been headstrong. I would have liked her to go to a good university.”
But Gupta believed life is as good an education as the classroom. She had lived in Montreal as a teenager, while attending the private Trafalgar School For Girls. After graduation, she went back to London, where she was born. As vibrant a fashion scene as London was, Gupta was drawn to Canada, and moved back to Montreal at age 20.
She landed a job first as an assistant fashion buyer for Le Chateau, then Limite Boutiques. She parlayed what she learned into her own women’s wear business, called Tarana’s. It became so successful that in just a few years she had three outlets. She sold the stores in the early 1990s when she took time off to raise her two children. When she returned to the work world, it was finally in her father’s realm, much to his delight. She used his New Delhi factory as a base to tap into the North American lighting market by launching Lamptronics. When that went well, she morphed Lamptronics into Greenlite in 1996 to import CFLs to Canada and the U.S.
At first, things didn’t go as well as she had hoped. The new company’s biggest road block was an identity problem. “I used to call people up and say, ‘I sell CFLs,’ and they thought I was calling from the Canadian Football League,” says Gupta. “I endured a lot of Canadian Football League jokes. But we hung in there and our business evolved and the demand increased.”
Never more so than when the U.S. government implemented a mandate to drastically reduce energy use at its federal sites. Gupta stepped into the spotlight as supplier, sending her company’s sales figures rocketing from $300,000 to $30 million in just one year. She says she’s shooting for $75 million in the next five years. Now that Ontario is offering subsidies for consumers and corporations — and has vowed to abolish the incandescent bulb by 2012 — her future can only get brighter. In fact, Gupta is now juggling three companies: Greenlite Lighting, “the mothership,” as she calls it; Greenlite USA, with an office in L.A.; and her new baby Greenlite Solar. “Because it’s in its infancy, it needs my time the most,” says Gupta of the new division. “Once it’s off the ground then I can get back to the other two. It’s like having three children but one’s in diapers.”
She almost had them all on their feet and out of the house three years ago, when her parents sold their own lighting business. “We were all supposed to retire on a beach,” she says with a sigh. “But my father said, ‘No, the kids have to work, they’re too young to retire, they’ll both turn into beach bums.’
“So I started the solar cell facility in May 2008, which is state-of-the-art, I think the third most automated facility in the world. So now everybody’s got their nose back to the grindstone.”
That means her dad and brother run the New Delhi plant, called IndoSolar, while she oversees offices in L.A. and a factory in Shanghai from her Montreal headquarters.
Gupta has to strike while the iron is hot on her new solar division. The Canadian government is finally supporting energy conservation and efficiency by loosening the purse strings on subsidies — offering the best in the world, in fact, says Gupta. “Plus, they’re running out of power. It’s like the sun: you can harness it every day and put it away for a rainy day, literally. Now they’ve finally realized it’s worth spending the money to put up the solar farms because they’re not going to have enough coal, etc. for the rest of the world.”
Gupta’s goal, apart from seeing everybody’s homes shining with CFLs, is to see their roofs outfitted with solar panelling. And the idea is not so far-fetched. With the subsidies, you could be financially rewarded from the government for being a good green citizen. “You could get $200 or $300 in the mail from Hydro Ontario or BC Hydro rather than writing a cheque to them every month. You’re using the electricity, plus you’re earning.”
Gupta, now 51, has to get up pretty early in the morning to keep tabs on those three growing “children.” She usually starts working the phones at 6:30 a.m., when the India and China offices are still open. An hour later she’s in her Montreal office “fielding fires all day until about 7 p.m.” when she heads home for a bit of family time before getting back on the computer at 10 p.m., when Asia re-opens. She’s tried to trade this metaphorical treadmill for a physical one with limited success.
“I’ve been trying to go to a gym, but I just can’t get there. Between the weather and having no discipline...” she trails off. When it’s suggested she just outfit her home with a mini gym, she says, “Oh, I’m fully equipped, I just don’t use it! I have the treadmill, the ball and the weights, the whole thing. I even had a trainer for a while. I also have the DVD with a pretty blond girl teaching me what to do, which I do, then I flop down on the floor and just look at her. In the summer I love to walk. I’m out at 7:30, 8:30 at night, headphones on, I just love it.”
Growing the business is what keeps Gupta in the office from dawn until dark. It’s a work ethic she inherited from her father, who used to take her and her younger brother into the office on the weekends. “Let me tell you, I could send a Tel-Ex at 12 years old,” she says. “Our Sunday treat was to go with dad to the factory and the office, check the Tel Ex, the fax machines, etc. It was a big deal for us to be allowed into the office on the weekends. Then we’d go to the movies, then out for dinner. The four of us always ate dinner together, always went places together. We’re still very close-knit, we talk on a daily basis . . . we’re a typical immigrant family. Our table conversation was business and I think that’s what really taught me a lot of what I know.”
She’s passed that knowledge and work ethic on to her own kids, a daughter, who’s in her last year at McGill earning her business degree, and her son, who’s finishing up at Marianopolis with a possible transfer to McGill law school.
“Wherever I’ve gone, my kids have gone with me,” says Gupta. “I used to pull them out of school to go with me wherever I went. Of course, you can’t always be travelling, but if I’m going to Cuba or India or Timbuktu for seven days, it’s worth it for them to see the country and the culture.”
Although she was born in England and her kids were born in Canada, she ensures they are well acquainted with their culture. “They’re Canadian by birth, but they’re Indian by heritage, and I want them to remember that,” she says. “I want them to always be proud of who they are. They have clued in to that whole Indian hierarchy, how the Indian families work, so when they go to India, which is often, they’re very comfortable. My daughter did a lot of work in the Delhi slums. So I’m pretty pleased.”
She’s not so pleased with herself, however, for not having the patience to teach her son and daughter to speak the language. “They both understand it perfectly but they don’t speak it well at all,” says Gupta.
As for passing on the family business, Gupta says that is her hope, but she wants her kids to know the value of a dollar before having it handed to them. “I’d like to see if they could get jobs on their own first,” she says. “My daughter is interested in eventually working for NGOs, but she currently has a part-time job in the solar industry. My son’s wheeling and dealing in automotive halogens, which we still sell. He belongs to automotive forums and he brings in small shipments of bulbs and then sells them in his forums. So he learns how hard it is to make $200 to $300 and then how easy it is to spend it.”
Meantime, Greenlite continues to bask in the limelight of recognition and awards. Gupta herself won the 2007 Trailblazing Award from the Canadian Women Entrepreneurs, the RBC Momentum Award for 2008, placed 12th out of Canada’s Top 100 Entrepreneurs in 2008, was a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Social Entrepreneur Award, and won the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce, also in 2008. While she appreciates the recognition, Gupta says she’d prefer that the spotlight fall on her company rather than herself.
“I think we won a lot of awards because we’re a small company that had a real trajectory of growth. We caught a lot of people’s attention because a) I’m Indian, b) I’m a woman, and c) we’re green. We have a lot of the buzz words. And I think once you win one award then you’re on everybody’s radar. I know it sounds cliche, but we’re a very good team. No man is an island, everybody needs somebody. Every success we have is because everybody did what they were supposed to do. My only contribution is that I dug my heels in and said I’m going to stay with this, I’m not going to deviate, I’m not going to start selling incandescents and having a 20-page catalogue of things that don’t go with what we’re trying to do. It’s like selling a cigarette ad and a cancer cure.” p
