| Here's a jolly holiday surprise. |
| It's a story of a rapidly expanding Detroit-area company adding hundreds of jobs and doubling its revenue every year. |
| And there's more. |
| Not only is this hot growth company in our Michigan midst, but it's also a story of rapid response from a state agency that helped keep this anomaly from departing for Denver. |
| Let's let Dilip Dubey take the story from here. |
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| Dubey, 38, was born in India, earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from a college in his hometown of Bhopal, and then a master's in 1993 from the University of Michigan. He joined General Motors Corp., for which he worked in Pontiac on a GM-Isuzu joint venture until 1997, when he formed Netlink, an information technology services shop, with partner Anurag Shrivastava, a friend from India who attended Clemson University and later worked as an IT consultant with Capgemini. |
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| By mid-2006, Southfield-based Netlink was en route to $28 million in annual sales and had several big customers in Colorado encouraging the owners to move Netlink headquarters to Denver. |
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| "I was 30 days away from signing papers to relocate to Colorado," Dubey told me last week. "We had eight or 10 customers out there, and lots of people were saying it was a better strategic location for us." Ciber Inc., another firm in the IT outsourcing space like Netlink, had grown sales to $800 million from its base in a Denver suburb. |
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"There's a perception out there that if you say Michigan is the best location for your business, then you must be idiots," Dubey said.
Just as he was considering the move West, Dubey got a call from a midlevel manager at the Michigan Economic Development Corp., the state's quasi-public business attraction and retention agency. |
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"I had heard MEDC's commercials on the radio before, but I didn't believe them. I had never heard of government doing anything worthwhile," Dubey said.
But he agreed to a meeting. |
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| "These guys were aggressive. I was amazed at the speed at which they operate," he said. Once MEDC staff learned about Netlink's growth, how its people were scattered in various metro Detroit locations, and that it was on the verge of a move to Colorado, a plan was pulled together quickly to help Netlink consolidate at a new headquarters location in Madison Heights. |
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| The state could provide a tax credit worth $3.6 million over seven years if Netlink continued to create jobs. The City of Madison Heights kicked in a personal property tax abatement worth $2 million over 10 years. |
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| Dubey was sold. He had an emotional attachment to Michigan, where he had launched the company and started a family with his wife, Sonal, a former Delphi Corp. employee. Netlink had won its first major project from DaimlerChrysler to create an online portal for Chrysler and Dodge dealers. And now he had financial incentives and a strong show of support from the state. |
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| When Dubey and his staff dedicated their new Madison Heights headquarters this month, Gov. Jennifer Granholm was on hand to help cut the ribbon. |
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| Revenues expected to double |
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| Dubey talked then, and in more detail with me last week, about what sets Netlink apart from a host of other IT services firms and drives its growth. The company has 1,000 employees now -- about 400 in Michigan, 400 in Bhopal, India, and 200 more scattered in other locations -- and expects revenues to grow to $60 million this year and double in each of the next three years. |
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| Netlink's business model is wrapped up in its simple promise to customers: It will cut their IT costs by at least 20% and improve service by 20%. |
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| Yes, by sourcing some work to India there is a cost savings, as great as 70% on some work. But IT outsourcing firms that overdid the rush to India, by sourcing as much as 95% of IT work for U.S. customers to India, have encountered problems of both quality and perception. |
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| There are some things that his young (average age 26), well-educated employees in Bhopal are very good at, Dubey said. But there are others that they have never experienced. |
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| "If you are designing a system for automobile dealerships and you have never purchased a car or been in a dealership, that has some impact on your ability to work on that project," Dubey said. "Serving the customer is the key, and if the customer doesn't want to have to deal with his IT provider at 3 o'clock in the morning, or with an accent he can't understand, he shouldn't have to." |
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| That's the rationale behind staffing both in the United States and abroad. Now that technology and globalization have allowed know-how to be zapped around the world in seconds, sourcing of some work to lower-cost nations will always be part of the equation. But plenty of opportunity remains at home. |
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| Netlink expects to hire 300 people in the United States during the next 18 months. And most of those, happily, will be in Michigan. |
