Are you in a business where the nature of the work that your employees do for your clients changes frequently? Do you find it challenging to create systems for your business and document procedures for the work you do because there are so many moving parts?
In this interview, Raj Goel the President and Co-founder of BrainLink reveals how he was able to systematize his business in the IT industry, which often presents many variables. He also shares how he was able to get his employees to adopt a systems approach to their work and help him document procedures for his business!
In this Episode You will Discover:
Episode Transcript:
OWEN: My guest today is Raj Goel and he’s the president and co-founder of BrainLink. Raj, welcome to show.
RAJ: Owen, I’m glad to be here.
OWEN: So let’s jump right in, what exactly does your company do and what big pain or problem do you solve for your customers?
RAJ: We are an IT consulting services company based out of New York City and we focus on New York City based businesses, architecture firms, construction firms, property management firms. We have a strong focus on architecture, real estate and private equity firms. And the biggest pain we solve for our clients is we reduce the cost of downtime, we increase productivity.
OWEN: Awesome. Just so the listener can get and understanding of the scale of the business, how many full-time employees do you have right now?
RAJ: We’re a company of 8 people.
OWEN: Awesome. And what was last year’s revenue and what do you expect to generate this year, whatever you can share with us will be okay.
RAJ: All I can share with you is last year was our best year in business and this year we’re already 15% ahead of last year. We actually don’t disclose our numbers because we’re a privately owned firm. But we’ve been on a very good growth streak last 3 years running.
OWEN: Awesome. Because the whole goal of this interview is to talk about how you’ve been able to systematize the business so that it runs without you. But before you go to that point, we want to share with the listeners some of the issues you had in the past. Let’s talk about what will you say so far was the lowest point in the business and describe how bad it got. I think during the pre-interview you mentioned how hiring and training employees was difficult. Let’s talk about that.
RAJ: Yeah, for me, one of the biggest challenges as an IT professional who’s started a business is I’ve built a lot of IT systems early on and I had a vision of what an IT employee or professional should be able to do. What I discovered in the marketplace is that a lot of people looking for work, a lot of people we hired or we interviewed were not at the same skill sets. The skills are varied and they had expectations, I had expectations of their performance and they had expectations of the training we provide for them. And there was a mismatch and it was a really painful process that I’ve been suffering with for about 10 years which had multiple approaches, sending people to school, getting them certifications, hiring people at different salary points from 50k to 150k a year and everything in between. It never ever worked that well. Either I felt like I was being held hostage by my employees [Unintelligible 00:02:48] client and their systems and their processes, or the clients are getting underserviced. It was this hamster
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