From India to the U.S. to Calgary: A journey of love and money

Devesh Dwivedi has had a long career in business that started in India and continued in the United States. But it was love not money that persuaded him to move to Canada, where he’s now passing on the lessons in entrepreneurship he’s learned throughout his career.

Dwivedi was born in Varanasi, a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Both his parents were bankers, and though they wanted their son to become an engineer, Dwivedi’s entrepreneurial spirit showed early when was just 14.

A huge fan of comic books, Dwivedi collected and collected “to a point where I had two garages full of comic books in my house.”

His family, concerned with his spending, cut off Dwivedi’s allowance, forcing him to find a creative way to make some money.

Dwivedi, who attended an English private school, remembers, noticing during a lunch break“kids ... going to the library and taking books from the library.”

That sparked his business idea: “I was like, I have so many comic books, what if I could rent these to these guys (and) charge a fee?”

Dwivedi recruited friends to help build the inventory of his comic book library.

The group started its business with nothing but a personalized rubber stamp to indicate that the comic books belonged to them.

The library was immediately popular, but the group quickly ran in to problems.

“Nobody came back to return the books!” Dwivedi says.

The business shut down a mere three months after it had opened, when the problem got so bad that it was brought to the attention of Dwivedi’s school principal.

The failure didn’t discourage Dwivedi from pursuing business. Instead, it pushed him forward.

“That kind of failure, you know, gives you a drive to do better,” he says.

Dwivedi decided to take a break from business to finish high school, and then attending university in India to get a bachelor of commerce, majoring in accounting.

While in university, Dwivedi started a marketing and event management company that he was able to sell after two years.

Following his time at university, Dwivedi began wondering if he should stay in India. Encouraged by the experiences and stories of his school’s alumnus, Dwivedi decided to go to the United States to get his MBA.

He applied to many schools and eventually chose to attend the State University of New York, where he was offered a partial scholarship.

“The initial struggle was fairly emotional, more related to (a) sense of belonging,” he says.

He missed his family, missed his home, and felt that a lot of his life in his new country revolved around university and studying.

As he became more involved in his school community, though, he eventually began to feel more welcome.

During his time in New York, he worked many jobs around campus; he did fundraising for the university and worked in the school’s cafeteria and small business development centre.

The centre, which is a partnership between state government and universities to support local businesses, is where Dwivedi believes the consulting bug first bit him.

He says he got the same “excitement and fulfilment” in helping others start their own business as he got starting his own.

“I could see them succeed with their business and that was enough fulfilment for me,” he says.

After graduating, Dwivedi stayed in the United States for a few years, working with a number of different companies. He would later draw on those experiences when he moved into consulting, teaching, coaching and writing.

What ultimately drew him out of America and into Canada, though, was something completely removed from his work.

“I moved here for love,” he says. Dwivedi had met his now-wife, Anisha Dwivedi, in Toronto and the two dated long-distance before he decided to leave the U.S. and join her and her family.

The two have been together for seven years, and will soon celebrate the sixth anniversary of their wedding, which almost never happened.

“He would always be the most serious person I had ever seen,” Anisha says of her husband. “So, when he proposed to me I was like, ‘ You know what? You are just too boring, you are always about business.’”

Dwivedi eventually found a way to win her over and the two are now raising their two-year old son Adi in Calgary.

Dwivedi now works primarily as a business consultant, personal and business coach, teacher and public speaker. He has written two books in his career: Two Sentence Business Plan and Breaking The 9 to 5 Jail.

His clients come from a variety of different industries and backgrounds: some of them immigrants and others Canadian-born.

As for his future, Dwivedi plans to keep consulting, and is currently in the early stages of working on a new project inspired by his experience writing books; it’s an interactive course to help entrepreneurs.

He adds that he has no regrets about the path he’s chosen: “Every experience that I’ve gone through I’ve loved it; I have used it as a learning experience.”