Patna: Himani Mishra has cracked a few glass ceilings. Not only has she worked with some of the country's top corporate houses in places such as Bangalore, she has also proven that with hard work and determination one can have a successful corporate career - and a flourishing startup - from Patna as well.
Himani (36), who has worked with Wipro, with Tata as a senior executive, and as vice-president with a Bangalore-based digital marketing venture, started her own digital marketing company, Brand Radiator, in Patna in May this year.
She has already clinched 12 projects, including one from Russia.
"I never thought that I would be getting such a good response in such a short span of time. Getting 12 projects in just around one month time, including an international project also from a real time bidding platform, really matters," she said.
She added: "People are talking about Digital India but when you speak about startups, they are only happening in bigger cities but the real India is in tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
"If you talk to people of tier-2 and tier-3 cities, very few people are aware of digital marketing. They say " ye hota kya hai? kyun hota hai (What is this? Why is this?) That's why I thought that if you don't bring this digital thing in the real India of tier-2 and tier-3 cities, the aim of Digital India won't be realised.
"Initially, a lot of negative things were told to us - such as our company won't survive - but all this has been proven false."
She is new to the field of digital marketing.
"I had got offer from Airtel but I declined the offer and joined a Bangalore-based digital marketing company as vice-president. I have done my engineering but my inclination was immensely towards business development and marketing. That's why I declined Airtel's offer and joined Bangalore's digital marketing company.
"But while working there I found many Biharis who went out of state to work are into digital marketing. The majority of those I interacted with would tell me that there was no platform in their home state so that they could do the same job in their own land. This is what motivated me to come back here and starting a digital marketing venture," she explained.
"Another reason for which I came back to Patna that my child was born and I had difficulty in managing my Patna home's affairs.
"So I came back and started venture over here. Shashidhar Ranjan, who is from Purnea and was working with me at the Bangalore company, is the co-founder of this venture," said Himani, mother of ten-and-a-half-year old Yash.
Himani did her BTech from the Indian Institute of Information and Technology in Calcutta, and she also has green belt qualification in six sigma from Motorola University, Singapore.
Shashidhar is a BTech degree holder in computer science from ICFAI University, Dehradun, and did his postgraduate diploma in management (business analytics) from Alliance University.
Himani said that she had got projects from varied clients, "including hospitals, educational institutions, web portal, and agro-product manufacturing company".
Thanks to the company bagging many projects, Himani is adding more people in her team.
"We started with16 people but today only we recruited five more people while tomorrow we are going to recruit two more people. Our team members include content developer, brand strategist, graphic designer, animators, website and app developer, search engine optimisation analyst, digital advertisement specialist ," she said.
