Once Did Kitchen Duties For Rs 5k, Kashmiri Pandit Turns Hotelier - Clocks Rs 2.5 Cr/Year

“I was supposed to be from a well-to-do family. But life happened.”

This is one of the first things that Sahil Pandita told Startup Pedia during an interview.

Sahil is an established hotelier who is the founder of ProMiller, an Indian hotel asset management company that is witnessing 100% year-on-year growth.

From Kanpur to Bengaluru to Delhi to Pune, he has been to many places.

Sahil is a Kashmiri Pandit whose parents saw the exodus, suffered from it, relocated houses, and eventually settled near a village in Chandigarh.

He says, “My father was a respected individual in Kashmir. He had a job in a Government bank in Srinagar. When the exodus happened, my parents survived in camps, then a small house in Jammu, and eventually came to a village near Chandigarh and settled there. That was when I was born. The government job was the only source of income for us.”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Sahil Pandita wasn’t a very studious child from the beginning. He was more interested in hands-on activities, exploring things, and getting out of the house all the time. So when he dropped out of school after finishing 10th standard, it came as a shock to his friends and family.

Concerned about his future, Sahil’s parents enrolled him for a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering in Pune.

But he dropped out of it after three months. 

By that time, in 2011, Sahil’s parents had shifted to Hubli in Karnataka. After dropping out, Sahil also went to Hubli and decided to do his 12th standard at the National Institute of Open Schooling.

He always wanted to earn money. Before even buying his books, he started hunting for jobs.  

“I was looking to work at a call center. I thought I could easily get a job there because I could speak fluent English, all thanks to my father who always spoke really nice English at home. But then I saw a newspaper ad for a job at Clarks Inn hotel in Hubli, Karnataka. I didn’t know that going into that hotel with zero experience would, quite literally, change how my life would pan out,” Sahil mentions.

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For a salary of Rs 5,200 a month, Sahil was put in the Hotel Operation Trainee program. He learned everything on the job. From dropping bags of guests at the front office to taking them to their rooms, rendering housekeeping services, cleaning beds, and toilets, washing utensils, and chopping up vegetables – he did everything that was to be done in a hotel.

After gaining enough exposure at Clarks Inn and dabbling with a similar role at Hotel Dennison, Sahil Pandita eventually shifted to Bangalore for a better job.

In 2012, he applied at ITC Hotels and landed a front-office assistant job. But he was in for a rude shock when he came across Bengaluru’s rent scenario.

Sahil shared a dorm-kind of space with 14 boys packed into one room. There was only one washroom for all of them to use in the morning and bed bugs to deal with at night. 

Sahil spent 14-15 hours working at the hotel every day. However, he dreaded returning to the dorm because of its condition, so he decided to sleep at the hotel itself.

“I packed my shaving kit and some toiletries and slept in the hotel bunker. With air conditioning and a clean space to sleep in, I suddenly realized the dichotomy of living standards. Or maybe life itself,” Sahil remarks.

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His time at ITC Hotels was spent not just doing what the job required him to do but also gaining information and absorbing knowledge about how the other departments of the hotel worked.

Impressed by his work ethic, his management got him enrolled in the ITC Hospitality Management Institute. This program covers students’ fees, provides work opportunities at the hotel itself, pays a stipend, and offers a three-course meal three times a day.

The training gave him the exact skills needed for higher-level positions in the hotel industry. Soon, he joined the Welcom Lead program at ITC Hotels.

In 2014, at the age of just 18, Sahil went to New Delhi.

“My managers gave me the opportunity to give an interview at ITC HMI –  ITC’s Hotel Management Institute. I cracked the interview but dropped out of the program after more than a year,” he says.

In his characteristic confidence, Sahil Pandita applied at Hyatt Regency in Delhi and immediately bagged the role of Team Lead with Rs 30,000 as a monthly salary. He was also promised the position of manager after six months.

Within four months of joining, Sahil was promoted to the Shift Manager Front Office position and became the youngest manager in the history of Hyatt hotels in India.

“No one believed I could become a manager. With my hotel management education all over the place, people, including my parents, thought I wouldn’t make it to key-level positions. But I took them by surprise,” he tells Startup Pedia.

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At Hyatt, Sahil worked double shifts at the hotel. He would spend 16 hours at the hotel, sleep for just 4 hours, and go back to do it all over again.

Constantly on the move, he quit Hyatt to join Taj Hotels as Duty Manager in January 2016. While work-life balance was better than before, he still wanted to explore further.

In December 2016, he landed a job at one of the most reputed asset management firms in India.

At the age of 22, he was now helping numerous properties smoothen their operations, audits, data handling, and finance management.

In January 2018, Sahil Pandita finally founded his own hotel asset management company by the name of ProMiller.

Sahil recounts a conversation with his ex-boss, “When I was leaving the job, I promised him that I’d get an Audi for myself. I don’t think he believed me then. One year later, I actually bought an Audi. I was 24 at the time.”

PROMILLER - END-TO-END MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTANCY

Along with his team, he has cracked hospitality consulting, delivering tangible results that enable hotel owners to closely monitor their daily operations, and track daily cash inflows and outflows.

In FY24, ProMiller clocked a revenue of Rupees 2.5 crore, solely through its consultancy services among other businesses. 

Sahil Pandita is fast emerging as a hotelier who knows how to make hotels work for just about anyone.

Beyond ProMiller, they have expanded their business into multiple verticals. 

Check them out here - Promiller Group

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