From Indore to Dubai, Story of Making Golden Eagle IT Service & Staffing Company
The Indian startup ecosystem has witnessed an unprecedented surge, as a new breed of visionary young entrepreneurs have reshaped ways of doing business to provide services and redefined success with the help of technology boom.
TechTitan Club (Supported by TalentOnLease – an IT recruitment agency where you can hire dedicated Java developers, mobile app developers, and all types of developers according to your business needs.) in its series of interview’s spoke to Chandan Kr Mallik, a young entrepreneur from Indore & Founder of Golden Eagle.
Talent on Lease – a prime hiring platform that’s established by industry veterans through a century of united experience. It directly addresses a major shortage in the tech talent pool by providing a network through 5,000 industry-ready and pre-vetted professionals, guaranteeing that they can handle the work in around 72 hours.
Indore as we all know is one of the cleanest cities in India. Being a 2 tier city we don’t hear big tech companies having set up there. But as things are changing in IT arena, smaller cities are having set up from where operations can be done unlike earlier it was not only big cities who grabbed the attention of entire IT staffing based services.
Golden Eagle IT service staffing company is based in Indore and primarily into providing IT services via remote development teams.
I am Gargi from TechTitanClub, as an editor I got the opportunity to interact with Chandan Kr. Mallik the other day.
While interacting with Chandan I got to hear some interesting perspectives on how Chandan and his fellow partner Yogesh Trivedi started Golden Eagle pvt. ltd while working together as developers in the same organization years back.
There was a spark and dreams filled in the eyes of the young entrepreneur, a poised demeanour as he went on to speak about his journey.
Journey of Golden Eagle
After completing his engineering degree Chandan started working as a developer for 2yrs. only later he realised that his interest lies in interacting with people, understanding requirements of clients that had more to do then than developing codes.
According to Chandan there were some challenges in the market, for which he had some solutions in mind but he was not sure how to build them up.
It was during that time Golden Eagle IT service company took its shape where he and Yogesh started by recruiting developers and providing remote development teams.
Further the company went to provide end to end product development and doing this for the last 8yrs. for clients in India and worldwide.
As I delved into their entrepreneurial odyssey, a lot uncovered the driving forces behind Golden Eagles ascent and implications of their venture.
Chandan started with the sales part primarily for his love of interacting and communicating with clients and Yogesh takes care of development part and operations.
Yogesh being a python developer has 12 yrs of experience in IT and fits in taking care of the operation part of the company.
Today Golden Eagle boasts of having 120 plus in-house developers. But when they started they had 4 people in their team back in 2017. In the past 8 yrs they made sure to add more people in their teams every year.
Challenges and Tribulations
According to Chandan ‘when we first thought about starting our company, we had challenges and had no clue how to interact with clients and get the businesses’.
Both Chandan and Yogesh worked as coders and developers so figuring out how to reach clients was a challenge without any sales background.. They had the clients but not the route to reach them.
Initially, they set up their profile on a freelancing portal called ‘Upwork’ where people can hire Python developers according to their needs, and bid on some projects. During their interactions through the portal with a few clients, they provided their expertise.
It was tough to convince the client for them and build a trust factor. In any business trust is important to do business and for them it was a challenge to get the first assignment.
‘If we observe people who do business with people they have trust on’ said Chandan.’
This was not the end, it was just the beginning of their journey of scaling up to building teams on new tech stack, they have added to getting new clients and access to new markets. As per Chandan challenges actually bring in opportunities to learn and grow.
First they had 4 people in the beginning, and they kept on adding more people and creating a culture around. Getting news clients was important so that developers were busy and occupied.
At the same time they incorporated training programs for developers to keep them updated about demands in the market.
When Covid came there were different challenge’s as everybody was working remotely.
As per Chandan ‘we had to manage remote employees; the client was already remote from the start. Managing remote employees was a big challenge as moonlighting was also a trend in IT organisations. We had to monitor those also, so we built in-house software to take care of that’.
Ultimately they have been able to monitor productivity of teams and till now a 40% of teams are working remotely. Currently the hybrid model has gained prominence but most of the time developers are remote and managing well.
Gaining First Client and Making Fresh Hiring
‘As we worked in IT we had our portfolio and projects we have worked. Based on those projects we could explain to our client and ultimately gained our first customer’ said Chandan with a spark of happiness in his eyes.’
Slowly training the developers started with in house process trainer for employees and kept hiring fresh resources and talent from colleges and universities.
A six month’s training program was developed to train developers so they gain enough knowledge to be on board in different developer’s teams
Charting New Horizons with AI Team
The duo made sure Golden Eagle was among the first companies who worked with AI & ML in 2017.
As per Chandan, very few companies in Indore started working on these digital based technologies back then. And they are the first in Indore to work with Python and Django as most of the libraries are from Python and Django.
This formed a new opportunity for them to build a team of developers who were very much adapted to such advanced technologies.
The market demands and queries are for developers who have knowledge on AI based technologies like CHATGPT and Gen AI. This is actually a boom for us as demand in the market is high, elaborated Chandan.
Now they have an App called ‘Aura’. They are using the app to monitor everything from remote employees, remote systems to devices as they are using official mobiles while at work etc.
Biggest ‘Ah Ha’ moments for Golden Eagle
As I interacted further, Chandan revealed how covid bought into the challenge and the most important was to keep the team occupied.
Before covid ‘we were doing end to end product development. The project managers did most of the heavy lifting’ said Chandan.
Post Covid clients were looking for developers who also had proper communication skills. Developers had to clear their interviews and they on the other side had to get to staff augmentation which was challenging on two fronts.
Initially the developers were not able to get through the interviews due to lack of communication skills. They were experts in coding but not able to communicate properly.
Most developers are into coding and happy doing that, says Chandan as he himself was in their chair back then.
Incorporating training was essential to give developers a feel that interviews are nothing but conversation between them and clients. The training was for 3 weeks and we got exceptional results and growth was too exponential.
It’s an important learning on essentials of communication in present day staffing scenarios and that is required in every industry. No matter how talented one is, if communication skills are lacking then it can be a setback for career development.
On Expansion Plans
Right now Golden Eagle IT has 3 offices in Indore and one in Pune. And they are planning to expand further and developers are sitting in all three offices.
On being asked about venturing to new markets, Chandan revealed ‘By 2024 only we will start our project in Dubai’ with happiness brimming in his eyes.
They participated as an aggregator in Jatex Dubai in 2023. Opportunities are great in the Middle East but most clients based in Dubai want the company to have a presence in their soil, says Chandan. Further plans are to expand in the Middle East and Europe.
They are done with all documentation processes and market study before venturing to the Dubai market, said Chandan.
Managing the Financial aspect as a Start Up
Since inception the young entrepreneurs made sure they never took any loan and their goal was to have profitable risk.
Most starts up now have seed funding and valuation might go down if not performing. So when they started the decision was not to take any funding until it was very necessary.
As per Chandan they don’t spend too much on marketing budgets and most of the work is done through their team and no money is put in third party agencies.
Chandan was proud to reveal that ‘With emergence of AI & Ml we are also automating certain parts of work. As software development teams it’s quite an easy task for us to do and that is cost savvy at the end’.
Mentorship
When I asked Chandan if he has any name specific to mention who mentored him in his journey, he revealed that most of his learning has been self-taught and by attending a lot of online classes regarding entrepreneurships or sales or how to handle a team.
Certain aspects Chandan mentioned like learning about Matrices.
What are the matrices one should be taking care of when you have a team in house.
It is essential to understand the concept of matrices while judging people based on certain parameters.
How do you set those parameters? How do you set those KPI’s? This information Chandan gained via online classes. That is when they introduced KPI in sales, in development teams etc. He gave credit to all those who mentored him online for guiding him.
On Hiring Trend in IT service Organizations
As the interview went ahead I couldn’t stop and asked his view on the present trend in hiring and job loss happening in IT based organizations as per various news portals.
Chandan was quick in his views that most of the resources in large companies or MNC are just head counts in a global pool of talented resources who are not adding any value to the projects. Such candidates replaceable head counts and whenever company feels they can be replaceable they are shown notice.
The actual ones are assets to a company and respected organizations don’t like replacing assets of a talented pool of professionals.
Mantra for wannabe Entrepreneur
Seeing his zeal and courage to build up a firm without any external funding, I went on to ask him what would be his mantra for upcoming entrepreneurs.
Chandan says ‘never have Plan B in your map, we as human beings have a tendency to give up, but if we have only one plan we will find a way out.
This has been true for me when I started. Either I succeed or die. And as humans we will do anything to succeed’.
Give your 100% and don’t have an exit strategy .Go with a positive energy and have calculated risk and do your research. One should have a plan in place and things are going to work out, says Chandan at the end.
In the end I can say, when a company succeeds, it’s because it has discovered and made the right moves along the way, it has found out how to create and capture customer value that is how Golden Eagle made it.
