Isha Jaiswal’s entrepreneurial and unshakeable spirit has taken her on a whirlwind journey. She started her business at the age of twenty-one with a small startup, a fashion brand named Glamitz, with an investment as low as three hundred rupees.

It started with an Instagram page, gaining over more than twelve thousand followers and later grew it in the form of a website.

Communicating with people, marketing and selling the products, and working on customers’ feedback were the highlights of the work and motivated her to perform better each day.

There were many barriers, too, that she has faced in this journey. While talking about the challenges in her path, Isha said, “Everything was going great when in May 2017, in a ransomware attack my Instagram account and website got hacked.

The big turn in my entrepreneurial journey. How would you feel when the fruits of your hard labor are taken away by some random faceless person sitting behind the anonymity of the technology within a fraction of seconds? And that you know you have no control over your data anymore?” 

But as they say, there is always more to life, and an entrepreneur is first a manager, and one can never be a good manager if he/she doesn’t know the art of crisis management! Learning from the incident, she stood up stronger and moved ahead on her journey.

After being approached by a College Professor to start a product based IT company, she served as a Director on her second startup venture.

Working on her project ‘Profeonet,’ an online platform for Engineering, Management, and Science Fraternity helped her improve and dwell upon networking. Post this, her work experience on project ‘Hiring99’ provided an insight into how a cycle is achieved in business.

Following her principle of getting things done for a positive outcome no matter what the consequences were throughout the journey, she has been a public speaker and GD-PI trainer for the underprivileged to make them interview ready.

Impressed by her entrepreneurial ventures, she was invited thrice as a guest lecturer at Dr. Ambedkar College, Nagpur, to deliver a lecture on Startups and Entrepreneurship to MBA students and ignite the spark of entrepreneurship in the students. This was the time when she got the first taste of how exciting an MBA life can be.

The struggles of running a private limited firm and meeting investors, which included big names of the business world, gave her a glimpse of how investor funding works. After pitching her projects to many big venture capitalists, she faced many rejections.

The two common questions that she encountered were: first, “Which IIT/IIM have you graduated from?” and second, “Where have you worked before and for how long?” These questions made her realize the importance of networking, working with profitable brands, and, most importantly, how having a reputed institute name that backs your work is incredibly valuable.

After a lot of struggle, she decided to get back to studies, bridge the knowledge gap in specific domains to run a business successfully, and pursue an MBA.

The long hours were grueling, but Isha was no stranger to putting in the time and effort. She cleared CAT and attended interviews for the fourteen IIMs that she was shortlisted for. The hard work paid off as she successfully converted five of them. “It was such an elevating feeling; I was grateful and full of excitement,” she recalled.

After weighing the odds and thorough research, she made her final, informed decision to study at IIM Rohtak. It fit the bill for Isha perfectly, being both a prestigious institute and one where her entrepreneurial frame of mind could flourish.

She believes that pursuing a Master of Business Administration will boost her career, broaden the horizon, and strengthen the holistic approach, not just in her entrepreneurial journey but also in life.

In her own words, she said, “I had finally hit the most enriching turn of my career. That one turn of my life!”

Current status? It is Isha Jaiswal, IIM Rohtak, Batch of 2020-22.

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