In the last episode we heard how Alok used his hospital stay to retrospect and get his final team in place. Santosh joined as the Chief operating officer and by the end of second year, Karun also joined Alok to head global sales and marketing. SRKay made a small profit in the second year and that was a big thing for any startup to achieve. His investors were upbeat and put a challenge to multiply the business promising all support. With things in place, Alok was confident of achieving the challenge. But the turn of events would be not what anyone would have thought.
Over next six months, Alok was speeding up his expense building with a view to get to next level in growth. SCIKEY platform was planned to be released by mid next year and to achieve this target, many new developers were hired. They would be overheads now, but a platform driven business would give SRKay significant competitive edge. Santosh had asked for an inside sales team to be setup to help him get more offshore business that appeared to be growing well. Santosh volunteered to add his helping hand in sales efforts. New team was hired and licenses for potential customer databases were purchased. They were expensive, but good things come at a cost.
Alok hired a friend who was based in the USA to lead the local sales initiative. His salary was a sizable chunk as compared to an Indian salary. But, Alok was determined to take risks to accelerate the business. In the mean time, expenses were built up in Malaysia to expand in the Asia market.
Within the next six months enough expenses were built with growth in mind. Now, Alok had to secure additional funds from his investors that came as promised.
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