Here’s the situation: it’s the year 2000 and Azhar Hameed started up a young company called Etilize, put its signboard on the wall and opens its doors for business. Sajid Hamid soon opened the company’s Karachi office and a short while after that, they were almost bankrupt. Today, Etilize is worth more than a billion dollars with more than 200 customers and 300 people. With operations based out of Pakistan and offices in the US, Canada and Europe, here’s how the company reinvented itself!
When the dotcom buzz was at its peak in the mid 1990’s, Sajid was working a 9-to-5 job in the US. “There was so much data available. All kinds of it. Data about everything was being researched and used by everyone, yet there was no standardization in the way it was presented.” The present Resident Director of Etilize is referring to the huge market of content aggregation. As the Internet hype continued to grow, companies quickly expanded their online web presence, cataloging hundreds of thousands of available products so end customers would be able to search for what they wanted and make an immediate transaction. And all of this was happening without ever having the customer leave his or her desk.
Etilize was formed to bridge a gap between companies and their consumers. Companies needed powerful solutions that would be able to mine through their product data, verify its integrity, standardize it and catalog it so people could find it. “Azhar realized very early on that the demand for aggregating this content would be huge. So we got into the business of providing product information management solutions to companies interested in selling their products on line” says Sajid.
When Azhar established Etilize, he looked to Sajid to work with him in the expansion plans. “We always wanted to return to Pakistan and work here and this seemed like a possible opportunity.” Even then, the young team considered other markets where they could set up their operations. “We researched other opportunities to compare it to the situation we already knew about Pakistan. If you remove the political instability factor, Pakistan was always the best choice for our business model. We have access to a large population and skilled talent pool that learns very quickly which is what we needed.”
The company was comparing countries such as UAE, Vietnam and Bangladesh amongst others. “What the deciding factor was the fact that we belonged in Pakistan. And we wanted to grow Pakistan with us.” And it has. Information that isn’t organized and cannot be ‘pulled’ into a central location online is useless for a company. “We bring that organization and standardization to the data and help them manage it more effectively” explains Sajid.
When Etilize kicked off its operations in Karachi with 18 people, Azhar and Sajid quickly realized that cataloging the monumental amount of data in Excel sheets was not going to cut it. They needed to develop something bigger and more powerful. “What we really needed was to develop a Product Information Management System. Something that could help us to clean the data and feed it in, which could then update or synch with a company’s inventory online – that’s what people need real-time access to” continues the Director. “And that’s why we needed to develop to a team that could do just that. After millions of lines of code and numerous tweaks, today our Product services more than 250 of our clients.” Today, Etilize is the second leading provider of products and services in its space in terms of market share.
BPO in Pakistan
The BPO (Business Process Outsource) bug bit Pakistan in the late part of 1990 and everyone jumped at Medical Transcription and Call Center opportunities. Because of elements such as a large population, strong English language skills and geographically central location, Pakistan has been able to maintain some sort of presence in the regular acquisition of BPO projects however, Etilize was one of the first web-centric companies to set up their back end operations in Karachi. While the US office was looking for clients, the Karachi office was buzzing with work. “Few people in the country understood what we were doing. They knew we had something to do with content because our logo said so, but beyond that, there was obviously little else for us to do here but develop the product we needed.”
Considering Web-based commerce is still quite a challenge, only a handful of local companies have actually been able to engage in online commerce – and even then, they’re really small. “When we talk of product information management, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of products that need to meet specific rules and parameters in order to bring the company any benefit.”
Etilize has built a profitable business aggregating product information from thousands of vendors in the IT, CE, AIDC and Office Products industries, and supplying this as ecommerce-ready web content to distributors and resellers. In fact, our database has content on over 2100 manufacturers. Due to subject matter expertise, world wide distribution relationships, economies of scale and offshore cost advantages, Etilize is able to provide a solution which minimizes customer’s costs by eliminating operational expenses such as catalog maintenance and allocation of database administrators. “We essentially allow companies like Ingram Micro, Apple, Staples or OfficeDepot, to outsource their online cataloging so they can focus on what they do best.”
BPO is a way for companies to optimize their operations and increase their productivity. “Efficiency. We are in the business of allowing some of the world’s largest retailers and distributors to sell without worrying about the technical aspects of the solution. We take care of all that for them.”
What makes this company so different than the others that have been striving to work on a similar model? “The key for growth in our organization” starts Sajid, “is our supply scalability. Whereas traditional BPOs suffer lack of growth because of a lack of demand, that is not the case with us.” The key to growing at such a pace has been their ability to scale their organization very quickly. Despite the increased demand, Etilize had a very different hiring policy to manage its people. “We hired a lot of people, but then also realized that we were being inefficient in a number of areas. That’s when we learned that it didn’t matter how many people you had, rather how much work they produced which made the impact on the bottom line.”
You rate the success of any company by assessing how much it has grown over the years. Etilize jumped from being a 2-person organization to more than 300 people. Starting out with no customers, it now has more than 300 customers today including the big names such as WalMart, Apple and Ingram-Micro. But the question we kept asking was the same that most people are thinking: the companies that Etlize is servicing are industry monsters. If Pakistan has such a bad image in the international media, how are they allowing their data to be ‘handled’ in Pakistan? Isn’t that a challenge in itself?
BPO works best when you have a smart people working with you. The companies that outsource their “business process” to you, do so because they want to focus on growth. “That’s why that first client was so critical. Our US office was marketing to so many companies and even though everyone was impressed, everyone said that they were not comfortable in awarding projects to a company without a track record.” Companies want to know if you will be able to competently and professionally manage the work. They also need to be absolutely sure that you will be able to deliver on time. It’s actually a lot easier to pitch for work if companies know that you have an operational or developer presence in Pakistan.” And more than anything, Sajid emphasizes on a point that still hasn’t been marketed positively in the international community: the population, the skill set and the ability to pick up a foreign language such as English, and speak it without as their own. “There is just so much media highlighting everything political going on, the elements that will enable Pakistani companies to acquire more work from the global market get lost in all the noise.”
“It is also important to realize that BPO allows us to handle data and not have to store it. We’re managing the data which makes it risk-free from any offline threat that may arise in an unforeseen circumstance.”
In addition to the track record, companies in Pakistan haven’t been able to convince the international markets that they are adept at disaster recovery. When the November 2007 fire happened in Caesar’s Towers, Karachi’s Software Technology Park, Etilize managed to move their entire office and have operations back online at full capacity within 36 hours. “We have a Disaster Recovery plan and a Business Continuity Plan in place” comments Sajid. And because everyone knew what they had to do in order to initiate the plan, the transfer of operations was seamless.
Perhaps these are the kinds of stories that would help demonstrate the fact that the private sector companies are rather self sufficient when it comes to maintaining their business… even in Pakistan.
Etilize has Arrived
So if Pakistan is a good place to get the job done, why did Etilize struggle so much in its initial years? “When we opened up offices in Karachi, we were doing mostly development work. The company was just too young to be able to generate any substantial leads. That’s what I had mentioned earlier – we didn’t have the track record at the time” explains Sajid. Working in the US obviously has a lot more expenses attached to it than setting up presence and hiring people in Pakistan. “Since we weren’t generating any revenue, our savings were depleting.”
Times were tough, but the brothers maintained their faith at the line of work they were investing in. “The Internet is the biggest thing to every happen to the world. There were very challenging times but we were always hopeful.
Sajid recalls that the top management was meeting regularly to considering shutting down operations altogether. “We were focusing on how to break the news to our meager staff that we had failed. I had a speech all written up where we had decided to give a one month salary and let everyone go.” All set to deliver this sermon at 9am the next morning, at 8pm an evening earlier, Sajid got the call that turned everything around. Ingram Micro’s head of operations had called and said the golden words: “We like what you’ve presented. Congratulations. You’ve got the job. We’ll send you the cheque in 2 weeks.” The value of the contract was close to half-a-million dollars, but the prestige the brandname would add to Etilize, was invaluable.
“We celebrated the success in the only way we knew – we worked like crazy!” laughs Sajid. After struggling for such a long time, Etilize finally arrived.
One Vision. One Mission.
When Etilize started, there were, of course, a lot of other players leading the way in the content aggregation vertical. “We looked at their models and did everything they didn’t do. Our objective is quite clear: we want to be a very successful company but also be accessible to our clients and our people.”
After Ingram Micro, Etilize was on its way. Their objective remained focused from the very beginning: to become the world’s number one company, sitting right here in Pakistan. “We never deviated from this vision despite having our mission almost taken off track in the beginning.” It was perhaps a childish question on my part, but I still wanted to find out: why was it so important for Etilize to be number one in the world? “
“We want to be the best company there is because once we achieve it, and we will do so very soon, it will open the floodgates for other Pakistani companies to get the acknowledgement they deserve” explains Sajid. It doesn’t take much to take a look around at the global industry and see few Pakistani companies having made their mark. Perhaps Sajid is really onto something in trying to use Etilize to initiate a trend. “It’s all about a track record. Once a single Pakistani company can establish their presence in the international market the way we hope to, you’ll see the difference yourself.” Sajid’s team has already made the leap of faith – now they’re just waiting to land.
What do these guys think the secret to their successful growth has been? Is there really that much work available out there? “The key for growth in our organization” starts Sajid, “is our supply scalability. Whereas traditional BPOs may suffer a lack of growth because of a lack of demand, that is not the case with us.” The company has been experience a demand far greater than the number of products and services and has scaled their growth accordingly. “The key to growing at such a pace has been our ability to scale our organization very quickly. Within the first 2 years of starting our Karachi office, we went from 20 to 180 people.” While most companies in the ITeS sector would consider that to be a risk of grandeur proportions, Etilize has the knack for getting the business to match its growth – or, as they say, the growth to match its business demand.
“You need to know more than your customer knows. You need to know more than your competition knows about the entire market.” A seasoned communicator, Sajid thinks back to the time when the company made a shift from learning about the customer, to learning about the industry to better serve the customer. “As an information service provider, it is our responsibility to know more about the vertical, complementing sectors and industry, upcoming changes and everything else that is ongoing in market. We talk to the bottom of the pyramid to find out how strong the foundations of an idea are – in order to be a leading company, you need to one step ahead of your customer. And all this information gathering allows us to be proactive. Several years ago, we made a conscious shift to learn more about the industry vertical that we would be working in.”
The Change
For the past 3 years, recalls Sajid, “we looked at our growth pattern and saw that we were ready.” Ready to make the shift from managing the company to changing the strategy to move to the number one spot in the vertical. “For this, we needed to make a few changes – hire fresh people who could give fresh and innovative ideas and contribute towards the company’s success.” And then 6 months ago, Sajid and the top management realized that if their vision was to be realized by 2015, they needed to change the pattern they were working in.
“We were losing innovation. And that’s always a bad sign. We were still on track to realizing our vision but we felt that the company needed a change in its management. Something that would rekindle its passion again. To give you an example, in our weekly internal meetings, whatever the board of management would discuss would be pretty much the same. No conflict and no resolve. You can’t have the kind of growth we need if everyone always agrees with one another!” he says. With so much going wrong in Pakistan, Etilize needed to reinvent itself. “Removing ourselves from the front and allowing the youngsters who drove the company to play a more prominent role seemed to be inline with our instincts.”
And so, Sajid and the rest of the management made a change and decentralized the company’s operations.
“My father always says, ‘Don’t hold something back because change always happens. If you own something and hold onto it too tight, it will never grow. If you want to it to grow and become better, let others take care of it and maintain accountability. Put your trust and confidence in people around you. And so Team Etilize runs the company and ensures that it is delivering what it promises to. “Our job is to mature a position, find someone to fill it, train him and then move on. The top management needs to move the company. Everyone else needs to run it. That’s the change we’ve made.
Sajid reiterates that you need to be able to generate objectives that can guide the progress of the company. “Align them and achieve them – then repeat the whole process. Research, align and achieve. Our success rate for achieving the objectives we set for ourselves, is 97% which puts into perspective the fact that the decision we made, was correct.”
There is no “I” in Team
Sajid’s team doesn’t exactly share the mundane ‘employee’ mentality you so commonly come across in companies. “We want every person that works here, to want to work here. That is very important to us. We want everyone on this team to give their 150% but also realize that we need to support them to achieve that goal.”
The culture at Etilize means business – but in the way you’d imagine business to be fun. “Until and unless everyone doesn’t feel like they belong here and share the same vision, they won’t be able to make an impact.” That’s why everyone at Etilize is accountable. “The KK” explains Pervaiz Ali Khan, the Chief Operating Officer at Etilize, “or Khulee Kacheyri (Open Court) system applies here where anyone who wants to ask someone else to justify a decision or purchase, can do so. It helps us to have an open atmosphere here.” The company also believes in giving back to the community. “Some our guys want to train kids in their respective communities to set up networks or deploy some kind of solution. They come back with very innovative ideas that we would have never even thought about.” Pervaiz is actually talking about a young team member named Umair who set up a voluntary network in his community and conducting trainings for his friends and people in his apartment complex.
“Everyone has a sense of social responsibility – we’re just providing them with a means to benefit more people.” Investing in every individual on the team gives the company a direction and allows them to come together on a common platform down the road to a brilliant future. It seems like this culture doesn’t fit well in the real world – How does Pervaiz sahib manage to balance the real world with what is practiced within the walls of the company? “It will take time, but the fact that each of us has a passion to change the world, the change happens one person at a time. Each time one person here benefits, that benefit is multiplied into their community also.”
Pervaiz explains the shift the company recently made to trends such as Rewards for Results, where any person who managed to achieve a goal, would receive a reward for it. “Obviously we all have a passion to work but the work needs compensation. Everyone works for a salary, but we’d like to employ the feeling of something beyond that. You get a salary, but you get more if you manage to do more. This model has worked quite effectively.”
If you take a look at the history of Outsourcing as far as the hierarchy is concerned, a lot of evolution has come about in the way communication takes place. “We had to train and produce Delivery Managers. These are the guys that ensure that there is ample communication on timelines and deadlines so that the work can be delivered on time.” While talking about capacity building, Pervaiz points out the long lifecycle of training a colleague in any department and the greatest challenge associated with it. “There is a long and rigorous training process. Usually our people are so well groomed by the time we are done with the training process, the challenge we face then, is a common one – since there is such a shortage of trained manpower in the industry, we train them, and other companies take them away. This is a constant challenge that we struggle with.”
