What strikes you about Sunil Mirani, CEO and co-founder, Ugam Solutions, when you talk to him is his sheer conviction for what he believes in. And why not, its perhaps this trait that has got him involved in the still new market research outsourcing services space back in 2000.

In 2000, the outsourcing bug bit Mirani and gang and that was the beginning of Ugam Solutions. Mirani is not new to starting a business, and entrepreneurship is his part of his heritage. He comes from a Mumbai based 120 year old family business - the KVS Group - that has interests in cotton trading, chemicals, and financial services.

In those days when outsourcing was synonymous with call-centers, Mirani wanted to carve out his niche in the market research space. “My cousin and co-founder of Ugam Technologies, Madhav Mirani, and a few partners from Avalon Consulting (then called Business Consulting Group) got together o start an outsourcing venture. Our chairman Raj Nair had his career roots in market research space and the idea of doing something in that area appealed,” says Mirani. “The hypothesis that market research and eventually any marketing related activity can be done remotely with any degradation of quality and even done better made sense to us”.

And as the company grew, they continued to refine their vision and belief and it became very clear that this theory is not just true for market research but the entire marketing decision support space.

While co-founder Madhav Mirani and Mihir Kittur moved to the US to start the business, Sunil stayed in India. “The reason for that was very simple, I was married and I had kids the other two didn’t,” he quips. But the going was good for them. When the team bounced off the idea of outsourcing their market research needs to American clients, the prophecy of being at the right place at the right time came true. By 2000-01 the India story was a well know across the corporate world. “The success of all the desi entrepreneurs and companies like Wipro Infosys was well known in the US market,” recalls Sunil. “And when we approached prospective clients we had a 100% success rate in terms of getting an audience.”

Sunil pleasantly remembers a client meeting when he was talking on the “Why India” point when the client stopped him and said, “Hey listen, you are an Indian you must be smart. So lets move to talking about what you have to offer.”

We did everything the good old Indian way. Our team camped with friends and relatives in the US, we used all sorts of method from cold calls to attending conferences and events to digging into the contact lists of friends an family and as soon as we were able to land the first 2-3 client we then leveraged those clients into expending our client base.” says Mirani.

Till recently Ugam ran a one man army in the US with Madhav Mirani being the only one working out of the US. As the company grew in size, the executive team wanted to close the few key gaps in their services bouquet, key being that Ugam had only English language capabilities, and in the market research space did not poses the ability to do end to end surveys. “Another area that needed to be addressed was that we didn’t really have a significant presence in Europe and we were short staffed in the US to be able to effectively address all sales and marketing needs,” says Mirani.

Ugam opened its London office in 2007 to add a gateway in to EuropeThe office is not only as a sales and marketing center but also an operations hubThe company has about 80 people in London in operations role

Ugam also hired 11 people to spearhead the sales and marketing operations in the US