From ‘a-table-and-a-few-chairs’ beginning, not only has Career Launcher scaled up its core offering in the area of test-prep services and emerged as a leading service provider, the company has aggressively diversified into primary education and now higher education. After opening Indus World School and Ananda playschool, it's now ready to roll out its B-school, Indus World School of Business (IWSB) in summer of 2008.
Mr Narayanan, popularly called ‘Satya’, is a quintessential entrepreneur – passionate, daring and deeply self-aware. A graduate from IIM Bangalore, he worked at pharma company Ranbaxy Laboratries for less than two years, and then quit to follow his dreams.
Career Launcher has grown from teaching 100 students in 1996 to 50,000 enrolments across 80+ centers. Its revenues in financial year 2007 were Rs 70 crores and have been growing at a CAGR of 50% for last five years.
MBAUniverse.com spoke to Mr Satyanarayan on his B-school plans and his entrepreneurial journey. Excerpts:
Q: You have announced setting up of Indus World School of Business which will rollout next year. What is the thinking behind this new initiative?
Satya: In last decade or so, Career Launcher has grown from a startup to a leading education domain company. Few years back, after successfully expanding our test-prep services nationally, we entered into mainstream education through it's Oown K-12 school. In 2005, the first playschools – Ananda and the first K-12 school - Indus World Schools were opened in Indore and Hyderabad.
We are very passionate about education and training, and see education as the only means to enable people realize their potential.
Keenness for setting up a B-school was always there for last few years. For the purpose of our B-school, we were talking to a few reputed foreign universities, but they were slow to take decisions. So we decided to go ahead with our plans.
We want to build a B-school which is at par, or even superior, when compared to other leading Indian B-schools. This is the reason we started it a little late and we are sparing no effort to make Indus World School of Business (IWSB) truly world class.
Q.So how will IWSB be different from other B-Schools?
Satya: IWSB is focusing on four things: entrepreneurial ethos, all-round education, global exposure and strong career services.
Of these, our focus and passion on entrepreneurship is most important. Our entire thinking and programme is geared to make our students successful entrepreneurs. Of course, many will choose to work in corporates, but even they will carry with them an entrepreneurial mindset and attitude. This focus gives phenomenal clarity to the academic design and the pedagogical approach.
Q: So how will IWSB develop entrepreneurship on campus?
Satya: Entrepreneurship development will get started even before we admit students on our campus. Our admission process is designed to check this trait in the candidates. While we will use the standard CAT, XAT and GMAT scores, we will evaluate what we call as the core entrepreneurial values in the applicants. We will take them through special tests, and out-bound activities to see what they are made of.
Then, once they come in, our hand picked faculty will take them through the thinking process and tools. Our faculty recruitment is as rigorous as our admission process!
There are many well respected entrepreneurs like Sanjeev Bhikchandani of Naukri.com involved with IWSB from the scratch. Their involvement is at a deep level and not for power point presentations and brochures.
During their academic course, students will have a lot of innovative inputs on this aspect. Like our ‘shadowing exercise’ where a candidate will closely follow an entrepreneur for a week – how do they think, how do they take decisions, how do they interact and so on. This will be a fantastic exposure for would-be entrepreneurs. We will also have a multi disciplinary project in term four which is micro entrepreneurship project. Everybody will be given some amount of money, they will come up with an idea and use that money in next 30 days pursuing that idea.
Then, at IWSB, we will provide hands-on entrepreneurship training through our in-house entrepreneurship development program. We are starting with an incubation lab having US $ 1 million. This lab will support good business ideas coming from our students. We will incubate business ideas – from providing them with basic resources, mentoring and handholding.
In fact my dream is that one of these companies from IWSB campus goes to the IPO stage in 10 years!
Q: That’s interesting…how strong is your personal involvement going to be in near future?
Satya: I am personally working on all aspects of this venture. In fact we don’t have a director, because I thought I will work on this myself and make this as a model B-school.
Q: Is your focus on entrepreneurship coming from personal passion or is it coming from a larger objective of creating India as a country of entrepreneurs?
Satya:Both are important points. I think that entrepreneurs add a lot more to the nation. Entrepreneurship is more useful to nation than ‘employeeship’.
And other thing that I have noticed is that entrepreneurship in B-schools is still very deglamourized as a domain. We need to somehow find ways of making it noticed.
We think entrepreneurs have a huge role to play in making India reach its potential.
Q: Placements is the other focus of IWSB?
Satya: Yes, it's an important area. Business education and research exists for solving business problems. It's not an ivory tower discipline. So how corporates feel about graduates is very important. It’s the ultimate seal of approval for us.
We are focusing on providing placements to our students in right kind of companies. We already have about 20 companies signed up. We want our candidates to go to fast growing select companies, not necessarily the biggest. That’s our focus.
Q: You are starting with a two-year MBA programme and a three-year BBA programme. What will be the batch size and fee structure?
Satya: To begin with we will offer a Post Graduate Program in Business and a three-year Under Graduate Program in Management for academic session starting July 2008. Within these programmes we are offering many specializations. We also have specialization in entrepreneurship which I will anchor myself. The full-year MBA will cost about Rs 5 lakhs while BBA will cost about Rs 3 lakhs. We are looking for good quality of students with the maximum batch size of 60 students. I don’t mind even lesser number of students but they have to meet our benchmarks.
Q: What are major trends in management education that you see?
Satya: Overall quality of B-schools is poor. That’s a sad thing. I wish that there would be more institutes started by mainstream corporates.
The other thing is that I believe that all-around education is very important for overall development while our management education the quantitative part is glorified. But as we go along, we realized that importance of quantitative skills is not as important as it is made out to be. It is leadership, thinking and behavior, that are very important. How does a person think, develop vision, how does he relate to peoples etc, are more crucial.
Q: Ok. Moving beyond IWSB, what were the days like when you started off in 1995?
Satya: Oh, it was fun! I was so sure of what I wanted to do that I didn’t do any market research at all, and took the plunge. I was scared that if I started discussing my plan of quitting and starting on my own, they will persuade me against it. So I kept it under waraps, and got going. Of course, we made a small beginning but it all worked out.
Q: What were a few things that you did right as an entrepreneur?
Satya: Well the first is that I took the plunge! Entrepreneurship is all about getting started, and not doing endless diagnosis and prognosis with friends and folks.
Then knowing your self very well is important. I knew all along that I was a below average person, and so I made extra efforts. At IIM B, I was ranked at the bottom of my class. I knew I wasn’t gifted as many of my batch mates were. I worked extremely hard to overcome my weaknesses.
Q: So what are the future plans of CL?
Satya: We are very excited with the opportunities and have big ambitions.
With IWSB, we have entered the higher education space, and we will add more streams in future. Liberal education is something on our minds but it needs deeper pockets. At IWSB we will start many new programmes. Right next year we might have one-year programme where we admit people with 4 year of work experience.
On the test prep side of our business, we will go wider and deeper. We will start new courses for areas like Chartered Accountancy, Civil Services Exam and more.
We have also gone ahead with vocational training programmes. This institute has been run as a pilot for many months now and is now stable. In the vocational training area, we will offer skill based courses in areas like Retail, Sales and Customer Services, Clinical Research and Legal Process Outsourcing.
We want to be present in all segments of education. We want to be an education behemoth!
