Vandana was born in London to Indian immigrant parents. She grew up being very interested in Marine Geography, but her very conventional dad have her 3 career choices: Doctor, Lawyer or Accountant. Vandana started off life as a radio jockey on a series of Asian radio stations, while she was at university. Her shows became an instant hit with Asian youth as she played popular Indian film music and discussed issues that affected young people. However, when one of the radio stations made heavy losses, she realised that she needed to understand how business worked. Dutiful daughter that she was – she went on to become a CA.

After her CA articleship, she worked with Ernst and Young in Bucharest,  Romania. She recalls realising there she had problems in her life when her brother pointed out that she was working more hours than him: as a junior doctor he was working 110 hours a week. On reflection, she realised the reason for her working crazy hours was because her staff were not trained and therefore were not working as effectively as they could be. She also realised that she enjoyed training them far more than doing accounts, M&A and audit work. She quit after a year and along with a colleague started to train students on the CA entrance. She wrote to BPP Guides – and asked them permission to use their guides to train her students. She got back a reply from them – you are free to use them, as long as you buy them legally.

It was a fairy-tale then on – students grew within a year to almost a thousand. The very intrigued BPP wanted to find out why an obscure Romanian distributor was suddenly ordering so much of stuff. The CEO of BPP plc talked to her – telling her that he wanted to come down to Romania to understand what was happening. He did – and made Vandana an offer to buy off her training operations – and simultaneously appoint her as CEO of their newly formed international division. At 27, Vandana thought that this was cool. So she ended up hitching on to the BPP Bandwagon.

Her first assignment was in Russia. The Russian market was tough – the law and order situation was even tougher. In 1998 the global economy collapsed – and BPP decided that they could no longer do business in Russia. She was then sent on to Poland. Thanks to some savvy networking, Vandana started getting corporate assignments from E&Y, Unilever and other British companies to train their employees on Finance basics. To cut a long story short – she ended up setting BPP Divisions in many more East European countries – making BPP happy enough to reward her with some handsome equity. A decade later, she decided to quit to venture out on her own. By then she had got married, started a family – and for some reason decided that her entrepreneurial career should be in India – a growing publishing market. Her husband, Dipak Poria is an IT professional. The goal was to make professional education available to the masses. In 2005, Vandana chose to move to India and in 2006 set up her own publishing and training company, Get Through Guides. Within 5 years of Vandana setting up GTG, GTG went on to become an accredited publisher – 1 of only 4 publishers accredited globally for the ACCA qualification. GTG was asked by the Insurance Institute of India to rewrite the Licentiate textbooks in 2010 and also has worked with the IRDA on producing the revised life-insurance textbook. Vandana’s future ambition include building career plans for students while they are studying so they have a clear idea of where they want to be and what they are aiming for.