Before getting into Data Science Training, Mrs. Pratibha Singh who hails from Jehanabad district of Bihar, had worked in one of India’s top 10 CA firms in their Bangalore office and is a Tax & Accounting professional with over 15 years of experience. Post marriage into a conservative family in Odisha she had taken a break from work for almost 5 years due to time constraints.

During such time she had started teaching commerce subjects to CA students in a nearby institute. Once the kids grew up, she founded two start-ups in Accounts & Tax Consulting (one in 2018 – Utkal Accounts Tax Consulting Pvt. Ltd. – focusing on providing quality and timely compliance services to small & micro enterprises at affordable cost so that, compliance does not become a burden on them. Second in 2020 – Valueserv Consulting Pvt. Ltd. – it was formed to focus on providing the best support services along with accounting as well as compliance to Start-up Companies), which are presently in operation and are being managed by other partners. Her Companies have supported many start-ups during their growing phase especially to get funding by supporting in completing the accounting documentation, updating secretarial records, supporting in facing due diligence exercises by investors. Most cases have charged bare minimum fees or no charge basis.  She is now devoting her entire time to Dhibrahm Analytics, which is imparting professional training and consulting in Data Analytics.

Origins or Initial Steps

Her getting into business was by chance or say by force. As a middle-class Indian woman, Mrs. Pratibha Singh was trying to balance family responsibilities and at the same time wanted to remain connected to her profession. In pre-Covid era, she could not find a job which allowed her to do both without compromising on either side. Hence, she decided to start the accounts and tax consulting firm with support from her friends and family members.

She had set up the office near her home from where could easily look after her two daughters and also could attend to clients. During Covid, she even moved the office to the terrace floor of her apartment building by renting out a 600 SFT space from the building association which allowed her to work without moving out of her own building. Switching her career from accounts and tax consulting to managing a data analytics training centre was due to the insistence of a family friend who ran an analytics training centre, where she was consultant for accounts and tax compliances. The friend was always worried about running the business smoothly with continuous growth in more admissions and revenue. He was more particularly worried about non-conversions of the leads generated from social media. The friend requested her to check if she could review and monitor the performance of his sales team on an experimental basis. Apart from accounts, she started giving a few hours to review the sales team’s work and could see that there was no set processes in place, there was no clarity on any team members’ roles & responsibilities,  everyone’s roles were overlapping with someone or other. Slowly she got a deeper understanding as to why the conversion rate was so low, worked on the same, and with continuous efforts helped the Company increase its revenue from Rs. 23 million in 2021-22 to more than Rs. 150 million in 2022-23. In this process, by the end of 2022-23, slowly on her own interest, she got into other important operation processes and took over one by one to streamline them and increase productivity with customer satisfaction. Due to certain reasons, Mrs. Pratibha Singh had to leave the Company and by that time she was personally attached and emotionally connected to more than 500 trainees. She was the only person in the Company who used to listen to anyone who has some issues and was genuinely trying to resolve their issues. When she left the Friend’s Company there was a huge vacuum which could never be filled. Most trainees missed her and slowly started coming to her home and requested her to start her own Data Analytics Company and keep helping students as she used to do in her earlier role. This made her Cofound Dhibrahm Analytics with her husband Mr. Dhirendra Kumar Dhal and his friend Mr. Swagat Jhankar Patra, both of whom are practising Chartered Accountants. With vast experience of above 20 years in the field of auditing and advisory services, both Dhirendra and Swagat have developed deep industry connects at senior level in many corporates. Their expertise in handling corporate relationship helps Dhibrahm Analytics in a great way to get connected to industries for hiring of trained candidates and also get analytics projects.

Noteworthy Trends and Developments

The global economy has been reeling under the pressure of inflation and various other geopolitical issues for the last two or three years. 2023 was better than expected. Hope things to be eased by mid of 2024 and again the world economy will get into growth mode. India now stands as the 5th largest Economy in the world above Britain and France. She expects the growth in India to be above the average growth rate of other nations. Further, being connected to the education industry, she feels that it is going through a lot of changes and becoming more focused on skill-based learning which makes the learners industry ready immediately after the learning period. 

Another trend that she feels is noteworthy, is increasing financial literacy among youth from semi-urban and rural belts. They have started participating in the capital market either through Equity Mutual Funds or Direct Equity Shares. 

The third noteworthy trend is generation of huge amount of data by various business houses like retail stores, e-commerce platforms, financial institutions (like banks, insurance companies, NBFCs), OTTs, healthcare companies, telecom companies, websites etc. With generation of such large volume of data, there is increased use of data analytics by business houses to get meaningful insights from such data to make informed business decisions. Hence, Mrs, Pratibha Singh feels there will be requirement for a lot of properly trained data science professionals especially in data analysis, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Seeing the industry trends, at her Dhibrahm Analytics, she has the prime goal to make any graduate industry ready data scientist or data analyst by training them on the relevant and currently in-demand analytics technologies along with cloud computing and project management tools. They also train the candidates to improve the English communication skills wherever required.

Success Strategies in Business

The strategies or approaches that she has been employing to achieve success in the business endeavours are as follows-

• Complete transparency with everyone we deal with 
• Understanding the current trends of the industry and changing our business model
• Continuously upgrading our course curriculum to match the current needs of the industry
• Personalised attention to each trainee
• Going the extra mile wherever required to support our trainees to fulfil the objective
• Instant and innovative mentorship program where a trainee can reach out to his assigned mentor anytime
• Handholding of all trainees till they get a placement

Personal Journey of Resilience as well as Success

During Covid, Mrs. Pratibha Singh saw many small bricks-and-mortar businesses fail to withstand the financial burden for long and were forced close down. She also had to write off a lot of receivables from such small businesses. Then decided to start Valueserv in Aug 2020 to diversify the client base focusing on IT Startups which helped to continue the cash flow, in fact increase the cash flow. She proudly says that, they had no salary cuts or retrenchment of the employees during any of the Covid phases from neither Utkal Accounts & Tax Consulting nor from Valueserv Consulting Private Limited. Further in 2023 beginning when she got separated from her friend’s Company there was a lot of financial burden and she had faced lot of personal difficulties due to the same friend. Still, with lot of courage and hope started Dhibrahm Analytics taking care of most of the processes by herself.

Essential Leadership Qualities in Today’s Competitive Business

Mrs. Pratibha Singh believes in leadership by example, giving freedom of expression and rewarding hard work. She thinks we need to be agile in adapting to changes. This will help in better decision making and withstand the turbulences in business effectively.

A Commitment to Responsible Business Practices

The company’s approach to ethical business practices as well as sustainability initiatives are-

• Being transparent in dealings with all
• Complying with applicable regulations
• Sustainable pricing strategy
• Operating at low cost without compromising on quality
• Sharing of Equity with key people
• Continuous innovation in service offerings

Key Challenges and Opportunities in Today’s Landscape

Challenges:

Overall economic scenario, where few new projects get launched, affects the job market and delays the hiring processes. Also, lot of competition from well-known as well as not-so-known institutes.

Opportunities:

At Dhibrahm Analytics, they feel when there is huge competition, they make significant efforts to stand out to be recognised among many. They need to do the extra things that make their candidates visible among 1000s of candidates in the job portals and also by the recruiters. They have included certain project management and cloud computing tools that enable their candidates to be completely industry-ready when they complete their studies. Further, personalised attention from founders is given in shaping the resume, linkedin profile, naukri profile of each candidate. Each candidate’s profile is tailormade to look different and unique. Further, they take care to include subjects that are not covered by any competitors.  

Navigating Industry Trends for Competitive Agility

By continuously discussing with our team of industry experts about the new practices that are being implemented across industries. By researching the current job postings and the skill sets required for the relevant jobs and upgrading the course contents as per the new skillsets required by the industry. Collaborating with relevant industry partners as well as global certifying agencies for hiring and certification.

Career Milestone That Shaped Professional Journey

During her tenure at Utkal Consulting and Valueserv, she had shaped the career of more than 40 commerce graduates especially from rural areas. After completing their graduation degrees,  they were clueless about further career path. They joined her with no practical knowledge and few even without a commerce degree. However, she used to train them patiently to make them industry ready and slowly they get absorbed by industry with good salary. During such training time also, they used to be paid salary enough to sustain them a living in Bangalore. 

After switching her career to the management of a data science institute, Mrs. Pratibha Singh grew her friend’s company’s revenue by 6 times within a year. It was a 12-year-old institute and was able to make certain revenue which grew 6-fold in one year. Similarly by God’s grace, within 7 months of starting her own institute in bootstrap model, she could scale up the business to hit a revenue of 10 million rupees in a dull market. 

Guidance for Aspiring Leaders

The Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs as well as business leaders based on their experiences 

• Always have fire in the belly to achieve your goal.
• Do what is in trend now.
• Spend judiciously and have a robust revenue model.

Long-term Goals as well as Visions for Business

To be the preferred partner for all education-related services starting from skill-based training in various sectors to academic coaching for various classes in the next 5 years. To start a skill-based training model where we can provide training free of cost to a certain number of eligible candidates every month as well as bring positive changes in their lives by enabling them to get a job.