When tech meets training: How Rajesh Veetil is bringing the best out of grassroots sports

By Gautam Viswanathan, Deputy Editor, The Inspired Indian

In an exclusive interview with The Inspired Indian, Rajesh Veetil, an immigrant of Indian origin who lives in Brampton, Ont., lifts the lid on how his own experiences as a sportsman and parent inspired him to launch a business that specializes in sports management across three areas of expertise.

His flagship product – Sync360 – is a remote-coaching platform that connects talented young players with coaches from around the world, providing them the chance to learn from the best by overcoming traditional physical barriers such as borders and distance. Another product – Club7MS – helps community sports clubs manage all their operations through a single app, while a third – RaysVenue – is a facility booking system.

 

Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I started my career as a professional cricketer – including one year playing overseas for English county side Middlesex – and at the age of 28, made the decision to stop playing pro cricket and focus on my career. 

I moved into the payments industry, and my company in Dubai sent me to Canada to lead their North American expansion, before I was hired as the vice president for a startup specializing in cross-border payments. When I came here, I played club cricket and also began coaching their academy players, and I realized that although there was a need for qualified coaches, it was difficult to reach them, so I decided to set up a company to address those issues.

 

Interesting – could you tell me about your products and the customers you have?

We’ve been working on our products for the last four years. Our main product is called Sync360, which connects players, academies, parents and coaches, all through one app within a single framework. We intend to launch this product in the first week of August, and have four academies in Canada, three in the Middle East, and four in India already signed up.

Our second is a grassroots club management solution: we design a customized mobile app for each club, with their own branding, helping them engage with sponsors, organize tournaments, manage social media, and provide updates to club members, all through a single app. Our team management application has about eight or nine customers across Canada, the US, and the Middle East, and we have another 15 who’ve signed up for the product.

Clubs currently manage their programmes through WhatsApp, Excel sheets, or Google, but our app provides a single point of contact for the club, with their branding.

During the process of meeting clients, we realized there was also a demand from some of them for a booking solution, and we’re working on getting this into the market as well. We’ve already signed up a couple of local clubs – one in Mississauga and another in Scarborough.

 

Alright. Could you tell me some of the positives and the negatives of running your own business?

There are a lot of positives, because ours is a niche market, and the excitement there is to develop sports tech, which is still widely accepted, although there is a lot of innovation happening. Being part of something new is exciting. But the challenge is starting from scratch: reaching out to the market and making connections when you have a lean team. We also need to change existing behaviours in the market. 

Canada’s system of setting up business is very clear, but it is hard to secure financial working capital for expansion because from a traditional banking perspective, you need to show stability in your business to secure funds. 

There needs to be a way for entrepreneurs to get funds, but at the same time, entrepreneurs must also ensure their investors are financing a sound product.

 

What sort of skills and qualities do you need to run your own business?

There are a lot of brilliant ideas out there, but running after that idea is where the difference lies. It’s all about that passion and focus: at the end of the day, how do you act on those ideas? 

Every day, you’re figuring out how to grow from a tech perspective, a marketing perspective, a sales perspective, and a customer perspective: how do you make a difference in all these areas? 

From this business perspective, you need to be focused across each area: development, testing, sales, customer interaction, and positioning the product. As an entrepreneur, you are involved in all these areas.

 

How do you plan on growing your subscriber base even more?

We have the traction, we’re moving forward, and we’re not in a hurry. We’re looking to establish a few markets in which we are very strong, before jumping into bigger markets. We are really focusing on the US, Canadian, and the Indian market. From a cricket perspective, we are looking at the US market as it is growing a lot. 

 

What advice would you give to immigrant entrepreneurs who want to come here and start their business?

Canada has a very vibrant ecosystem, but it depends on which city you’re in: that makes a lot of difference. Not all cities are growing the same way, so you have to be very, very choosy, depending on the areas of operation. But overall, Canada’s ecosystem is growing exponentially.