The office of Career Launcher is as unassuming as its founder, Satya Narayanan R. The waiting area is at best plain and the conference room is bare bones. Satya, as he is fondly known, is equally unpretentious. It takes a second to recognise him when he breezes in, wearing a green cotton shirt and beige trousers - and a warm smile.
It’s hard to guess, though, that this man - who appears all over town in the ‘choosing your own path’ advertisement of Dell Computer - runs a multi-crore business, or is an IIM alumnus, or that he topped his class while at St Stephen’s College. He could even pass off as one of the many students who approach his centres for test preparation.
But then, it is equally difficult to imagine him as a cricketer – which is what he wanted to be throughout his teens, especially after legendary cricketer Bishen Singh Bedi selected him from among 1,500 students for a residential camp, and later persuaded his parents to let him study in Delhi to give cricket a shot.
Bedi also taught him to hedge his risks with a solid performance in academics, which is what Satya did. “I played cricket all year round, but come January, I packed up my kit. Till March, it would be study, study and study. When I studied, I could study 16 hours a day,” recalls the test-prep champ of his school days.
Even though he dropped a year in Class XII for cricket, he scored enough second time round to get into St Stephen’s, an elite college even in 1988. “I did not make it on sports quota,” he’s quick to clarify.
But success in cricket kept eluding him. In his third year of BSc, when he did not debut with a decent team for the Ranji Trophy, Satya shifted course and set his sights on a management degree. He got through IIM Bangalore, where he got his first “understanding of the 4-5 functions that are relevant to running a business.”
The taste of victory did not last long. Academically, he did not do particularly well. “I was so under-confident that I didn’t do a single presentation in my two years at IIMB,” recalls Satya, who is now a seasoned public speaker.
After graduating from IIMB, he joined Ranbaxy as a management trainee, but that did not keep him satisfied for long. At 25 and barely two years out of B-school, Satya played the riskiest shot of his life. He started coaching students, who had cleared the entrance exam for IIMs, for their group discussion sessions and interviews. He even held mock CAT sessions at colleges, and corrected them for free.
Satya had played the right shot at the right time. Test preparation for MBAs was an unexploited field in 1995. At that time, IMS coached students by correspondence. Career Launcher introduced classroom coaching and turned it into a profitable business. What began as personality development classes for IIM interviews soon turned into full preparation for MBA entrances, and later for other entrance exams, such as law, engineering and hotel management.
Today, Career Launcher is a household name in education, offering a range of educational services through its three playschools, 17 schools and one business school. In 2008-09, its revenue was Rs 150 crore and it touched nearly 110,000 learners across 225 locations. It has even partnered with the government of Rajasthan for vocational training and plans to start a university in the state.
It is a business that has been funded by Gaja Capital in 2007 and Intel Capital before that. Career Launcher also has a subsidiary in the US and is planning a footprint across Asia. In fact, its plans to go for a public listing to raise funds have been postponed only due to the recent state of the markets.
Of course, it has not been a smooth sail. After the initial success of the test-prep model, Career Launcher decided to expand using the franchisee route. But the model did not work as well for them as it had for NIIT, another education company. Satya then tweaked the model by partnering only with teachers, so that he could be assured of quality at his centres. Even the pricing of the product took some fine-tuning before it was accepted by the students.
Then, around 2003-04, business started slowing down. “We were not going to remain a test-prep business forever,” says Satya. So Career Launcher started thinking about related fields in education, which resulted in an altogether new set of challenges.
“The most challenging period of this journey was 2005-07, when we started moving into other businesses. We were six of us trying to build three different businesses under one organisation. So far, we were used to working with each other’s skills. And then, we had to make do without the support of one or many of us in that particular business.”
Last year brought a fresh set of challenges - the corporate greed that led to failure of banks across the US and the resultant economic slowdown cast a gloomy shadow over MBAs. “The year’s been difficult for us,” admits Satya, who is not particularly perturbed by business cycles.
As far as he is concerned, he has put a strong team in place, which will ensure the numbers are met. The day-to-day functioning of the company lies with five other co-founders and a strong team of professionals from IITs and IIMs through a structure consisting of “business councils” and their “anchors”.
“I am a part of every council but not the anchor. I bring people together and make them share a vision,” he says of his core strengths. He would rather spend his time finding ways to “democratise education”.
“We are already offering education at Rs 150 a month to the poor through our nine rural schools. The aim is to leverage technology such that we can be a vehicle to reach 25 million people,” says the optimist. So what if it has taken his company 14 years to reach just over a lakh?
“I keep asking myself: can I get to a million in the next three years and how? I know that this will happen only when we sell bicycles instead of Honda Citys,” says he. So instead of resting on his laurels, the way many in his shoes would be tempted to do, Satya shows up at work every morning at regular office hours to find ways in which technology can help him take education to the masses.
He is also hands-on at the B-school, Indus World School of Business, where he runs the entrepreneurship module. “I teach the appreciation of reality,” says Satya, who also wants to chronicle the stories of entrepreneurship in a book. “For me, Mother Teresa was as much an entrepreneur as Sachin Tendulkar is, or Shah Rukh Khan is. I want to unravel the person that an entrepreneur is; his vulnerabilities, insecurities, and his belief inventory – and not just the success story.”
There is only one thing that has remained constant in this career launcher’s life – his passion to coach students. Even now, he spends up to 20 hours a month at different coaching centres, trying to find ways in which he can help 98% of those students, who he knows will not get what they have paid him for – an admission to an IIM.
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