For Mahuva, drying onions for export and carving furniture, two trades sharing one workforce.
Onions, timber, and a coastline
Mahuva dries and dehydrates onions on a scale that reaches export markets, and it also makes wooden furniture. The two have almost nothing in common except that the same families move between them depending on the season and the year.
Working two trades badly rather than one well
Diversification looks prudent and often functions as avoidance. Clients here describe running both, mastering neither, and using each as an explanation for why the other is not further along.
Onion processing is volatile - prices swing violently, and a good year and a ruinous year look identical until quite late. Furniture is steadier and slower. Holding both means never having to commit to either, which feels like risk management and behaves like indecision.
What the work addresses
Naming which one you would choose if you had to. Sometimes the answer is genuinely both, run properly, with separate accounts and separate attention. More often one has been kept alive for years out of sentiment or fear while quietly consuming the capital the other generates.
That is a difficult thing to see from inside, because the busyness of two trades resembles productivity.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati, usually scheduled around the onion season.
Frequently asked questions
- Is running two businesses wrong?
- Not at all. Running two to avoid committing to one is a different thing, and worth checking.
