Story of CA Saksham Agarwal, a Chartered Accountant turned Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is a path that’s quite less trodden upon!

And there are even fewer individuals who would tread this path after having the letters CA attached to their name.

This is the incredible story of a Chartered Accountant-turned-Entrepreneur, CA Saksham Agarwal!

Hey!

I am CA Saksham Agarwal!

I am the founder and Managing Director of Jobaaj.com

And this is the story of how I became an entrepreneur.

Being fortunate to have come from an education-centric family, I achieved my International Baccalaureate Diploma in 2013.

Just like all my friends I wanted to go & study abroad back then but my dad suggested a professional degree in Accounting & Finance, and I still remember his exact words “let your friends do what they want but there can be no better degree than that of a CA” (though he is also a Chartered Accountant 😅).

That’s how I started my journey as a CA student in 2014.

I didn’t have any prior accounting knowledge or practice, (IB diplomas don’t usually cover accounting subjects).

So it was quite a challenge in the beginning.

I breezed through the IPCC exams and cleared both groups in the first attempt.

It was also during this time that I had started to feel the entrepreneurial spirit burning through me.

And so it was during my CA preparation that I launched my first startup with my brother in 2015. It was a merchandise/fashion brand named Veshmoda.

After IPCC, I pursued an articleship with PWC Mumbai in the audit division.

Here I again felt the disadvantage of not having a strong grasp of accounting. I felt that I wasn’t giving my 100% with my articleship due to my accounting drawback. So after 9 months of articleship with PWC, I joined ASA & Associates.

Here, I entered at the root level to practice debit and credit accounting on Tally which helped me develop my accounting skills, and moreover, it helped in understanding the journey of a transaction to balance sheet which was lacking earlier.

However, I hit a hurdle in 2018 when my CA Final result was put on hold.

I prepared and gave exams for both groups. However, because of some documentation problem, my result was put on hold and I had to give the exams the next year again.

It was then that I learned that not having proper documentation could cost a lot. In my case, it was a lost year.

However I powered through and then in 2019, I achieved the All India Highest score in the SFM CA final. I was done with my CA course and had attested those 2 esteemed letters prefixes with my name.

After becoming a CA, I felt that I have accomplished something greater than I ever had done. The entrepreneurial spirit raged inside of me.

At that moment I had two options, one was to go for an MBA abroad & then start with business (just like my elder brother) or to start with business right away.

By then I had also become the Chairman Trustee of Eshan Group of Institutions (it was an inheritance from my father).

There I felt that no degree can match the exposure/learnings which running a startup can provide.

I finally launched Jobaaj.com in June 2019. (my most successful startup till now)

Jobaaj.com was supposed to be my solution to the nationwide problem of unemployment.

In my years of study, articleship and work, I realized that even though there was an abundance of opportunity in the job market yet proper training and development was lacking somewhere.

I believe that I was able to solve this problem to a good extent with Jobaaj & Jobaaj Learnings, and that’s the second biggest achievement that I am proud of.

In October 2019, I also launched ProCapitas (the finance/research arm of Jobaaj.com) with my brother.

Being a CA turned entrepreneur, I have been able to conceptualize things like startups on a primal scale.

Not only that, launching these startups and portals and managing them day and night has made me a far better individual than I was ever before.

It has enhanced me emotionally, intellectually, and mentally!

And the ability to make a positive difference with something that I created has been the best feeling in the world.

Apart from being a Managing Director and a Chairman Trustee, I am also a passionate investor and a boxer.

I have been involved with the stock market since 2018 and have also achieved several SEBI certifications. Apart from that, I have also been training professionally in boxing since June 2019.

As an individual, I try to embrace the different activities that I am passionate about and I always try to be better at them.

It’s always a joy to learn new things.

I am also going to pursue the CFA exam in 2022.

So fingers crossed!

Source:- https://stories.jobaaj.com/story-of-ca-saksham-agarwal-a-chartered-accountant-turned-entrepreneur/