Narendra Barhate is an electronics and telecom engineer from COEP who followed it up with an M.Tech from IIT Bombay. He started his career with DRDO, where he worked for more than a decade. Not happy with his career in the government he left in 1994 to lay seeds to his entrepeneurial career. His father, who is a farmer, was puzzled as to why his lad left the security of a Class I Govt Gazetted officer post to jump into the fool-hardiness of business. In our society, there is very little respect for failure – and this discourages entrepreneurship. Why entrepreneurs, even bright engineers are not being attracted to startups. And on top of it, to get into teaching. Society still abides by the dictum – those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

Narendra started business, by first getting into fire-cracker sales with an investment of 1500. He managed to get a 100% return in a matter of month and was ready to get into business full time. He got an opportunity to teach Fortran to engineering students. The accident of teaching stuck on, as he thought he did a good job of it. 4 partners got together with a capital contribution of 25,000 each and started SEED Infotech – SEED standing for Software Engineering Education and Development. Trouble happened in the first year itself when one of the partners backed out. He was a guarantor for a 5 lakh loan that the company had taken – and the banks called in the loan when he quit the business. The remaining partners had to scramble for funds, but they just managed to scrape through.

The opportunity that SEED grabbed was a simple one – almost 90% of graduates in India are not employable. Off late the quality of coding being done by India has also started going down. Here is where SEED came in  – and till date they have trained about 300,000 grads to get jobs. Life was hunky-dory at SEED from 1994 till 1999 – double digit growth every year. In 2000, Narendra realized that the growth came primarily because as the IT tide rose, all boats that swam in that also rose. But when it fell in 2000, so did all the players. At that time SEED had a 110 employees. One of the things that Narendra took time to learn then is – firing. It took him some time to get the salary bill down – and in the meantime a lot of the company capital got eroded.

In 2006, Times of India picked up 10% equity in the company. Later they also got an investment of 7 m $ from a UK based fund. The big thing that investors bring to the table, apart from the investments, is their question-asking skills. Most of the times the questions are relevant and make the entrepreneur sit up.

What drives SEED? Narendra mentions that 70% of business in education is word-of-mouth. What drives word-of-mouth is the quality of teaching. He believes that most of his competition has run itself to ground, because of the overspending on advertising. SEED spends in marketing on social and digital media with value added events.

Recognizing this, SEED’s business model is to have all the centers owned by the company itself – they believe that franchisees will not be able to maintain faculty quality standards. Also having company owned centers ensures that systems and processes are consistent. The other Key success factor of course has been placement support. In fact most students don’t join SEED for the learning, they join the company course for the job.

About 10% of the workforce at SEED has been with the company for the last 10 years. Having said that, it is important to induct fresh blood into the system. It gets in fresh ideas. Also the challenge is to keep getting employees out of their comfort zones. Sensitizing the newcomers to the values of the organization is done by having them listen in directly to the founders talking about company ideology. (One lacuna which the company is trying to address is to make newcomers understand the consequences of not following the values of the company)

What does the future hold? SEED has grown to 40 locations, 600 employees (out of which 250 are trainers). Ambtions remains of paramount importance for an entrepreneur – and today Narendra’s vision is to outgrow NIIT, the only player ahead of them in the IT training space today, to become the number 1 in IT training in India.

SEED has started training on soft skills in addition to technical skills. Here they work in building self-esteem, self-confidence and communication skills of students. They have already gone in for backward intergration – with tie-ups in 70 colleges – so that students can be trained in campus – and SEED can help drive companies to campuses.

He also sees a shift in IT recruitment away from engineering to science graduates, and roles like data scientists taking on higher importance.

He sees SEED teachers doing less of teaching and more of facilitation in future. The onus of learning has to be more with learners now. 80-90% of learning happens outside classrooms – so why not shift classrooms to open air! Another trend he sees happening is online synchronous e-learning. 100% e-learning has not woked out – so what would be required would be blended models.

Apart from SEED, Narendra runs another company called Palash, which is into hospital management software. They have an ERP system which is running for about 150 hospitals – working on the Microsoft Platform

Narendra is a deeply spiritual person. He is a believer in nature and its curative effects – to the extent that he has not been taking any medicine for the last 4 years. He has been a follower of Vivekananda from his childhood days – and one of his current interest areas is stress management. Narendra believes that most stress management skills get built up in the first 7 years of our lives. He talks of how there are 3 parts in our brain – the reptilian, the mammalian and the human. Stress happens when the mammalian part of the brain hijacks the human brain by secreting cortisol and adrenalin. This leads to what is called the flight-or-fight syndrome. Your heart starts pounding – blood supply to the extremities increase and rational thinking takes a back-seat. The solution to such stressful situations is actually quite simple. When you oxygenate the amygdalla (the mammalian brain) enough – the cortisol-adernalin secretions stop. In simple language, all you need to do is to take 10 deep breaths – and that gets your rationality back, as the secretions stop. As Narendra likes to put it – in any problem situation it is not the resources that matter, it is the resourcefulness.