Sambhawami is the brain child of two individuals who met in the corporate world but were always excited about the world of academics. As people who were born before the digital era, we strongly believed in the good old-fashioned method of getting our fundamentals strong. No matter what be the medium of instruction, the tools used or the technology employed-the core idea is always to ensure that students get the basics right. And thus developed our motto- “Learn How to Learn”
The journey has been steep so far but so has our learning curve. When we jumped into the world of entrepreneurship, there was no guide book for us to follow. Despite being hard core professionals in our domain, the world of academics was an untrodden path. Thankfully, we had our guardian angels. With immense support from our family and close friends, we began to take one step at a time. We were determined to do it the hard way and take no short cuts and therefore today after almost a decade from when Sambhawami was born, we take pride in the purely organic growth that we have achieved.
When we first began our journey, our mentors told us that for every new enterprise, getting the first client is the biggest challenge and we could not have agreed more. It took us some time to get there. Parents are naturally concerned about their children’s future and gaining their trust was a difficult process. But eventually we did get our first student who for almost six months was the solitary student that Sambhawami had. However, we had our hands full. Researching about different boards, talking to school teachers, gaining their insights, talking to parents and understanding what they look for when they search for a coaching center, took up a lot of our time. There was no money to be received for our work but the knowledge we acquired was priceless. It was then that we decided to make the policy of building our inhouse study material program. We took help of qualified teachers and collaborated with academicians within our circle to create quality study material that was interesting and at the same time helpful. Going beyond text books became our next motto. We want students to be intelligent, not a repertoire of information collected and stored to be repeated on need.
Gradually our efforts began to pay off. Our first student recommended few more students and it wasn’t long before we reached break-even. We were delighted to achieve our first milestone. Our baby was now independent and we felt confident we were on the right track. Referrals and recommendations poured in and till date remain our best source of new student addition. Taking English and Mathematics as our core subjects we slowly began to add other subjects as demand dictated. We realized that at some point that we needed to migrate to the digital mode since there were students from other cities, eager to associate with us. Sometimes we had students from our own city who could not join us because they lived too far away from our center. While we knew that building a digital platform was an inevitable step to scale up our business, the inertia of daily operations kept us from taking the step.
Whatever is meant to be always happens and we realized this when we were plunged into one of the worst calamities of the century. Covid-19 ravaged the world like a monster and small businesses like ours were shoved into a world of dismay. With the entire country put into a lockdown the future of our business looked bleak. The ray of hope was taking classes online and we looked at the idea with reservations. Starting slowly, we learnt the ropes, made innovations and with the help of our students fine tuned the process. Opportunity came in the form of few cousins of our existing students who lived in other cities and even countries but were excited to join us. Today we are thrilled to say that we are as comfortable taking online classes as we were with our classroom teaching sessions.
In today’s age of rapid technological advancement and with the threat of Artificial Intelligence, popularly known as AI, looming over many jobs, we feel it is imperative for students to get their core ideas correct, their reasoning and logical skills honed and their interpersonal relationships strong. At Sambhawami we lay emphasis on these things more than anything else. It often happens that a student does not get full marks in school but has a much deeper level of understanding and insight about the subject than his/ her counterparts. We encourage parents to count that as an achievement because in the practical world what matters is real knowledge and not simply memorizing facts. However, the importance of marks and grades as a yardstick to measure a student’s performance cannot be denied. We have developed a mechanism, over the years, to ensure that students consistently score well in their tests and do not feel any anxiety over appearing for an exam.
It has been a decade since Sambhawami was first conceived and in the words of Robert Frost, we still have “miles to go”. The journey is overwhelming but at the same time uplifting-daunting yet rewarding. Leaving a corporate job was not an easy decision but today even in the face of our worst obstacles, we do not regret our decision. Sambhawami gives us a chance to look into the future and do our bit in making the next generation ready for it. Sambhawami is not just a coaching center or a tutorial. It is an institution where young and old minds come together and discover the joys of learning. At Sambhawami, we are all students-of Literature, of Mathematics, of Economics, of Political Science, of Finance and Marketing. Our students love us and the parents whom we love to think of as our business associates, support us in all our endeavors.
As we begin the next stage of our journey as entrepreneurs, we hope to build on our strengths and also work upon our weaknesses. Taking Sambhawami on the web helps us connect with more people and broaden our horizon. Knowledge is as vast as the ocean and Sambhawami is but a ship that enables us to journey through the undiscovered lands. May the journey never end!
