TOP STORIES: He incorporated his startup from a room into a Rs 141 crore turnover organization with 900 workers

For Sushant Gupta, it arrived in the form of a phone call from a friend in the US, who said he wanted to outsource some analytics-related work to a company in India. However, this friend came back to me after two months and said he had not been able to finalize any deal, and suggested that I take up the work, says Sushant Gupta, 53, founder of Pune-based SG Analytics Private Limited, who started his company as a lone man from his daughter’s bedroom in 2007

He had just shifted to Pune from Nagpur with his family and had sold his stakes in a previous business he had been part of and taking life easy when he got the phone call that changed his life. “I was free during those days, mostly watching cricket all day,” says Sushant, a graduate in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi.

Today, SG Analytics, which started with an investment of Rs 15 lakh, is rated as one of India’s leading data analytics companies with a turnover of Rs 141 crore and a workforce of 900 people. They have worked for several Fortune 500 companies including UBS, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley. When Sushant started SG Analytics, his two daughters were just 12 and 7. For the first eight months, he worked from one of his daughter’s bedrooms and slowly increased the size of the team as the business grew.

Within eight months more people joined and there were 11 computers in that room, and then we decided to move out,” recalls Sushant, reminiscing the early days of SG Analytics. That was a time when life was all about work, travel, and sleep, and there was nothing else. My wife Simi was the positive energy in my life.”

Sushant, an engineer by training, also holds an MBA in Finance from INSEAD (France). “I wasn’t just learning (analytics), but I also handled the sales, operations, and marketing all in one go, apart from training the freshers,” says Sushant. Parminder, aka Simi, Sushant’s wife, was a pillar of support during those days.

Sushant credits her energy of ‘ok ness’ and support as a ‘big calm tree’ for his success as an entrepreneur. Later, he left to join another company, and by 1997, he was earning USD 100,000 a year. In 1999, Sushant started Citikey Pvt Ltd, a London startup with USD 30,000 from his savings. Launched in 11 cities across Europe, it was basically doing what Google Maps does today. Still, it was too early for the market,” says Sushant, recounting his professional journey before starting SG Analytics. We shut down the company after two years.

“Then I worked for a year and a half at a London-based family office, and looked after their finance.” Later he joined an IT services company, which was ramping up its European presence. He became the European head, and a minority stakeholder in the company and worked there for two years from 2002-04.

In 2004, he moved back to India with enough savings to support him for the next five years. I ended up selling some of them by the end of these years, but we were always comfortable,” he says. “SG Analytics became profitable by 2010, and I was able to earn a salary of Rs 1 lakh a month and life became even more comfortable.”

“I managed from my savings during the years I wasn’t working. I knew it will all work out in the end,” says Sushant, who also invested in an open source training company during this period and later sold his stakes. Sushant’s company does a lot of CSR work too.