Entrepreneurial Alumni

Vishal Sharma

Vishal Sharma

Posted 01 December 2015

New York Program

August 2011 Intake


Vishal spent his Mountbatten year at Deutsche Bank as a Product Development Analyst. After coming back to London he joined HSBC and worked in Programme and Project Management in the regulatory space for almost 3 years. However, Vishal explains how "my ambition has always been to be an entrepreneur and start my own company. I finally decided in September 2015 to take the leap to become an entrepreneur. I have co-founded Prive Butler - a concierge service which takes care of all your chores and errands whilst you are at work, for a small weekly fee. We take care of everything including house cleaning, dry cleaning and laundry, grocery shopping, sorting and posting letters or even returning unwanted items back to Amazon or any other seller, and special request items like sending gifts/flowers or arranging parties. We assign a dedicated house manager to each client who visits the client's property each week to carry out chores and errands.

The inspiration for this business idea has come as a result of my personal experience during the last year when I was particularly busy juggling both my personal and professional life. Not only was my job very demanding but I was also buying my first property (we all know the stress that comes with finding and buying a property in London!) and preparing for my forthcoming marriage. Doing all of this at once was a nightmare and I virtually had no time to do the daily grind of chores and errands. I tried to find a service that would take care of all of my chores and errands, but there simply weren't any! There are companies out there that take care of one single task like cleaning, but that involves having to be at home to let the cleaner in or handing over your keys to potentially different cleaners every few months.

As soon as I had this idea, I quickly formed a team of 3 web and iOS developers to start working on the idea. We made a website within a week and will also finish building the prototype by the end of December. The key in this type of business is to 'hustle'. I reached out to various property management companies and rental market places and was able to secure 2 meetings with the CEOs who I subsequently met and they had a very positive response to the value proposition. We hope to sign them up as partners over the coming weeks! Our future plans involve reaching out to more companies who would be interested in partnering up with us - especially investment banks and letting companies - and service their employees and tenants. We have managed to raise a seed round (small pot of money) which will allow us to grow and build our team. We are currently looking to fill business development and operations roles, so please feel free to reach out if you are interested in joining Prive Butler!

I would encourage every one of you to consider entrepreneurship as a viable career path. You need to dig really deep to understand what motivates you in life, and whether you want to be your own boss. There is a lot of help out there for 'would be' entrepreneurs to get you started, including a lot of events and meetups, so I suggest you start by attending a few of these to get a feel for whether entrepreneurship is for you."