Kami Narayan and Kapil Viswanathan are (30 something) siblings and third generation entrepreneurs from one of the oldest business families in Chennai. They are the promoters of Pre Media Global group, possibly the largest e-publishing services company in the country. Their father was S Viswanathan, chairman of Enfield India, the Chennai-based company that launched the Bullet bikes. Viswanathan?s father was one of the founders of Enfield India, a pioneering venture then. Viswanathan saw the company through many ups and downs and finally sold it to the Eicher group.

Both Kami (the older sister) and Kapil say that their father made sure that they could follow their heart. He did not want them to grow up with any baggage. ?There were no restrictions on what we wanted to do. I went to National Law School in Bangalore,? says Kami. She was a gold medalist. After completing law, Kami joined Arthur Anderson. She helped multi-national companies negotiate joint ventures. She then went to Harvard to do her MBA and returned to head the M&A group at Office Tiger (now taken over by RR Donnelly), managing the US-India interface and handling project implementation. Kapil did engineering and got a Masters from Stanford. He was sure he was going to start something on his own, and knew it could be an electronics or IT related business, and so he had opted for engineering. After Stanford, he returned to India and joined TCS. Kapil headed one of the verticals. Then he too went to Harvard to do his MBA. ?I didn?t apply anywhere else,? he says. Kapil says their father made sure that they were deanchored from the set path.

In his second year, Kapil was part of the globalisation club in Harvard. ?I learnt a lot about outsourcing from the buyer?s point of view.? At this point, Kami was gaining experience in Office Tiger. She was already exploring a lot of avenues to branch out on her own. Then Kapil came back and they started working on a project together and zeroed in on PMG, which provides end-to-end publishing solutions. Both siblings did a lot of research before they decided on what they wanted to do. The company was launched end-2005. ?We set up PMG together because our skills complemented each other?s and not because we were keen on being together,? they say.

They knew they were not the first movers in the business. They were late entrants. But they also knew the business had tremendous potential. The challenge was to figure out how they were going to be different from the competitors. Their research into both customers and the offshore scene convinced them that there was a need for a full service vendor. Existing companies were focusing on one small service. This meant that the publisher had to go scurrying round for the same title to several vendors. PMG told the publishers that it would take care of all the intermediary setups and deliver a PDF that the client could print. Kapil says that many of their competitors have caught on and are following PMG?s model.

Before they set up the company, Kami and Kapil had been talking to potential customers who liked their model. The first two customers signed up and were happy with what they delivered. Very soon, PMG was able to attract big names in publishing like McGraw-Hill, Thomson, Houghton-Mifflin, Harcourt, Pearson, Wiley, the National Geographic and Reader?s Digest. Although this is a very competitive industry, PMG?s customers have remained loyal. ?If you are a full service quality provider, there is a lot of stickiness in this industry,? says Kapil.

A major customer adds, ?When I first met Kapil and Kami a few years ago, PMG was a fledgling company with a unique business model that carried a lot of promise. Within a short period of time, they have established a global end-to-end operation and emerged as one of the largest companies in this space, delivering outstanding value to publishers like us.?

Once they were launched, both Kapil and Kami were clear that they would have to go in for acquisitions. ?It was part of our DNA, to go global. It is not easy to integrate the American and Indian cultures. Many of our competitors did not want to venture into that. We are personally comfortable in both cultures.? There was a lot of daredevilry in their acquisition plans. The siblings had set up their business with their own money, plus contributions from friends and family. They had not quite established themselves before they went about acquiring American companies. The siblings told the companies they wanted to buy about their vision, how this was unique and why the American company should become a part of this vision. There was a lot of creative financing?like seller loans, deferred loans, earn-out structures and other combinations. ?We knew we didn?t have a track record, yet. In fact, I had a client meeting one week before I graduated and raised a lot of eyebrows,? laughs Kapil.

They managed to acquire four companies. ?Our acquisitions were well sequenced. We focused on niches we wanted to be in. The US-India hybrid model is both interesting and challenging,? say Kami and Kapil. PMG focused on not what the company could offer publishers, but what exactly the publishers wanted. PE backing came in 2008 and they have been able to breathe easy. The company had also earned a lot of credibility in the market by then. As acquisitions happened, one of the major challenges was to build up adequate support systems in Chennai. Both the promoters say that Chennai has a great talent pool and it is no longer difficult to attract professionals from other metros to Chennai. They have managed to recruit and train people without compromising on quality.

What started with six people in a single room has grown into offices in Chennai and the US, with more than 1,000 staff. It is a young setup. Senior managers are not older than 35. Four general managers are from Delhi. ?Something unthinkable even 15 years ago,? smiles Kami. The turnover this year is expected to exceed Rs 125 crore?all this within four years! Most larger e-publishing companies have a turnover of Rs 50-60 crore. The nearest competitors are Delhi-based Aptra and Innodato Isogen, a Mumbai-based US Company. Last year was a slow year for the company that has doubled and tripled its turnover. They did not lose customers, but customers could not be as active as they were in previous years.

Kami says now they are looking at how to move forward. After a huge growth phase, they are getting ready for the next one. The publishing industry is grappling with digital readers coming up. Its rules are changing fast. ?We are looking at how we can help in this transformation from print to digital. We want to look at it more as an opportunity than a threat. In educational content, digital media brings in a lot more to just reading. This is a change that is going to catch on in a big way. We also want to diversify into other markets like consumer packaging and all types of corporate marketing communication.?

Kami and Kapil may belong to old Madras, but they are a prominent example of the new entrepreneurial Chennai.