Awe-inspiring Coloum

ON THE CONTRARY

The one-person global company

How many people do you need to run a successful global business? One, actually

LAST week I spent some time with a gent who runs a company in Mumbai that sells software to customers around the world. I had invested in them years ago, and for one reason or another we couldn't catch up much in the middle, except to share notes on email.

Things were going well. He was not huge by global standards - about $250,000 in revenues, slated to double this year. Customers in more than 30 countries. Over 500,000 people around the world who'd tried his product. Over 5,000 of them who had paid for it and who use it. A well-known brand in its field.

The business was profitable. He reckons he is world No.3 in his niche. His product was acclaimed worldwide, reviewed by PC Magazine and such. All in all, it was a pretty good record - having survived through the worst downturns in the market, and still making it. And we were talking of how he'd done it.

It wasn't that he was a coding or technical genius. The gent is actually a biology grad, and to my knowledge, can't write code. But he's always known what he wanted - and has figured out some inventive ways to get things done.

The truly amazing thing is this: he runs the company with a full-time staff of two people, including a peon. His only other employee is a 12th class-pass girl who basically handles all the admin, follow-up and back-end work.

This was of such wonder to me that what was meant to be a 30-minute meeting stretched out well past six hours. I dug deep into how he manages stuff. Turns out he never actually aimed for it to be this way. He had a big staff - at one point, as he said, more than a dozen people. And he had tried every traditional way of running a company and marketing his wares.

But simply, the time to break into the market and the typical attitude of Indian governmental buyers ("Will you kick back 20 per cent to us?") put him off. He was forced to this extreme of leanness more by circumstances than by choice. And he was beginning to revel in it.

I asked him how he got stuff done - and to me it was a rediscovery of globalisation. He has a spiffy-looking website; and he said he had tried numerous Indian web designers but didn't get the finesse he needed. So he went online and found a designer in Canada - a girl he paid some $300, for three hours of work - who did the overall look and feel right. He then contacted someone locally to build the site based on her designs. (This is the second time in the last month I'm seeing Indian web-design needs being outsourced to someone in North America. In each case, someone who took the decision picked perceived quality over low price.)

It went further. His entire product development was outsourced - to someone in Pune he paid top dollar or, as it turns out, Rs 1,000 an hour. This, he felt, gave him the same quality of work he used to earlier contract out to programmers in Ukraine and Bulgaria, where the first versions of his products were produced for about the same price. Again, all of this was online - he never could afford to call overseas.

He had a newer version of the product coming out - and was particular that it needed great icons in its user interface. He took me through a long deal he was doing on the boards of freelancer-haven elance.com, with an icon artist who, on the fifth iteration, had gotten the icons to a point where our man was not unhappy. This deal was entirely conducted online too.

Everything was wired. His credit card processor wired the money to him. He paid Google and other places he advertised on using his credit card. (His major issue was that his card company never raised his credit limit though he was doing five times that value of business.) Everything was wired - and lean.

Except perhaps his online connectivity where he has, for insurance, three providers - two as back-up. One indulgence, in my book, but hey, given that all his business depends on it, it's understandable. We'll see more such 'lone shark' businesses, which'll turn all traditional notions of 'needing an A-team' upside down.