Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Gita Bhargava . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Gita thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
My journey began 43 years ago in a small town in India where I became the first young female to run a business after my father’s death. After the passing of my father I ran the family pharmacy store for 6 years till I got married and immigrated to the USA.
I immigrated 5 dollars in my pocket and not knowing English and had to fight through language and gender barriers to make a life for me and my family. I went on to found a successful company, Global Upside, in 1999.
Over time the Company expend its services in 170+ countries with 5 brands.
The risk taken to build a company from scratch and my perseverance paid off and we had a successful exit in 2022.
Let’s just say I’ve been swimming against the tide for a really long time….and I love it.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In late 1990, we were in an internet bubble. It was hard to find good qualified accountants. IT services started to be outsourced to India. I knew that accounting and back office will be next. There were plenty of English speaking qualified accountants in India. Many things started to change in favor of our business model, like: internet becoming stable, open interfaces with enterprises accounting software (Oracle, SAP etc.) and improved scanning capabilities making outsourcing to India possible.
Also, the almost 12 hours time difference made it 24/7 operations for our clients. Within a year, we got our first public company Client doing US accounting.
We never said no to our Clients and grew our offering based on our Clients’ need.
As a business owner, my focus was to help people, Clients came first and then our employees. This helped us with long term Client and employee retention. Being a mother I was very focused on taking care of my employees and offering them benefits which not only allowed for work life balance but also allowed them to work when necessary and take time off when personal responsibilities had to be taken care off.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
In 2008, we lost our biggest (90% revenue) Client and I had to let almost all of my team go. We ended up restructuring the Company and I asked my husband to join with me. It was very hard decision as we were going to put all eggs in one basket. We were very nervous but we knew that failure was not an option. He joined me as CEO, taking care of Sales, Marketing and Administration and I was COO taking care of Operations and Customer Service. In 2014, we bought a Finance and Accounting Staffing firm. All of a sudden we had a very large payroll as wages in USA are much higher than in India. Also, we had to start paying once a week versus every 15 days. It was very nerve racking and worrisome to ensure we have enough money for payroll. I would call all our Clients on Monday morning to remind them to pay our invoices on time. They were very helpful as we provided them excellent service. As the acquired enterprise was assimilated properly in our processes our cash flow improved and we never had to look back.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
During COVID, business was down. We decided not to lay off anyone and did not cut anyone’s pay as I always believed in the team and their expertise.
We invested in employee’s mental health by adding Short and Long term disability insurance, Employee Assistance Program which included their families as well as increased life insurance.
On a weekly basis each department would have a Zoom call and play games and share life stories and challenges for a few hours to provide virtual connections and continuity of pre-COVID relationships. In fact our team grew a lot during the period as not only did we hire personnel in existing locations we expanded our operations in an additional 12 countries.
Our CFO was not convinced that it was good idea to spend extra money when business was down but I was adamant.
I repurposed our operations team to document and improve processes. When market started to pick up after COVID, we were ready and capable to help our Clients. In fact we did so well that in in the middle of 2020, we had to revise our revenue and earnings projection for the remainder of the year.
Contact Info:
- Linkedin: Gita Bhargava
- Youtube: Gita Bhargava