Top 100 Franchise Leaders

Virag Joshi – President & CEO, Devyani International Limited

Virag Joshi is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Devyani International Limited and a name to reckon with in the QSR industry. He has been the key strategist in expansion of Yum Brands in India for over two decades at Devyani International. Under his able leadership, KFC, Pizza Hut, Costa Coffee, Vaango and Food Street have grown multi-fold to become household names in India.

Virag is a passionate and people’s leader with proven credentials of building motivated teams, driving processes & leading customer focused organizations. He brings with him unparalleled experience of over three decades in the hospitality industry. He has been instrumental in spearheading various hospitality brands to profitability and creating new benchmarks in the QSR industry. Virag has been recognised for his work and contribution at brands like Indian Hotels Company Limited, Milkfood Limited, Domino’ with whom he was previously associated.

He is a Director on Board at Devyani International Limited and is leading the organisation to its next phase of growth.

As a leader who has spearheaded teams at various organisations through their business journey, he believes that three aspects are a must for a leader- ability, agility and adaptability.

He thinks that the significance of a leader lies in his skills to collaborate and predict market trends for affective business goal setting for the future. A leader must have the foresight to gauge and engage at the right time with stakeholders.

For him, a leader must be a people’s person. He/ she must know who are the people who build his/her organisation from behind the scenes and who are the frontline warriors.

For Virag, success is relative to each leader, some may define profitability as success, a few may measure success by their customer satisfaction and may be a personal sense of achievement for others. To him, success is leading a driven and motivated team to a singular business goal of reaching the top position in whatever one does. He is a people centric person and his team defines his success.