Building a $5M+ Digital Design Services Firm from Kolkata: Indus Net CEO Abhishek Rungta (Part 6)

Sramana: What have been your primary strategies for growth?

Abhishek Rungta: I did make a few good decisions. In 2009 I joined hands with a small company, and I ended up acquiring it. They were running a small .NET business but did not have a lot of work. I was able to provide them with work, but my terms were that I be allowed to run the management aspect so that I could ensure the quality of the work to my clients. That was an easy deal to make, it was a win-win scenario. That helped us maintain our growth even though things were not growing in other areas.

We also jumped on mobile computing very early. We built a very good mobile tool set and did a lot of projects. I found there was a lot of demand for mobile technologies, and I had coders who were very excited for work. The moment we started talking to clients about mobile applications the business started rolling in very quickly, which made our developers very happy. We relied on mobile development growth quite a bit, that is what pushed our company’s revenue.

Sramana: Did you do this work under your original company, or was it under the company you acquired?

Abhishek Rungta: This was done under the company that I acquired, which was run as a subsidiary.

Sramana: Where do you see the business going from here?

Abhishek Rungta: In the past three months I have done a complete review of our portfolio. I have come to realize that we have a great list of enterprise clients as well as a great number of agencies that have us do their work. We can now focus on expanding our growth by providing our existing enterprise clients with new development opportunities. For example, if we have had a client that has used us for a lot of work, we can offer to provide them our services for mobile platforms. I expect we will grow a lot just by doing that, and by continuing to provide for agencies.

Sramana: There appears to be a huge agency outsourcing business developing. Typically agencies do not have a lot of technical capabilities, so they have to outsource this work. This model with India is becoming big. I think your agency outsourcing business with the U.K. and the U.S. will be very big.

Abhishek Rungta: We have built subsidiaries in the U.K., the U.S. and Singapore. We did it as a corporate structure, whereas before we were simply a privately held company. We also founded an agency of our own. What concerns me today is that I don’t think we have optimized the growth areas we have already discovered. Instead of optimizing our past growth areas, we have continually found new ones. That is due to my personal nature of discovery. Somewhere I missed the ability to build a massive structure on the initial foundation that I built.

Sramana: Process is important, and when one is implemented it must be done in a granular detail. That is what will bring about a repeatable sales process, which allows you to scale a really large company.

Abhishek Rungta: This was never a problem with really small businesses. Client expectations are high and they want to pay less. At the end of the day, every project becomes a struggle. We are now trying to define the projects we want to do and ensure they are respectable projects. They need to have a solid budgetary backing. In the past we dealt with a lot of clients who just wanted a clone of an existing website like eBay. Those projects had no long-term goals or processes. I want to focus on projects that have real value to them.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a $5M+ Digital Design Services Firm from Kolkata: Indus Net CEO Abhishek Rungta
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