Story of a village boy from UP who made his way towards IIT BHU and built a Rs 28 crore entity

Continuous brooding over fate will not offer you a platter of solutions. Learn to define your own destiny and tread path accordingly. Being raised in a farmer’s family in Dankaur, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, Anil Nagar since childhood believed in self-created destiny and decided to prepare for IIT JEE exam. Due to lack of guidance on how to crack the exam he enrolled himself in a coaching centre. His hard work paid off and he cleared the exam in 1998 and pursued his BTech (electronics and communications) at IIT BHU.

After having spent a long stint in the corporate world – working with Jaypee Group, Liqvid (Online education), ITM University, and Cognizant Technology Solutions – Anil, Founder, quit his job in 2010 to start a testing preparation venture Career Power along with his friend Saurabh Bansal, Co-founder. The initial investment was Rs 1 lakh pooled in by the founders.

Career Power is an organisation that is engaged in training students for government jobs and entrance exams in India. Today, the company boasts of with more than 70 physical training centres across India and claims to be the first company to launch online test preparations platform sscadda.com and bankersadda.com.

Anil, 37, says,

bankersadda.com, a product of the same mother brand, is the most visited website by the aspirants with average daily hits crossing one million besides sscadda.com, which witnessed two million users last year.”

Anil also pursued his MBA from Goa Institute of Management. Saurabh, 32, is a finance graduate from college of Business Studies, Delhi University, and a master in finance from Delhi University. He gained 10 years of extensive experience working with KIPCO Group’s consulting arm, ICRA, and Yes Bank.

A flashback

Career Power primarily started with classroom-based coaching centre, with its first branch in Delhi. Anil recalls that 26 out of 32 students in the first batch were selected for various jobs. Lack of funding posed a huge challenge for them when it came to expand the business, which decelerated the pace of initial growth. However, it helped them gain better control over both growth and value of money.

Saurabh avers,

Our focussed approach and rigorous programmes help students in giving their best performance in these competitive exams. Regular assignments, tests, quizzes keep our students on the toes throughout their exam preparation.”

Career Power currently has more than 700 employees, out of which more than 300 are teachers.

Courses

Career Power caters to two main exams – Bank Exams and SSC Exams. With its online tests series for banks and SSC exams, students can self-assess their preparation along with their detailed analysis. The content team, which comprises subject matter experts, translators, and typists, always work on updating content as per the changing patterns of exams, preparing books, mock tests, and assignments.

Bankersadda.com offers study materials on quantitative aptitude, reasoning aptitude, English language, daily words list (vocabulary), computer, marketing, banking and static GK. SSCAdda.com offers quantitative aptitude, English language, general studies, general intelligence, and railway notes. Career Power charges Rs 10,000 for regular classroom courses.

In the next two to three years, Career Power plans to strengthen the product offerings with CTET (Central Teacher Eligibility Test), Railways, NDA (National Defence Academy), and CDS.

Anil says,

Generally, profit margins for offline classroom coaching are in the range of 25–26 per cent, while online business gives margins in excess of 50 per cent.”

Gaining numbers

Career Power has trained approximately 28,000 students in FY 2015, out of which 16,000 students are from classroom programme and 12,000 students from online programme. It aims to train more than 1 lakh students by FY 2016 (50,000 students in classroom programme and 50,000 students in online programme).

In recently concluded exams, about 1,200 candidates got selected in IBPS PO and IBPS Clerk (recruitment process of 2014–15) and more than 1,000 students have been selected in SBI PO (Pre) 2015. The startup plans to add 30 more branches and train more than 60,000 students in classroom programmes.

Currently, the branches of Career Power are spread across Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Patna, Ranchi, Kolkata, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and more. The startup plans to focus more on South India and Western India and open 30 more branches in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur, Truchi, Vizag and more by 2016.

YourStory take

Over the last couple of years, online test preparation market has become a promising sector for startups to embark in backed by the growing usage of smartphone and significant traction of students. Even big coaching institutes like Career Launcher and TIME have turned online with the test preparation modules. Moreover, the likes of Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, Khan Academy have broken the conventional mode of learning. Toppr, Embibe, Online Tyaari, EntrancePrime, Cracku, and CrunchPrep GRE are few of the startup.

The online test prep industry is valued at $8 billion in India and over $80 billion globally. Moreover, this space has witnessed a spate of investor activity with top venture capital firms validating their growth potential. Bengaluru-based Vedantu raised $5 million from Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management, Toppr raised Rs 65 crore for expansion in May, OnlineTyaari raised Rs 5 crore from both angel and VC investors.

However, Delhi-based Career Power appeared to avoid taking the most feasible route of funding. Moreover, with more than 70 physical training centres, it is growing parallel in both online and offline. The company has maintained a steady growth by being bootstrapped for the last five years. It has witnessed revenue of Rs. 28 crore in FY 2014–15 and for FY 2015–16, it is expecting a revenue of Rs 30 crore.

Anil says “We have grown by 200 per cent over last year in terms of our offline business, while growth in online is expected to be approx 500 per cent.”

In terms of product offerings, the startup will soon offer videos, live classes, online doubt clearing, online interactive books and more through web and mobile applications.

Career Power