Learning The Tricks Of The Trade Harshil Gala, Director, eSense Learning feels now it's his part to play in the education revolution initiated by his grandfather.

Being a third generation entrepreneur in the Navneet family, Harshil Gala returned to India after completing his education in the UK in 2010. He developed the eLearning wing of Navneet named "eSense Learning" and launched TOPScorer.com promoting Audio-Visual as a learning style. His work has helped eSense reach 2500+ schools, 10 Lakh+ students with the help of more than 50 thousand minutes of content library.

Towards The Top

For Hashil, joining the family business was always the end goal. After doing his masters in marketing from Nottingham University, he worked with Dosti group and an ad agency called saints and warriors before joining eSense learning, a Navneet subsidiary. Talking about his interest in the digital learning space, Harshil shares, "Looking at the Digital step Navneet was taking it was the right time for me to join the family business."

Harhsil joined the company in 2011 at the age of 23. When he joined, the turnover of the digital arm was 1 crore. He joined the ranks as a management trainee, moved to be a sales executive, a sales manager, and then a marketing manager and now leads it as the director and head of marketing. Harshil became a part of the team and worked at the ground level with his team mates, today he listen to all team members and works on solution to the problems with them.

Though it is very difficult to get changes in a family run company for the young ones, Harshil was lucky because of working in a start up within Navneet, so it was relatively easy to bring changes and execute his ideas into the business. "This way I had the chance to prove my formulas and show my elders that there can be a different way to work in today's day and age," resonates Harshil. Sharing the nuggets of wisdom his father shared while joining the family business, Harshil remembers, "At my age, he told me to put in extra hours and learn all areas of a company. Since all departments are equally important, so
becoming a master in all is very critical."

Currently eSense's turnover is 25 cr. out of which, 75 per cent comes from content revenue. Focusing on state board schools and CBSE schools, eSense is a market leader in Maharashtra and Gujarat with over 300 employees. At present, eSense has over 2500 schools using its software in the classrooms and it has trained over 50,000 teachers on how to use eLearning. Talking about its USP, Harshil says, "We have launched our online website and are the only ones to have all our offerings in an offline version as well." The team of content and technology always keep a track on marketing trends, thus developing at a great pace to always stay ahead of the market.

This article first appeared in the Indian edition of Entrepreneur magazine (June 2016 Issue).