How a young person retaliated subsequent to losing his dad and fabricated a Rs 3 Crore GMV Company in under a year

From the days of a carefree and happy childhood, Ankit Goel’s life took a turn for the worse than his father’s business began to suffer losses during his early teenage years, and it hit the nadir when he lost his father at age 17. “My father traded in different kinds of paper and had a shop in Chandigarh,” says Ankit.

Ankit, 30, started Jack Hammer Studios, an interior design firm in Gurugram last July and has completed projects worth Rs 3 crore in less than a year. “We make a margin of about 10-12 percent on each project, which means I got Rs 30-39 lakh as my profit in the last 10 months, which is triple the amount of Rs 12 LPA (lakh per annum) I was drawing at my last workplace,” says Ankit, tracing his journey from his hometown Chandigarh to the national capital.

How Ankit rebuilt his life after the death of his father, looked after his mother and younger sister, started a career, and finally turned an entrepreneur after he was sacked from his job is an inspirational story that can lift the spirits of any person going through difficult circumstances. Ankit‘s father Sushil Kumar Goel was a paper trading merchant, and he had his shop at Panchkula in Chandigarh since 1998.

His mother is a homemaker and his sister is six years younger than him. “Dad would take his weekly off on Mondays, and he would take us out for shopping, eating out, and just having fun,” says Ankit, recalling the good times the family had together. “Dad started working 7 days a week.

“There were times when I fought with Dad as to why he had become so stingy, as I didn’t know the importance of money and how it is earned.” In 2009, while waiting for his Class 12 results, Ankit started spending time at his father’s shop.

One day, while he was in the shop with his mother, his father complained of ‘acidic issues’ and took him to the doctor. I still remember, my dad just called my name, and sank on the chair he was sitting on,” says Ankit, recalling the day his father suffered a heart attack and passed away, leaving the family in dire straits.

So I became worried about my Mom and younger sister, rather than grieving for my father.” Forced to shoulder the responsibility of the family, five days after his father’s demise, Ankit opened his father’s shop and tried to get himself acquainted with the business. We eventually sold the shop that was located in a prime commercial center in 2012 and repaid our debts,” says Ankit, who went on to pursue a PG diploma in interior designing along with diplomas in CADS and 3D Max, software related to interior designing.

I think that was my first interior design project,” he says. With the academic training he received in interior designing, and the business mind he had inherited from his father, he began to hunt for projects. Later, I started doing small projects for as little as Rs 2 lakh,” says Ankit. In 2017, a friend who was working at LivSpace, an interior design firm, invited him to Delhi.

Ankit began to work for LivSpace as a freelance design partner and later joined the company as Senior Designer at an annual package of Rs 12 lakh in 2018.“In February 2020 I was awarded the Global Architecture and Builder Award (GABA) in Dubai. Within a month he got a couple of projects through his network. In November 2020, Ankit shifted to Delhi, as he began to get more projects in NCR.