Ten years and 1,100 MBBS seats — what actually compounds in a chemistry classroom
A decade-long retrospective on the institute that began with a whiteboard, a stack of NCERT books, and the conviction that small batches taught well outperform big batches taught loudly.
Ten years ago I set up the first classroom of what would become The Phenol Institute — a whiteboard, a small bench of chemistry textbooks, eight students from Rajkot who had agreed to try a smaller class than what the city was used to. As the institute crosses its tenth year and the 1,100th MBBS placement, I want to share — honestly — what I have learned about what compounds across a decade in a working classroom, what doesn't, and the operating decisions that produced the results.
What compounds — alumni who become referrers
The single most powerful compounding mechanism in a coaching institute is the alumni network. A student who clears MBBS through The Phenol Institute typically refers two or three younger siblings, cousins or family friends over the next five years. Over a decade, that compounding gets large. We have never spent meaningfully on outdoor advertising or aggressive marketing campaigns; we have not needed to. The alumni network does the work. The institute's first ten students each became, in expectation, eight or nine future enrolments through the chain of referrals.
The implication for institute design is clear: every batch matters not just for its own results, but for the next decade of referrals it will or won't produce. A mediocre year of teaching does not just cost the current cohort their scores. It costs the institute the entire downstream chain of referrals that cohort would have generated. The compounding cuts both ways. The discipline of treating every batch as if the next decade depends on it is exactly the operating discipline a long-horizon institute needs.
What compounds — the institutional knowledge of the test bank
The second compounding asset is the internal test bank. Every year, the institute creates and refines its own weekly chemistry tests — calibrated to the NEET and JEE patterns, organised by chapter, with calibrated difficulty levels. After ten years, that test bank contains tens of thousands of questions, organised, categorised, peer-reviewed by the faculty bench, and refined every year based on what the actual NEET and JEE papers have asked.
A first-year coaching institute does not have this asset. It cannot have it. It can only build it one year at a time. The institute that survives long enough to build a decade-deep test bank has a tangible operating advantage over the institute that opened last June. That advantage is invisible in marketing brochures and very visible in student outcomes.
What does not compound — the founder's reputation, by itself
An honest counter-point: the founder's reputation alone does not compound the way many institute brochures imply. CSIR-NET AIR-1 was a real result in 2015. It opened the institute's first three years. It does not, by itself, justify the institute's reputation in 2026. What the institute has become over a decade is the result of operating discipline applied to thousands of students, not of one credential carried forward. The trap many coaching institutes fall into is to over-rely on the founder's headline credential and under-invest in the operating system. By year five, the under-invested institute starts visibly underperforming the over-invested one. By year ten, the gap is decisive.
What does not compound — flashy marketing
Coaching institutes that spend heavily on aggressive marketing — billboards, newspaper supplements, social media buys — get a first-year enrolment bump that does not translate into a decade of compounding. The reason is structural: marketing-driven enrolment selects for families who responded to marketing, not for families who selected the institute on the basis of teaching reputation. Both kinds of enrolment generate revenue. Only one kind generates referrals. After three years, the marketing-driven institute is paying ever-increasing acquisition costs to maintain enrolment, while the referral-driven institute is filling batches with families who arrived already convinced.
We have spent more on faculty time and test material than on marketing every single year. The cumulative effect over a decade is the institute's current shape — a small operating budget, a strong alumni-driven enrolment, and a teaching faculty paid well enough to stay for the long run.
What does not compound — chasing every new exam category
Over the decade, I was approached perhaps twenty times to expand into adjacent exam categories — physics, biology, English-language entrance prep, civil-services chemistry, GRE, GMAT, IB / IGCSE prep. Each expansion would have generated short-term revenue. None of them would have compounded the chemistry teaching identity the institute is built on. We declined all of them. The institute teaches one subject — chemistry — for a focused set of exams. The discipline of saying no to adjacent revenue is exactly what protected the focus that the chemistry teaching depends on.
Five operating decisions that shaped the decade
One — keep batch sizes capped at a level where the founder personally knows every student by name. The cap moves the institute's growth trajectory from a fast straight line to a slow compounding curve, but the slow curve produces every other compounding asset.
Two — invest in the QC of teaching the same way a regulated industry invests in audit-grade documentation. Weekly tests, calibrated answer keys, faculty-bench peer review of difficult topics, mistake logs maintained by every student. The discipline is unglamorous and it is exactly the part that compounds.
Three — keep tuition affordable enough that a middle-class Saurashtra family can enrol without mortgaging the household. The economics of a Tier-2 city institute genuinely support this; the discipline is to maintain it as the institute scales.
Four — publish lectures free on YouTube. The fear of cannibalising paid enrolment was real and unfounded. The reach into students who would never enrol in any case is enormous and the brand gravity of free chemistry compounds the paid classroom enrolment, not the reverse.
Five — stay in Rajkot. The decision to not relocate to Ahmedabad or Mumbai or to chase a multi-city expansion has cost the institute prestige in some markets. It has cost nothing in the student outcomes that actually matter. Saurashtra deserves an institute built for it; that institute exists; expansion would dilute it.
What the next decade looks like
Continuing exactly the work that produced the first decade. The same chemistry, the same test discipline, the same small batches, the same open mentorship desk, the same free YouTube channel. Some incremental investments — a deeper post-graduate / CSIR-NET track, more bilingual material for Gujarati-medium aspirants, perhaps a dedicated repeater-year programme with structured residential elements. But the headline operating model does not change, because the model is what compounds. The temptation to "transform" an institute that is working is the surest way to break it. The discipline of letting the working model continue working — for another decade — is the discipline this work needs.
Got a question on what you've just read — or about preparing for NEET, JEE, GUJCET or CSIR-NET? Write directly to the institute.
First-generation Chemistry educator. M.Sc., Ph.D., CSIR-NET AIR-1. Founder and Director of The Phenol Institute, Rajkot — 1,100+ MBBS placements over ten years of NEET, JEE, GUJCET and Board chemistry coaching.