Human touch

OUR BIG IDEA

Monisha Advani and Madhu Bhojwani have grown up together like Siamese twins. Surrounded by the affluent, their middle-class backgrounds made them feel like they were born on the wrong side of the tracks and they wanted to bridge the gap.

So when Advani suggested starting a human resource services firm, Bhojwani jumped on. Today Emmay HR has branches across India and a turnover above Rs 6 crore.

The wonder years

Bhojwani: I was born and brought up in Mumbai. My parents are typical Sindhis who migrated to Mumbai post partition. My father worked at a refugee camp and struggled to make a living.

He eventually used relative connections abroad and worked there to provide for the family. I met Monisha in school and the Advani family took me under their wing.

Advani: My father worked hard to provide the bread and butter, while my mother started her own ad agency to provide the jam. I love to say that ours is a polyester-to-pure wool story.

As a child I've always questioned information and I don't think I can live with a conformist structure. After junior college I took up a liberal arts course in mid-western US, but decided that I couldn't finish it and came back.

Entrepreneurial spirit

Advani: As kids we would take chocolates gifted to us by foreign-returned relatives to the grocery store to sell and earn money, instead of eating them. I also started giving tuitions to earn extra cash.

Once, I noticed as we were entering a plane that some people were embarking from the front "" it was the club class. I promised myself I would afford that one day.

Bhojwani: I've always liked the idea of building something. I've seen my parents struggle and the disparity between us and the rest of our relatives.

So when Monisha returned to India in 1989 and came up with the idea of starting a company to counsel students who wanted to study abroad, I took it up without any questions. So we started Emmay Consultancy from her mother's office. I worked for a salary but later became an equal partner.

Reading the market

Advani: I realised the counseling business would not grow in scale. The Internet and competition was creeping in. I left the business for Madhu to run, decided to take a sabbatical and arbitrarily picked Hong Kong as a holiday destination. I got a job offer with an HR firm.

After the first two days of being a head hunter, I almost quit. So they changed my profile to recruitment processes. It was a good learning ground but when the firm "" Executive Access "" decided to send me to Delhi to set up shop, I left because I had a strong network to do the same.

Bhojwani: At the time we were charging each of our students Rs 20,000, so that was a lot of money to walk away from. But I've always trusted Monisha's instinct and it's never failed me. She drew up the blueprint and I implemented.

New beginnings

Advani: On my return, I got job offers from companies including Sony TV. But I decided to do my own thing. We took a Rs 3 lakh loan from a bank. For the first two months there was no work at all. It so happened that a friend who was with British Airways called me to meet the head.

We got chatting and he mentioned that they wanted to hire 50 people. I asked to see the business plan, studied it and offered an alternative plan. He was impressed and offered the contract of hiring 1,000 people to us.

I almost turned it down because I felt we wouldn't be able to handle it. He offered us an advance and all I could think of was paying back the loan.

Bhojwani: That was our big break and business started picking up slowly.

Expanding dreams

Advani: Though we initially worked with the BPO sector, we consciously looked at other sectors too. Today our mix is made up of BPO, commercial aviation, technology, banking and financial services.

Bhojwani: We work well together because she has the vision and I'm good at the implementation. The idea at the end of the day is wealth creation, something that goes beyond just the two of us.