Start-up Diaries

Delhi/Mumbai: The Careerists

By Rohini Banerjee

Photograph by Subhojit Paul

Shiv Dewan has a disconcerting habit of throwing questions back at you—did you always want to be a journalist, or did you take an aptitude test to figure out what you wanted to do, he asks before we can get a word in. Yet, he doesn’t wait for an answer. The chatty 29-year-old quickly establishes his point—that “career counselling” as we know it doesn’t really deliver what it promises to do. It was something he and his friend, and now business partner Shahdab Siddiqui, believed in enough to turn their own careers inside out.

In 2009, the duo, batchmates from IIM Indore, set up One Step Up, a career-counselling company with a simple mission—to help school students make more informed choices, about what streams of education they should take up, or how to think about the mindboggling question of a career. Within two years, their start-up has taken several confident strides, reaching out to nearly 12,000 students across 82 schools in 15 states.

Dewan and Siddiqui believe in showing, not telling. At the workshop sessions they organise for school students, typically between Class IX and XII, they begin by playing slickly-produced, very “MTV” videos that take the students through a regular day in the life of a profession (from conventional options like a doctor, lawyer and engineer, to more off-beat careers like a dramatist or a radio jockey). Produced in-house, these videos are storyboarded to give the students a real sense of what a particular professional actually entails. A presentation and activities based on various pros and cons of a profession is then conducted to help students figure out if this is something they are good at, or would like to do.

“Usually, you choose from the options that you see, hear and know of either through your peers, friends or family. We thought of widening that circle and bringing in professionals into the classrooms who would honestly talk about their jobs, their yahoo moments and also those moments when the struggles didn’t seem worth it,” explains Dewan. Being in the middle of somebody’s work day, and sharing their experiences, he believes, helps in getting the right picture of a certain job. “If what you see is what you like then there’s your career. If you don’t then that’s great too, because now you know what you don’t want to do,” Dewan adds.

Dewan and Siddiqui wonder honestly if they might’ve been somewhere else today if they had access to really identifying what was the best-fit for them when they were in school. Dewan studied science in school, switched to commerce, then law before ending up in IIM Indore where he met Siddiqui, a fellow classmate. He also played squash for India, and seriously pondered about being a sportsperson. But after their management degree, the duo tred the expected path by taking up corporate jobs. Dewan went to NDTV’s business planning division, and Siddiqui worked in Reliance and Bennett & Coleman, till they decided to start-up.

One Step Up—and countless other entrepreneurial ventures—had started to take shape in their IIM hostel room but nothing seemed like something they could fly with then. “Some ideas may be great, but they don’t make for a great market,” Siddiqui says.

For both of them, the thrills of corporate life didn’t last long, and putting to action one of their numerous business plans seemed attractive. In mid 2009, while still in their jobs, they put together an informal pilot programme for ten high-school students. The response sealed their decision, and they knew they had a business winner at hand. Impatient themselves, they figured lecture- type workshops wouldn’t work. “Teenagers don’t have time to listen,” Dewan pitches in. And hit on breezy, fun, short videos as an option to reach their audience. They decided to build a repertoire of 10 videos on different professions with their own money, roughly Rs 5 lakh. An old teacher from Dewan’s alma mater, The Lawrence School, Lovedale, recommended his programme to Welham Boys in Dehra Dun. It set their ball rolling. “We were still working when we received a call from the Welham Boys School in Dehra Dun. We were allotted a tricky slot: a Sunday afternoon before a special pizza lunch. It was a six-hour-long session and when the bell rang, none of the boys seemed in a rush to get their pizzas,” says Dewan.

It was Dewan’s yahoo moment. A week later, he quit his day job. It took Siddiqui a few months more to cross over.

In the first year, they decided to take things slow. If need be, they would hit 40 schools at most. They had meagre budgets, most of which was spent on the Rs 15,000-Rs 80,000 to produce the videos. They hit their targets right on spot. Within a year, they had covered 38 schools on their list, including prestigious institutions like the Doon School, Dehra Dun, Shriram in Delhi, and Lawrence School, Lovedale. Just from these schools, they’d recovered most of their video costs. Encouragingly, almost every school they reached out to got in touch for follow-up sessions. The mathematics seemed to add up.

“We have two revenue models. In the sign-up model, each school pays anywhere between Rs 10,000-Rs 15,000 per session. In the second model, we devise curriculum-based modules for schools,” Siddiqui explains. The duo prefers the sign-up model, especially for repeat workshops in the same school. “If the students come back for more, we know we’ve done something right.” A large part of their success, they believe, has been about identifying the right schools. In every state, they first target the top five schools. If these come on board, other educators, administrators and principals become easier to access, they say. Their repeat ratio has been nearly flawless. Over the past two years, only two of the 82 schools they’ve worked with have not given them repeat workshops.

Even now, they reach out to 20-plus schools every month. That means a gruelling travel schedule, and both Dewan and Siddiqui crisscross the country. Take the last two months—they’ve had workshops in Shimla, Dehra Dun, Chandigarh, Coimbatore and Bengaluru. “We wouldn’t have continued had we not loved to travel. But we love what we do. Interacting with students is wonderful,” gushes Dewan. With their enthusiasm and quick-wit, it’s easy to see that their team—now six-people strong, including Dewan’s “much-better-half” Shobita Naithani, and former TV journalist Mansi Sharma—manage to bond with the students. “We usually begin by kicking ball with them. It breaks the ice,” he adds. Their students, he says, have helped them expand the programmes. Their list of careers and jobs, 24 in total right now, for the videos come from student suggestions.

In their management programmes, they might’ve have been hard-wired to draw up ambitious plans. But Dewan and Siddiqui truly live their brand name. For now, they’re happy taking it a step at a time. “We look at short-term goals, not long-term plans,” explains Siddiqui. “We have recovered our initial investment costs. One day we plan to make as much money as some of our classmates. Right now, we love where we are,” he adds. Clearly, even as they help others find what they love to do, they have themselves found their way to a perfect career.

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