Our beginning
Integra was founded in 2004 by 4 of us - Ganesh, Ram, Aravind and me. I was then working as an IT Consultant in the UK and Ganesh as a Marketing director in the USA. Ram & Aravind were running an Internet café in India. We got together and planned to start our outsourcing venture. It was agreed that Ram & Aravind would look after the operations side of things from India. Ganesh and I would manage the sales and marketing from the USA and the UK respectively.
We started off with a small office in Coimbatore, India with just 2 employees. With dark alleys, untidy desks and not so great neighbours, our office looked more like a dubious car dealer’s office than an accounting outsourcing company aspiring for global clients. But we had to start somewhere, right?
Some wealthy investors actually offered to invest in our business venture. But, we did not take their offer, because we wanted to grow organically and with our founding principle intact.
Our founding principle
Our founding principle is taking the “fear” out of outsourcing.
How did we arrive at that? Well, Outsourcing was becoming a huge phenomenon in India from the mid 90’s. But in the early years it was only available to large multinational corporations. Even the outsourcing suppliers in India were solely focussing on serving them.
Small and medium businesses in the west could not really afford to outsource and when they tried, they were mostly turned away. For a few businesses that tried to find their way through, it was becoming a frustrating and fearful experience with no real personal care and attention.
We wanted to address this void and make outsourcing a happy and successful journey for our clients and do it with absolutely no fear. That is, taking the “fear” out of outsourcing.
Our early years
It wasn’t easy in the early years. I was holding on to my day job, but Ganesh had resigned his and we started to get a few clients for bookkeeping. It wasn't a lot of orders, but just enough to keep us going. We were building the knowledge pool and had a fantastic core team that was ready to put in long hours. We were also learning to market, run the business and it was hard work. It required lots of persistence and motivation.
But as they say, our hard work paid off quickly and we started to get more clients. We just could not continue anymore with our small office. We set about moving to a bigger office. Again, we could have gone with an outside investor, but we didn’t. We invested all our savings, used our local help and moved to our new bigger office.
Bigger office and further growth
By then, having left my day job, I had become a fulltime businessman. I had also started to steer our sales and marketing functions. As soon as we moved to the bigger office, we started getting more clients, thanks to the glowing references and testimonials by our previous clients. The new clients were both businesses and accountancy firms. Many of our clients were start-ups and small business. And a few of them were large corporations. We started establishing processes and tighter controls to ensure the 100% security, quality of service and timely delivery.
All the while, we steadily grew and with about 60 people our office was operating at full capacity and we could not accommodate any more projects. To support our further growth, we started another branch a little away from our head office. Apart from accounting, we have additional services including customer service outsourcing and IT.
Currently we have 200+ employees and we operate out of two modern offices with world-class facilities and fool-proof security standards. Our teams are comfortably managed by multi-talented team leaders and project managers. We have come a long way from the dodgy dark alley office frequented by two of our fellow founders to where we are now.
Though we have grown quickly from our humble beginnings, we have kept our founding principle intact. That is taking the “fear “out of outsourcing.
Sincerely,Rajesh Velayuthasamy
Founder director
Integra Global Solutions
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