Before you start your entrepreneurship journey, make sure you validate your reason and motivation for doing so. If you are convinced that you are doing this for the right reasons, whatever it may be, you shall be able to take on whatever comes your way.

—Saurabh Gupta, founder of Gyan-I Inc.

The name of Saurabh Gupta’s company, Gyan-I, means “knowledgeable one” in Hindi. Having always wanted to be his own boss, Saurabh’s entrepreneurship journey began when he came across an opportunity while working for a very large charitable foundation called Daniels Fund. Daniels Fund is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and is dedicated to providing grants, scholarship programs, and ethics education in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. As vice president of IT, Saurabh oversaw the end-to-end management of the organization’s entire IT infrastructure. This included vendor negotiations, department budgeting, project planning, and execution. Daniels Fund manages assets of more than 1 billion dollars, but Saurabh realized that smaller, less wealthy nonprofit organizations faced similar IT issues and technological challenges. He identified a real unmet need: IT services for nonprofit organizations that did not have the infrastructure or money to support a full-time IT staff. Saurabh felt that meeting this need would fit perfectly with his skillset and experience and would be a good way to finally fulfill his dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

Though he toyed with the idea of starting Gyan-I Inc. for years, he could only take the leap after he received his U.S. green card in 2011. The CEO of Daniels Fund was supportive of Saurabh’s decision to start his own company and was also his first customer! His former CEO continues to be his mentor and a pillar of support today.

Gyan-I Inc. provides technology consulting and managed IT services primarily for nonprofit and small- business organizations. As Saurabh explains it,

For an organization with 10 to 100 people, it doesn’t really make sense to hire a techie. What we do is that we run the basics around the network, website, online infrastructure, and even consult companies to give them new ideas and improve overall operations using IT. Most of the work is remote and our clients sometimes like us to operate out of their offices. While the five-member team usually works out of Denver, people are all over the country. Recently, however, we have pivoted the business to focus on cybersecurity, and all the services I just mentioned are offered only to legacy clients.

Over the past 2 years, with the increasing number of cyber incidents, crime, and malware, cybersecurity in business infrastructure has gained significant importance.

The hacking of the 2016 U.S. elections was a watershed moment for us. While cybersecurity is a space that I personally really enjoyed, it is also a space that is gaining significant importance and is here to stay. The IT infrastructure around the world is changing with more offerings coming on the cloud, increasing exposure to the Internet, making cybersecurity even more necessary and relevant. We saw this as an opportunity to evaluate the strength of our team and internal resources, focus our offerings towards cybersecurity and move up the pecking order in our niche market segment.

Gyan-I Inc. now offers three services that help small businesses manage their cyber risk. First, they do an initial risk assessment and give a report on the risk businesses are likely to face and consult on how to overcome the risk. Second, they extend offerings by hand-holding the company and providing the necessary support to protect the companies from risk, analyze their security, and train employees on an ongoing basis. The third service is related to fast responses to cyber breaches. The response to these higher-margin services, Saurabh says, has been “good.”

In 2011, when Saurabh started, he was alone and “bootstrapped” the business. Bootstrapping is entrepreneurship lingo for starting a business with very limited resources without outside investment. Saurabh believes his bootstrapping approach helped him start small but grow with intention. As people joined the team, the company began to grow organically and slowly, not to mention being profitable from Day 1. Bootstrapping the company presented Saurabh with its own sets of constraints. He felt that it would not be possible to deliver the services to his clients at a low cost and on time if he developed his own resources (IT infrastructure). Instead, he adopted existing software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that were not only tried and tested but also readily available (e.g., SaaS for payroll, project management software). Using these existing solutions allowed him to bundle and customize his offerings to address the specific needs of his customers, improving customer satisfaction.

Bootstrapping also meant that other overhead costs had to be minimized. His first office was in a co-op workspace in Denver. “Everything is an operational expense when you’re bootstrapped,” he quipped. The business developed organically and mostly through word of mouth. Because most of the leads resulted from inbound marketing , their sales cycles were extremely short, so they could contact the customer, pitch the product, and close the sale in less than one day. This enabled them to grow 30% every year. Gyan-I Inc. currently has 45 to 50 customers, and they have expanded their marketing efforts to include outbound marketing . They have recently hired a marketing professional to help grow the company base and brand.

Inbound marketing: bringing potential customers to your business by creating online content that addresses their needs, in order to build trust and brand awareness.

Outbound marketing: promoting your product or service through traditional activities such as advertising, trade shows, and cold calling.

Not everything was smooth sailing for Saurabh. He recalls an early misstep in the business around 2013, when he decided to focus on developing a SaaS product called Applyd ( http://applyd.co/ ) from scratch. He noticed many of his nonprofit clients followed a paper-based approach to file requests for scholarships. He thought it was possible to streamline this process electronically, reducing the time spent on redundant activities for these 500 potential clients. Building a product from scratch was different from what Gyan-I had done so far. Saurabh, however, felt that he understood the problem and that the product he would build would be adopted by potential users almost immediately. He decided to dive in with both feet, allocated a budget, and spent a lot of time building and working on the concept. His budget was running out and he was spending more than he wanted to on building the product. He was able to scrape through and finished the software in 2014, but the product did not achieve expected sales. It reached only 2–3% of the addressable market. The clients simply didn’t use it. He quickly realized that his clients were not early adopters and couldn’t see the value in automation. Saurabh stopped pursuing Applyd in 2015.

Saurabh realized that the company successfully worked as an outsourced model. His customers needed IT support and not new IT products. Gyan-I worked because it had internal resources—knowledgeable people who offered quality service and attention. Clients knew their IT was in good, capable hands. Today Saurabh is confident that his boutique business has a sustainable model that is scalable. The small staff size of the company also positions it well to provide high-quality services.

When a client approaches us, the team is able to be nimble and efficient. We are able to fine-tune our offerings in real-time based on the feedback and requirements of the client. Some clients are hard pressed for time and want work to be completed within the week, while some don’t mind spreading it over a few months. We are able to manage those expectations, a big advantage in this space.

Added to this is the awareness that Gyan-I Inc. has of the events affecting its industry, especially those related to cybersecurity. This nimble attitude has allowed it to pivot effectively and leverage and build on the existing strengths of the team.

Saurabh’s journey as an entrepreneur has not been without a struggle. He says that starting and running a company has been a spiritual and philosophical journey for him. It has not only helped him become more observant and disciplined in his personal life, but he has also developed a sense of self-awareness—something that he is very thankful for. Although he’s not able to spend as much time with his family as he would like, he has been able to strike a meaningful balance between family life and work life. The technology industry is constantly evolving, and Saurabh points out that he is always concerned about the company’s ability to remain relevant to customer needs and wants as the managed IT services industry is experiencing a tectonic shift toward cloud-based computing and consumption. This means that he is continuously learning in order to stay ahead of the game.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. How risky is it to start a technology services company today when technology is changing at such a rapid pace?

2. The Entrepreneurship Method is about taking action and trying new things. Do you see evidence of the Method during the creation of Gyan-I?

3. As you think about doing something entrepreneurial, today or someday, what is your motivation for doing so?

Source: Saurabh Gupta (interview with Babson MBA graduate assistant Gaurav Khemka, September 09, 2018.)