Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you did a bunch of e-commerce systems at a couple of hundred thousand dollars a pop in the early days of the company. What’s the next major milestone? How long did it take you to get to a $100 million in revenue, for instance?

Faisal Husain: We started in mid-2001. We did about $400,000 in revenue. We reached the million dollar mark fairly quickly. In the third year, which was the second full year we had, we did about $2.8 million in revenue. Then we did $5.5 million. We grew extremely well in 2004. The next year, we did $14.4 million.

Sramana Mitra: All this was still in the same business model? You were still building e-commerce systems in a services mode?

Faisal Husain: No. The early projects happened to be e-commerce, but the core knowledge or specialization that we were building was around financial systems, such as real business-intensive trading order management, pricing risk, treasury management. Apart from the initial projects that launched us, we were able to quickly start building revenue in those financial systems. That’s what then drove our growth.

Sramana Mitra: It was not just e-commerce projects anymore. You were doing other kinds of systems as well.

Faisal Husain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Were there dominant verticals besides retail e-commerce? Finance, you said, is one.

Faisal Husain: From a vertical perspective, we are almost purely financial services, even from the beginning. The e-commerce work that we did was within financial services.

Sramana Mitra: I see.

Faisal Husain: It was not in retail. Our focus from day one has always been financial services. That’s really our defining train today. We are a very industry-focused company.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the strategic moves that you’ve made in that period between 2001 to 2006, or whatever time frame you want to cover? What were some of the strategic moves that helped you grow the way you did? It sounds like you experienced pretty fast growth.

Faisal Husain: We really are fortunate. Sometimes, I look back to see what we did. It sounds like nothing more than common sense. I don’t attribute it to any unusual strategy that we had. I would attribute it more to really strong execution. For us, the strategy was fairly simple. Execution is more important that strategy, assuming you have a decent strategy. Right in the beginning, we leveraged our personal contacts to solicit business. Right in the second year, we invested in some professional business development talent. After about nine months, that started to pay us dividends. I think that was one of the key things to get the growth, not only from the network that we had, but also to mine new relationships.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron
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