It’s a Monday morning, and Patricia, bright and fresh, is busy monitoring her catering business at her 12 food outlets across Chennai. Thanks to CCTVs, Patricia, 55, supervises the work from her home in Velachery, south Chennai.

As she looks at the CCTV images of a work going with almost mechanised efficiency, Patricia (she prefers to be called by her first name to retain her individuality, as Narayan was her late husband’s name) seems the embodiment of a self-made entrepreneur. And that she is, having received the FICCI Best Woman Entrepreneur Award for 2010-11.

Yet, life has been anything but easy. Beginning her career at 20, she sold eatables from a kiosk on the city’s Marina beach against all odds – battling a failed marriage, coping with her multiple-addict husband, raising two children and losing her daughter and son-in-law in an accident, becoming an entrepreneur and then nearly losing it all. Before fighting back to reclaim lost territory – Patricia has seen it all.

Looking back over the last three decades, Patricia’s life looks like a takeoff of a typical rags-to-riches film script – black and white turning sepia into a blooming, almost raging, burst of colour; starting off with day’s sale of 50 paise and now lording over four brands – Sandeepha, San’s Kitchen, Quencher’s and Golden Wok – with daily sales of over '2 lakh.

Getting the FICCI award back in April 2010, she says, was the moment when the realisation hit home: “I grasped the full worth of what I have achieved; that someone somewhere has taken note of all my hard work.”

Patricia was born into a conservative, middle-class Christian family from Kanyakumari on July 7, 1958. At 18 when she dropped out of second-year graduation and got married, she, however, had no inkling of all that hard work. The wedding, and the breezy romance leading up to it, also had a filmi touch to it: as a college-goer in 1977-78 (she was a social science student, before dropping out), Patricia used to visit a food outlet on Marina beach, which was close to her college, Queen’s Mary, and given her passion for cooking, often wandered into the kitchen to unearth more. In the kitchen she met the owner’s son, Narayan, fell in love and ended up marrying him in 1977. Narayan, a diploma holder in catering, helped his father in the business. With her marriage to a Brahmin opposed vehemently by her parents – both senior central government employees – Patricia left home.

But the marriage fell apart soon. “My husband was into a lot of vices (drugs and alcohol) that I did not know (before wedding),” she says. “I made several efforts to bring him out of it but could not – it was a tough time for me.” He also used to assault her.

It wasn’t long before she decided she could not take it any longer and moved back to her parents’ home in Chennai with her son in 1980.
 
Back ‘home’, and beginning afresh

“I did not want to be a burden on my parents – I had to earn, as I had to take care of my child. And I thought my passion could, and should, be my business. Prodded on by my mother, Victoria Jeyaraj, I did a short-term course at a catering college in Chennai and started making pickles, squashes and jams at home.

“Banking on a few hundred rupees loaned by my mother to buy raw materials, I jumped into it full-time and got off to a heady start: I sold everything I had made on the very first day I put them up for sale!”

More opportunity came within a year when one of her father’s friends, who ran a school for physically challenged children, was looking for unemployed graduates to run kiosks to sell tea and coffee and she got one. The condition: she had to employ at least two handicapped people at her kiosk. The kiosk was to be stationed at a public place with footfall, and what better option than Marina beach?

“I thought I would just have to take the kiosk to the beach and start functioning. But I had to run to the public works department (PWD) office almost every day, and it took almost a year to get the permission,” Patricia says.

When the stall was finally up and running, in mid-1982, she got her first lesson in management: real gusto can often browbeat the most adverse of situations. On the first day – “it was a Friday” – Patricia could sell only one cup of coffee. She earned 50 paise.

Distraught, she wanted to give it up then and there. “But my mother encouraged me to stick on. The next day was a Saturday, when many more people thronged the beach and my work took off. I was the only person selling eatables there; others did not sell snacks at such kiosks at the time. I sold French fries, vegetable samosas, cutlets, different types of juice, ice-cream and milk shakes – it might have been small and insignificant but I felt like owning a big hotel,” Patricia says.
 
A ‘school’ on the beach

Her kiosk, she says today, was her learning ground: “Though I do not hold any professional degree in business, I have learned from my experiences – today I am as good as any MBA professional. I take criticism the right way and I am learning till this day. For me, that should be the attitude of an entrepreneur.”

Patricia is quick to add that she also learnt valuable lessons from her husband, who also worked in the hospitality industry. “He used to come with me to the kiosk and told me a lot about how things are done. But by late evenings he would be drunk, get into fights and take away money from me. As more money came in, the problems multiplied for me.

“I was with my husband for 14 years (they divorced in 1991, and he passed away later) but I could not make him leave his addiction,” she rues.
Not long after she opened the kiosk, Patricia had her second child in 1982 – a daughter.

Three or four months after she had opened the beach kiosk, seeing her work, the Slum Clearance Board made her an offer to run the canteen at its office. “It was a 9-5 job and I served breakfast, lunch and evening snacks. On average working days, we catered to the regular staff of 200-250, but on Wednesdays and Fridays, which were public grievance days, there used to be more than 1,000 people!”

But Patricia’s workday was hardly like any ‘regular’ employee: “I used to get up at 5 am, cook and attend to the beach kiosk. From 9 am, I was at the canteen. At 3.30 pm, I would be back at the beach kiosk – and stayed there till 11 pm. My hands were full of work, and I loved what I was doing.”
 
On to bigger avenues

With the canteen turning out to be a huge success within three or four years, she got another offer to run the Bank of Madurai canteen and chose to quit work at the Slum Clearance Board’s canteen.

At the bank canteen, she served food to around 300 people every day and simultaneously ran her beach kiosk, which was operational till 2003. Fate was to change soon, and for the better.

Patricia recalls: “One day, after a fight with my husband, who, like he did often, came home and harassed me, I took a bus and on a whim travelled till the last stop. There, I saw the National Institute of Port Management (NIPM, about 30 km from the city). I got in and learnt that they were looking for a caterer. I met the director but he refused outright, saying it wasn’t a woman’s job. I was also told that most students there were north Indians and that they would prefer phulkas (rotis). I assured I would provide good food but was asked to leave.”

But Patricia’s luck changed soon. “I got a call from NIPM after three or four months and was asked to join the following week. It was a 24x7 job and I literally didn’t sleep for two weeks. Besides students, professionals too used to study there. So I had to be very professional, and had to keep myself updated. I could not have survived at NIPM with basic cooking.”

Though the work was back-breaking, NIPM, she says, is the place that “groomed” her. “It was also where I took a contract in my own name for the first time – earlier I used to take contracts in my husband’s name.”

While working there, Patricia got an offer for catering at a dental college just across the road and began work there, too. She took care of both canteens till 1998 – the year she met people from one of Chennai’s most famous chains of restaurants (she is reluctant to name the chain, or the people). Made a managing partner in one of its units, Patricia had entered the restaurant format!

By then, she could also afford bigger risks – both her children were well educated, and son Praveen had entered merchant navy. “Having been associated with the merchant navy college, I liked the way they worked and wanted Praveen to join that field. Since I was working 24x7, I had almost no time for family – that’s one reason I did not want Praveen to get into the catering field, though both my children were very interested in cooking.”
After Praveen started sailing, Patricia’s daughter graduated in visual communication. “I had her wedding fixed almost immediately. But destiny had written something else…”
 
Beating the blues and hitting back

Patricia’s daughter, Pratheepha Sandra, and son-in-law died in an road accident barely a month after their wedding in 2004. “It shattered me. I withdrew from all that I was doing. I still cannot get over my daughter’s death. I have done all this only for my children…to give them a good life,” she says in short, staccato sentences.

As she completely withdrew from her work and things threatened to get stuck on business front, it was time for her son, Praveen, to come to her rescue. He left his job in merchant navy to keep the business going.

“Those three or four years were very tough for us. We had to restart from scratch because everything fell apart. People were trying to walk over us – they tried to push my son out of the industry. At that point, I decided to get up and stand by my son.

“Praveen wanted to build from where I had left and in 2005 he started our first restaurant – ‘Sandeepha’ – in my daughter’s memory.”

At present, Patricia says with justifiable pride, they serve 8,000 to 10,000 people every day from her 12 outlets under four brand names.

“Today, I repent that I had to let go of the kiosk. I was emotionally attached to it,” says Patricia. A small green lawn next to the Gandhi statue on the beach was space big enough for Patricia to run it. She says she had to stop running the beach kiosk after 2003 since her business rivals were trying to pull her down and after her daughter’s death people who claimed to be well-wishers cheated her. Patricia says they even tried to register her brand name in their name. So there was little option but to let go of the kiosk and concentrate on her restaurant business.

“I had the kiosk at my parent’s place (in Santhome area of Chennai) for a long time but the home was renovated sometime back and we had to remove it,” she adds.

Hammering away steadily on his laptop all this while, son Praveen shifts his attention momentarily and spells out plans to expand business in cities like Trichy and Dindigul in Tamil Nadu, as also in Bangalore – “hopefully by middle of next year”.

As he explains the blueprint for expansion plan, two people walk in. Patricia introduces them as Anbalazhan and Parthipal, who have stuck with her for the last 25 years through thick and thin. “We are with her like a family,” the two say, almost in unison.

Though there wasn’t much competition those days, Parthipal says Patricia always remained true to her principle: “She stood for quality. She herself used to go to the market at 4 am to ensure she gets fresh and quality vegetables.” Parthipal says she has also trained her son the same way.
Patricia, in turn, says Parthipal guided her with ways to handle things at NIPM.

While Patricia has trained many of her employees, her sheer passion for cooking keeps her connected to the kitchen. “When the owners help them, the employees feel encouraged; that’s how they grow a sense of ownership and work with passion and zeal.”
Passion and zeal. Patricia should know a thing or two about both the nouns for that’s what kept her going for more than three decades of adversity and opportunity.

(This article appeared in December 1-15, 2013 issue of the magazine)