Ethical businesses have the potential to bring millions of people out of poverty. Where decades of international aid for economic development has often failed, many successful social enterprises have proven that the win-win approach adopted by them have resulted in economic well being of their beneficiaries and made business sense for the enterprise. For no enterprise is this truer than the $300 billion industry known as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
As a rural BPO our three pillars for business success are Sustainability, Scalability and Cost Leadership
Sustainability:
eGramServe has earned the love and respect of the local community because we have provided growth opportunities to their youth both within Narendranagar and outside if they choose to go out to larger companies. The boys and girls who have worked with us have become knowledgeable, confident and mature. In fact there is peer pressure amongst our employees to do their best when working here so they look good within their community! They are self conscious of the quality of work that they do, as they really want eGramServe to succeed and scale-up and become a role-model for other towns and villages in the district.
Scalability:
Our business model is to move “jobs-to-the people” rather than “people-to-the-jobs”. Our proposed “hub-and-spoke” architecture will enable us to reach the remotest regions for tapping the human resource while the “hub” ensures a seamless service-delivery for our clients. Once we perfect this, then it will facilitate rapid scalability without requiring heavy investment in infrastructure.
Cost Leadership:
Operating from regions like Garhwal helps us retain a cost leadership over the long term. After an initial investment in developing the skill sets of the local youth, they become at par with the workforce available in BPOs in the metro cities, but at substantially lower salary levels. It’s a win-win for both – their salary expectations are low because whatever they earn, they save. If they even earn twice of this in a metro city, they won’t be able to sustain for long due to the high living costs and a high-pressure metro life, which they are not exposed to.
Our training & on-boarding costs also remain low due to high employee retention and their expectations of a y-o-y salary-raise are not as high as those in the metro cities. Moreover an IT-based job has a higher aspirational value for people in this region (no longer true in metro cities) over other occupations and gives us an assured availability of human resources. Thus our cost leadership can be sustained over the long-term.