Software and spirituality get him into Inc 500

Rohit Bansal

From a lowly manager in SV Gramin Bank, Madhava Reddy hasn’t done too badly, since he relaunched himself as a software entrepreneur in the US in 1990.

Inc 500 has had Mr Reddy’s HTC Global Services in its list of ‘America’s fastest-growing privately held companies’ for five years running.

As the magazine puts it, this list “is an early indicator of future accomplishments on a global scale.” Tall talk? Well, the earlier Inc 500 lists boast of Oracle, Microsoft, Timberland, Morningstar, E-Trade, Intuit, Domino’s Pizza, and the Princeton Review.

Mr Reddy’s sales are $60 million, and he’s managing to grow at 30 per cent. He holds on to 100 per cent of the stock, which is important if you get buy-out offers every other day!

So, what’s got him here? “Meditation for one hour in the morning, and another one hour after work,” he answers as his eyes brighten up. But would jetting between clients as demanding as AT&T, Bell & Howell Information & Learning, KMart, Sun Microsystems, and StanChart leave two hours a day? “It isn’t a sacrifice. I’m able to better utilise the 21 hours that I have,” he explains, fishing out spiritual literature from the Ramachandra Mission. 21? “Well, I sleep for three hours, sometimes four, but never six, seven, or eight,” Mr Reddy adds. He spends 10 hours a week as preceptor, too.

So, when was it last, when spiritual moorings bailed him out? “Right from the first big client I got,” he remembers. “We were a one-customer company, and here I see him walking off, with my key employees set to jump onboard! Only faith could have kept me going.”

“Then there’s this 100-man year project we have just picked up. Just when all the legal agreements were out of the way, we realised that vital components to the job had been forgotten. So, the question was...do we armtwist this client to pay more? Or, do we absorb 25 per cent more of non-billable time, and give him 80-100 per cent more?”

Mr Reddy wants to go public one day. For keeping the brand alive after he’s no more, and also for his key employees.

Remember, they stuck out with him without stock options in an era where even priests broke the coconut for Esops. That would mean ‘bye, bye’ to Inc 500, but detachment isn’t one of Mr Reddy’s biggest problems anyway.