How did we get together?

We (Ganesh, Rajesh, Ram and Aravind) had a vision of starting in the outsourcing industry and started this venture in 2004. We are one of the first companies to provide online bookkeeping outsourcing services for small and medium businesses.

How did we choose outsourcing?

During the early years of outsourcing, IT and call center outsourcing were taking shape across multi national companies. Bookkeeping and accounting outsourcing was also slowly getting accepted by many companies in the west and it was also becoming a success with the multi nationals starting to adopt this. We decided to jump into the outsourcing industry and specifically in the finance and accounting areas.

During early 2000's outsourcing industry in India was focussing solely on large multinational corporations. The benefits of outsourcing were only available for a few giants. Small and medium businesses could not really afford to outsource and when they tried, they were mostly turned away by these big outsourcing providers. For a few businesses, who 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 goals and our approach is always geared towards addressing this fear for our clients and making them comfortable in doing business with an outsourcing company.

Naming, vision and our first office

We decided to name our company International Commerce Alliance. It was agreed that Ram & Aravind will look after the operations side of things from India and Rajesh and Ganesh will manage the sales and marketing from UK and USA respectively. Though we had a few wealthy people who were ready to back us from the onset, we did not seek funds from anyone. This was a conscious decision made by all of us together. We wanted to grow our business with whatever little savings we had and more importantly with no interference from anyone to our philosophy.

We believed and trusted each other's capabilities and we were very sure of achieving success. We sincerely believed that with our work experience in major corporati;ons and with large number of contacts, we will easily get us a bag full of projects. How wrong were we?

We started our business venture with a tiny little office in the city centre of Coimbatore. With dark alleys, unpainted walls and untidy light bulbs, it looked more like a dubious car dealer's office than an outsourcing company aspiring for global clients. But, both Ram & Aravind would religiously come to the office everyday and wait for our phone calls about a large multi-million outsourcing projects which never came their way.

Our early days

We would would explain about our fantastic business plan to our friends/colleagues and asked to refer us to their business friends. We would also voluntarily introduce ourselves at birthday parties, local gatherings and explain about our great business vision to much of their dismay. We believed that someone would introduce us to the right client who is ready for outsourcing to India. But unfortunately, most of them whom I knew were from working class background and all they could do was, listen patiently, wish me "best of luck".

Our growth

Ganesh used his contacts in USA, met a few prospects and finally got our first prospective client to visit our office in India.

Though, we could not land the project, for which we had moved to a bigger office, we slowly started getting clients and projects from US, UK and Canada. All of our people in India used to work very long hours and weekends, both for establishing the early success and to earn the trust from our clients. We started recruiting and our first batch of employees started with us. Now looking back at it, we are both proud and happy to note that most of our first batch of people are still with us. They were and continue to be the foundation of our success.

Name change and further growth

We realised that our name International commerce alliance did not correctly represent outsourcing business and after much brain storming we re-named our company as Integra Global Solutions. Our sales and marketing strategy became more focussed and our operational team got better with some bright young talents joining us to complement our experience.

We started getting more projects in bookkeeping/accounting and our business grew with glowing reference from our first clients. We established processes and tighter controls to ensure the 100% security, quality of service and timely delivery. Most of our clients were small and medium businesses but we also got some contracts from large companies.

To support our growth further, we started another office a few miles away from the main office in India. Currently we have about 1300+ staff and we operate out of two modern offices with world-class facilities and fool-proof security standards. Our various teams are ably 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.

Now we select the staff from the best universities and with a variety of education levels such as bachelor's, master's, MBA's and other related degrees. After selection our staff go through stringent training in the actual work and also security measures. Our staff start working with the clients only after they prove good in the training phases. This assures that we have a good level of experience and commitment to support your needs and requirements.

Our future plans and vision

We are proud to have achieved this far with our philosophy and core values intact. Our multi-talented team now, is a good mixture of young talents and wise experienced heads. We have home grown project managers with abundance of talent and confidence, ready to take on any challenge thrown our way. Now our aim is to be able to challenge for bigger honours and expand our operations to a much large scale. But, we only want to get there, without compromising on our core value of trust and integrity.

We will continue to run our outsourcing service with the same founding principle of taking the "fear" out of outsourcing. Existence of our business & further success solely rest on our clients' unabated confidence on us. In turn, we will ensure our clients get far greater benefits through outsourcing and share some wonderful memories along the way.

Sincerely,

Ganesh Ranganathan
Founder director
Integra Global Solutions