At 28, Jani is a director at the SCA Group of Companies, the firm her great-grandfather founded in 1896. “Currently, I am the link between the board of the family business and the professionals in the various companies of the family business,” she explains. The SCA Group has companies in the businesses of inventory management, supply chain technology, cargo handling and warehousing, having sold Blue Dart’s courier services to DHL in 2004, and eventually, i3pl may join this stable of enterprises. “In ten years, this venture might be part of the family business as we continue to grow and scale it up,” Jani comments. “I will not take it public, because there are a lot of confidentiality issues attached to working with large corporates and being their strategic partner in the supply chain.”
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| “I felt that the huge Indian diaspora in the US contributed so much to the American economy and yet had a very little impact on Indo-US relations, treaties and business agreements. I had absolutely no connections in the business or political areas in the US, so I consider this to be a real achievement.” - ABHI SHAH |
Abhi Shah: Starting a new family tree
28 year old Abhi Shah, founder and CEO of the ClutchGroup (www.clutchgroup.com), grew up in an entrepreneurial setting but was free of expectations that he would inherit or build the family enterprise. “My dad is a graduate of IIT Mumbai who moved back to India when I was two years old and started a company called Electrotherm, which manufactured large industrial furnaces for metals,” he says. “It was the largest company in this area in India, and after the FIPB regulations in India were relaxed, he sold the company. My mom runs an English and public speaking institute, so I had no empire to inherit.”
Shah’s family was determined that he make it on his own to such an extent that he began learning sales at a time when most of his contemporaries were still in school. “My parents wanted me to be independent and learn to fend for myself at a very early age, so after high school they didn’t give me a dime for my undergraduate studies in the US,” he explains. “I sold bibles for 80 hours a week in the sweltering heat of Alabama to save for my tuition fees, and that was my first step into becoming an entrepreneur. I felt that if a 16 year old from a different faith could sell bibles to conservative American households, I could do anything that I set my eyes on.
at was when I started to think big.”
Shah earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in marketing from Texas A&M University, graduating at the top of his class, and then was a sales star at Compaq Computer and Thomas Nelson, Inc. in the US before joining Accenture as a Senior Consultant. In his private time, he co-founded the US India Business Alliance (USIBA) to promote investment and trade between the US and India and started the Future Leaders Council of the US India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), the largest organization representing Indian American issues in Washington. “That was my second experience in starting something from scratch and growing it to a huge scale,” he comments. “I felt that the huge Indian diaspora in the US contributed so much to the American economy and yet had a very little impact on Indo-US relations, treaties and business agreements. I had absolutely no connections in the business or political areas in the US, so I consider this to be a real achievement.”
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| "I was always responsible from an early age and love leading from the front, my venture has given me the chance to do that. Other than providing me guidance and support like any parents would, my family has stayed away from my venture." - BHAIRAVI JANI |
Shah’s internship project was helping Rao sell MphasiS (a leading outsourcing firm) to EDS. Working with the law firm that served MphasiS got Shah interested in the legal services sector. “I knew that the execution of an idea, not just having a great idea, leads to creating a successful growth venture, so I decided to do a study with Harvard Law School for two months once I knew I wanted to enter the legal services space,” he recalls. “At the end of it, I knew this was the sector I wanted to enter and I believed it would scale up pretty soon. The legal services business in the world is $250 billion, and the US and UK account for 95% of the total spend.”
In 2006, Shah returned to India and launched a company to provide world-class legal services at competitive rates through a network of professionals in the US and India. “India and the US share the legacy of the British legal system and a huge number of English speaking lawyers come from India,” he says. “However, professionals like lawyers are wary of working in your typical BPO Company, so I decided to build a company with paralegals and lawyers based out of the US and India. In the US, we have consultants on our rolls that do not want to work in typical law firms and are happy working 40 hours/week with us. In all, we have 300 qualified professionals in our offices in New York, Washington DC and Bangalore, working for a variety of Fortune 500 companies and over 40 of the 100 biggest American law firms.”
Shah is confident that he has found the right sector and the right business model to grow a giant enterprise. “I always wanted to build a world class company on a global scale and I always thought that thinking small is a crime,” he remarks. “I want my company to achieve critical mass and become a billion dollar company in five years. In 18 months, we’ve scaled up very rapidly and I am confident of achieving our target. I love the challenge of bringing together the best professionals in this industry and working with them. I’ve also been able to seamlessly build and operate this company across two countries and use the advantages of being based in both.”
Although he is the child of entrepreneurs, Shah has mostly benefited from the moral backing of his family and their approval of his appetite for risk. “My dad is my biggest cheerleader, but other than that, there is no family involvement in the venture,” he says. In turn, Shah doesn’t expect the ClutchGroup to become a family business that he passes on to his children. “In four years, I would like the company to go public, and after that I would like to go into public service via politics,” he says. “Building a global company will give me the credibility, financial freedom, and network of incredible people to do what my heart is after and pursue my ultimate ambition, getting into public service.” However, Shah expects to give his children active assistance if they want to become entrepreneurs. “Since I’ve been to a business school and have started my company from scratch with no resources from the family, I will be able to provide direct operational guidance to my children if they decide to start their own ventures,” he says.
Sarvesh Shahra, Bhairavi Jani, and Abhi Shah are all using a family heritage of entrepreneurship to pursue their own entrepreneurial dreams instead of rising up through the management ranks of a family enterprise. Each has started a company that is distinctively different from what their parents launched, and each benefits in a different way from his or her parental relationships. However, their separate experiences suggest that the descendants of yesterday’s entrepreneurs will have a large part to play in the entrepreneurial revolution that is defining the Indian economy of tomorrow.
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