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Quest Tutorials and its enviable success rate

Quest Tutorials and its enviable success rate

They met at IIT Roorkee and never thought they would one day end up being partners in their quest for knowledge. While Gaurav Mittal graduated to IIM Lucknow followed by a stint at an advertising agency, J Walter Thompson and Zensar Technologies, Praveen Tyagi moved to the US and worked with Oracle but dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur.

After brainstorming for months, Praveen decided education was his forte and India was his calling. He drew up a business plan to get into the tutorial business and brought an apprehensive Gaurav on board and that is how Quest Tutorials was born. Four years into the business of coaching and training IIT aspirants, Quest has an enviable success rate.

where there are a lot of small as well as large players, they have been pretty confident and have devised a business model and strategy, that has set them apart from the clutter. Gaurav Mittal told CNBC-TV18, “There are a lot of players in the market today, but there are a very few, who actually appeared to be thriving and passionate about winning again and again. We started with the confidence that we will crack it - let us start doing it and we will figure it out. The plans just kept developing as we went along.”

Their first student came up to them with a lot of expectation. Although, they come from a background where they had never taught before but they somehow managed. “We needed three teachers and here we were just two guys. I am good in Maths and Chemistry, so I taught him both,” adds Praveen.

They then developed a personal marketing team, which involved making bigger decisions so parents were kept informed. Further explaining the incremental growth, Gaurav explains, “We trained people to be counsellors and extended that counselling service, to reach out to our prospective students in their homes. We sent out people to give complete information, not just on our programme but also on engineering as a career.” Hence, it became an entire career-counseling-at-home service. This is how they reached out to a lot of people and the numbers started churning in. Through

word of mouth and their quality of service, people flocked in.

A mathematics whiz, Praveen still takes out time to teach students. What started with Rs 5 lakhs as initial capital, is now being roughly valued at over Rs 9 crore. Having trained over 3,000 students, of which 100 have made it to the IITs. Quest is now planning to go pan-India and is looking at setting up institutes in Bangalore and Pune by next year.

But do they have enough funds? “We are looking at venture capitalists, but we’re definitely not looking at what is known as dump money from people, who are not going to put their mind into it. We don’t want to go thinking money is everything, money will follow,” avers Gaurav. By next year, they are looking at eight more centres in Delhi and in some other states too.

They are also looking at breaking out of the IIT market into the MBA market, which Gaurav believes will happen in the logical progression of things ie. 2-3

years down the line. He further adds, “We also need to expand the team for that and we need to get the right kind of people with the right set of skills. It will go in that direction but not immediately.”

Life for Praveen and Gaurav has always meant striking out on their own and aiming at excellence. While growing their business is priority, Quest is targeting underprivileged IIT aspirants, with an innovative scheme called ‘Super 30′.

These two are sure doing their bit for the underprivileged, with or without the reservations issue, dictating terms to them. They are quietly chipping away at their targets and pocketing glory, which is all in a days work for this duo.

Source : http://news.moneycontrol.com/

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