I started with a failure and that was learning for life: Aakash Chaudhry
Not all great stories begin with a bang, sometimes there are early setbacks, other times a bit of soul-searching, before the big picture begins to find semblance. Excerpts from an interview
Tell us about your background?
I did my entire schooling in Delhi and passed 12th from Delhi Public School, RK Puram. After finishing my schooling in Delhi, I did my engineering in computer sciences at MD University Rohtak. After finishing engineering, I joined the family business with the Aakash institute and also started my own venture in advertising and production. I saw this as an opportunity and I saw that as a company we were spending a lot of money on advertising and marketing, where I thought that to make the system more systematic and ensure our communication message is punchier, I could contribute to the creatives. This was kind of my first experience outside of education as a job and entrepreneurial experience but that did not last for a very long time because I chanced upon a bad client who defaulted on his payments. I was left with nothing and that was a great lesson for me at a very early age of seeing a massively successful business on one side being run and on the other side trying something new and failing at it.
You were not prepared for failure?
When you are starting, you are full of energy and lots of hopes and lots of success stories around and you tend to feel that you cannot fail and you know you have your credentials behind you and your education. You just do not think of failing but when it fails it’s a rude shock and you either accept it and give up or you want to introspect and find out what went wrong and what I could have done differently. And findings for me were that I was not prepared for the fundamentals of business-like finance, operation, HR, sales lead collections, execution strategies, and hiring the right kind of talent. So, I decided to look into furthering my education. I joined an executive program at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in Singapore. I really enjoyed the education but I also felt that I needed to do a full-time comprehensive program like an MBA for complete rounded thinking.
Did you do your MBA?
Yes, I did. I came back to India and I planned for some of the US universities and at the same time the Indian School of Business (ISB) at Hyderabad was also coming up as a great institution for management. So, I went through the entire process, took my GMATs, application process, interview, etc, and got through. That was one great learning experience and an MBA from a great college gives you a fantastic peer network for life as well as an understanding of business which I quickly realized I needed.
Campus placements?
Yes, they were and I sat for the campus process and got a job at Infosys in the Enterprise Solution Practise and was posted in Hyderabad. I spent a year in Infosys first in Hyderabad and later in Bangalore and I learned so much in the short stint I had at Infosys. It had 60k-70k employees and very well-defined systems. And the founders are not involved on a daily basis and how the whole organisation worked on autopilot and people were accountable. While in
Aakash it was one person calling the shots every day and for everything.
After a year, I joined Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) in Chennai. I could see a bit of start-up culture in that company and while it was completely a tech company it had its processes at the same time very agile to accommodate changing talent and market space.
What did you pick up from there?
I realised that Aakash ran on a completely centralised system of working where every decision was made at the head office. My father was running it as a single person so every decision was coming from his table and as a result, people would not own up. In places like Infosys and Cognizant, you know if your objectives are being met by a far more efficient method then you have the liberty to go and choose it. Empowering people is an efficient way to run the enterprise.
In 2005, I was planning to take off to Australia on a 4-year project from the company. My family was surprised that joining the family company was not top of mind for me. I told my father that we don’t exactly work well together which is when he offered me to go to a new location like Mumbai where Aakash would be a new brand and take on an Aakash franchise myself to set up business afresh in a new location. He told me that I would have to pay him royalty since I was going to use his brand name and expertise. I took up the venture but could not understand the lesson and value behind this ask of his. Very soon I realised that as a key learning for me and my first lesson that you can’t take good things for free in life and you can’t take it for granted as well, you have to value what has been built by somebody else and protect it.
And what did you do in Mumbai?
In the three years, I ran the franchise in Mumbai where I learned the essence and meaning of running a business. Things like how to manage the faculty members, marketing and sales staff, daily administration and how to manage the expectations of the customers. And once I was there, I could experience the gaps in the business that needed attention. There was a shortage of teachers, a shortage of trained staff to depute at outside locations. There was no proper technology in place so no real online systems, reporting, or lectures either. And when I came to Delhi, those same problems existed in Delhi branches but at a bigger proportion so we worked upon this and got ourselves online ready then itself. During Covid, in about 10 days, we saved the organization from going into complete darkness because we had about 9 years of experience of having our video content having our life tutoring platform, and teaching them for the last 7 years.
Did online penetrate the rural market?
Sadly, not as much as it should have. The government will play an important role in sorting this. As it is now, post Covid era, only 25% have access to online education in India. That number has to increase and the isolation has to be curtailed. But what Covid did was it tried to match the expectations and aspirations of students in remote areas all over the country and that number has gone up. Earlier the universe for rural students was a 10-km radius, not 10,000 kilometres. Today, with their online devices they can read what a Harvard professor is saying and what is going on at MIT. It has come a long way from being zero and I think what created the divide was that devices which are usually one per family became the education device in that family and all had to make do with that one device.
Do you expect a shake-out in the industry?
Ed-tech is a rising industry and seeing the opportunity people start offering services if they think they have the skill set. But time will eventually separate out good ones from the bad, as you have to offer quality and a differentiated product to stay in the game. Those who can’t maintain or continue to evolve will trickle out. I have attended a lot of conferences and I met founders of a bunch of Ed-tech companies and I see that they have created products without having taught them ever in their life. I feel you need to be part of the ecosystem to understand its needs to identify the problems to be solved or gaps to be filled. You need to be connected to your audience to be able to bring out a quality product and lead the curation of the core offering.
M&As are a given today?
Yes, if different synergies can complement each other for a better outcome, they will happen. With regards to Aakash and BYJU’s, we complement each other on the offline and online modes. We are the offline and hybrid provider and BYJU’s maintains the digital portfolio. BYJU’s leverages our test prep brand equity, track record, academic excellence and large offline local centres network. We have opened about 75+ new offline centres in India, and more than 25 in the South of India alone.
Aakash is a very strong brand for the Medical and IIT test prep offline space whereas BYJU’s value is known as a brand that is high on technology and strong in the K12 space. I think it made a lot more sense for us to join hands, and going forward a lot of these consolidations will happen with other players also where they would see either acquiring another player would give them a complementary capability that they could not themselves develop or they don’t want to do it because their brand stands for something else.
How do you retain faculty?
At Aakash, we built a system-centric model of teaching and not a teacher-centric business. This becomes a very important element and for us it becomes very important to be solved so that we can have a continuous supply of teachers with good caliber, ensuring there isn’t a shortage of teachers for our growth as well as current operations to deliver effective courses. In 2009, we started our first campus placement program and in the first year, we got about 200 candidates interested and excited to join us. These were top institutes like the IITs, NITs, IIITs, Agri Universities, and others. We got them here in Delhi, trained them for about 3 months, and then introduced them to our classrooms.
These newly minted teachers themselves had cleared these entrance exams, so they knew the rigor and since they had learned these subjects as a pure science in physics or chemistry or mathematics or botany, they were able to deliver the content very well.
We brought in our expert teachers and master trainers to give them the flavour of teaching.
In about 3 to 4 months, they were ready to enter the classes. Our teams would also go to other cities in India, camp there for 2-3 days and find candidates from local colleges and universities, shortlist them and then bring them to Delhi to train them. Finally, introduce them to our existing and new centres wherever we had an opening.
Did you ever teach?
Running our Mumbai franchise centre was the most important part of my business learning journey. I still remember that while I was there, after 2 days of the first set of classes of a newly formed maiden batch at my franchise, our Physics teacher left without giving any notice. So, I could not let the class go empty, I had to pull out the books and start making notes that I used to enter the class to keep students engaged for about 6 days. It is so surprising that before I took that class, I had a stage fear, and when you are in a situation like this you just have to go ahead and face it. After the first few nervous sets of classes I became so confident then that I continued it by doing seminars
and motivation sessions for students in schools. I started enjoying it and that stage fear absolutely vanished. I now thank the
teacher who left.
Has Ed-tech not turned the noble art of teaching into an industry?
It is a sector or place where you can’t get into over monetisation. You need to make that profit so that there is enough excitement to do it and there is an availability of enough resources for you to plough it back into the system to further improve it. The cycle has to go on because if you don’t make money on it then how do you put it back to solve the problem that you went out to solve. There has to be some profit or return on your efforts but if that becomes the core objective then there is a problem. Unfortunately, increasingly many people are jumping into this sector to create valuation models instead of business models or profit models, which in my mind is not the right object.