Leading From Behind: How Transparency and Trust Drive Sustainable Business Growth

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms, let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:30

Hi, I’m Susan Kearney, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast for middle market business owners and CEOs talk to us about founding, scaling and often exiting their companies. This episode is brought to you by Newport, a cadre of founders, business owners and season sweet C suite executives, quite easy for me to say, to help CEOs of privately held companies build more valuable businesses and exit them on their own terms. You can learn about us at Newportllc.com Today, I’m thrilled to be talking with Anand Basu. Anand is a friend and a former client of mine. He’s an entrepreneur and a technologist. On and was the owner and president at ESAC, which stands for enterprise science and computing, for seven years before selling the company to ICF several years ago. Welcome Anand, and we’re pleased to have you with us today.

Anand Basu  1:26

Thank you, Susan. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you, and I’m looking forward to answering your questions. I’ve never done a podcast in my life, so I’m obviously, I’m a little nervous, as well, as you can tell, but, but I’m really excited to talk to

Susan Kearney  1:44

you. Yeah, I think this will be fun. It’ll be great. And so let’s start off with some things about you professionally. On it first, tell us a little bit about your background, about your career, and what are the common threads that run through your professional career. So I I’m

Anand Basu  2:04

an electrical engineer by training, and I did my math. I came to the US in the early 90s, late 80s, 89 to be exact, and enrolled in computer engineering master’s program at Wright State University. From there, my career kind of took off in the direction of a consulting career, sort of working for a company called Capgemini, and they hired me out of college, and they moved me around all over the country, and I got to see all parts of America. And that was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me, especially for somebody who’s just out of college and and starts experiencing these different companies, different cultures, different opportunities, technologies, and this was in the early 90s, and consulting was as a was a big industry at that time, so I really enjoyed myself so and all these engagements, my role was mostly in technology development, software development. So I was, I was a developer. I used to write software code and and developed a deep appreciation for technology and what it can do for you and and things that were not really clear to you in an academic setting, that that in that you don’t really get in college. So from there, I moved to Bell Labs in AT and T where I sort of focused on telecom software development in telecom switches and call centers and all that exciting stuff during the 90s, after the sort of the telecom boom was over, I moved to a company called Celera genomics, And that’s where my journey in sort of Life Sciences, bio informatics started, and it it was also my first sort of startup that that I joined, and it was a really exciting place we were. We were mapping the human genome, for those who were familiar with that effort, it was the private arm of that effort. And eventually that company wound down right after the.com boom, and the bust followed, and a few of us from that company went off in different directions, but one of us started consulting on an individual basis. Started working as a 1099, as a consultant for different local companies here in the DC area, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and so that person and I, we got together one day, and then we decided, you know, we know a lot of these folks from Celera who have gone into different directions. Who bring this wonderful skill of Life Sciences and Technology, the intersection of Life Sciences and Technology, which was kind of unique at that time. And we thought, what? Why don’t we take a crack at starting a real sort of company and getting into some serious life sciences business, and so that that’s where ESAC sort of started. And I think our first business, our first project, was with Georgetown University here in the DC area, and that’s where we got started. And from there, we got into government consulting, government contracting, and the rest of this is history. Here I am, yeah, how did you end

Susan Kearney  5:52

up getting into government contracting? Because you did so much work in that area.

Anand Basu  5:56

Yeah, that that has been, that had been our primary focus was in government contracting. It was, it was really accidental, I would say, we got approached by somebody we were not very familiar with government contracting. We got approached by another small company that wanted to do something at NIH at NCI, they had a specific project for which they needed a specific skill set. They needed assembly informatics person, so genome assembly informatics person, that one person on our team had that experience, and so he got hired as a subcontract as an individual, single person. That’s where we sort of learned about this whole business of government contracting. Even though we had lived in the DC metro area, we weren’t that big into we weren’t that familiar with the whole ecosystem around around the beltway. So that was sort of our introduction.

Susan Kearney  6:59

Yeah, I think, unlike common perception, a lot of people live for many years in DC area without being engaged either as an employee of the federal government or in government contracting, even though it’s such a vibrant community, yeah, you know for that. And so tell me a little bit about the development of ESAC, so the two of you put it together and started focusing on life sciences, technology, that intersection. How did you end up as the president? How did the company grow and develop over the next

Anand Basu  7:29

year? So I joined so shine was the the owner and the principal of the company at that time, and I joined as a senior Weisz president at some point, Shine wanted to exit well before that we we were a fairly small company, and our big break came with a contract at CMS. When I started, like right after, maybe nine or 10 months after I took over, we got a big contract at CMS, which kind of propelled us in in that right direction, and that’s where we started seriously building, building the company out. And so right after that contract, the previous owner wanted to exit, and he wanted to get out, so we made sure that he exited, and I took over as president from him, and continued building the company. So so we got a lot of different so we expanded our footprint at the VA as well as at NIH, and so that that helped us grow a lot.

Susan Kearney  8:35

Yeah, what about some of the challenges you face as the company scaled from, you know, small to medium, from private or government contract, what Tell me about some of those.

Anand Basu  8:47

I think the rules and regulations that we were not familiar with that that kind of was a big challenge for us, all the accounting stuff that we had to take care of, all the different sort of far provisions that we had to the Federal Acquisition rules that we had to familiarize ourselves with being because earlier, we were just subcontractors, and it didn’t affect us that much. Once we became a prime contractor, we were introduced to us whole slew of reporting requirements, and you know, the usual billing and reporting requirements that come with government contracting, the accounting standards that we had to upgrade our accounting systems, we had to Get the proper accreditations like CMMI or all the other accreditations that are helpful in in getting new, newer contracts, that was one aspect of it and but I think that those are all sort of mechanical, sort of aspects of the business. But more importantly, I think there was the people aspect was, was a little bit more. More challenging than just, you know, because, because these the other challenges are morally formulaic. You know, people have done it before, and you know how, how you can get it done, but getting into large scale HR management systems and performance evaluate employee management, performance evaluations and all that thing hiring an HR person. We never had an HR person when we were a small company, so hiring your our first HR person was a lot of fun and and we found a lot of interesting candidates who brought their own ways of thinking about employee management. What we thought of would be something that will be cool will be shot down very quickly by the HR person. And, no, that doesn’t make sense, that that’s not quite kosher. So those were, those were some of the challenges, but I would say none of them. They were all good challenges. You know? They were all exciting things. We learned a lot of things, and it’s, it’s always fun to learn new things, like, you know, human capital management that you as an engineer, I as an engineer, wasn’t that familiar with, or wasn’t that excited about. But then you are actually forced to do, not forced, but you know you are. You have to do those things, and then you learn this whole new world of new regulations and new how to manage people, how to manage people without being their supervisor. You know how to manage a large company which has many projects, many, many different ways of running a project. How do you bring them all together in one uniform, unified way of doing business across the company? Those are, those are some of the challenges that we had. But like I said, none of them were very difficult or off putting. They were, they were all very to me, at least, they were very interesting and exciting.

Susan Kearney  11:58

Yeah. How did you, you know, being an engineer and then being in that position to be a leader and to deal with human capital issues. How would you say your leadership style might have changed as that company grew, as you got more expert in business building along with your technology expertise?

Anand Basu  12:22

Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting question. Before I So, so in your usual career progression, you start off as an engineer, you start coding, then you become like maybe a project manager, then you become a people manager, and then you you have larger responsibilities, maybe you have a portfolio of projects. So I think I skipped one of the generations in that, one of the steps in that, and I jumped from being a sort of technical manager directly to a sort of a larger scale, management at a larger scale. So couple of things in between. While I was at Celera, I actually got myself an MBA. I went to the Smith School of Business here at the University of Maryland, and did a part time MBA there and and while I was doing it, I may not have been that engaged in the program itself, which I hate to admit. But then once I got in the middle of these things, I tried looking back, and I realized, you know, there’s a lot of useful stuff that you can learn from these programs. And so that was a big realization, sort of a big help for me, when I started sort of leveraging some of those things that I had learned, and then at some point you have to change, sort of your management style, that that kind of happened almost by accident or almost, I don’t know how to put it, but suddenly I realized the value of leading from behind. While you’re an engineer and you’re doing things you want to be in the forefront. You want to be doing the things you want to take credit for. Oh, look at this great piece of software that I wrote, you have to sort of change your mindset from that individual contributor sort of thinking to to not this middle management thinking, but but to a higher level thinking where you’re constantly thinking, How do I make other people successful? Because that’s how these companies are successful. You can’t do it yourself. So, so getting into that sort of mindset, you know, how do I lead from behind? How do I make sure that people get the right credit? How do they how do I put them in front so that. There is, there is ownership in the business. There’s ownership in the in the company, and people feel part of a family that we wanted to bring together with Isa. So that was a long winded answer. Oh, but it was a good one.

Susan Kearney  15:15

Appreciate it, because I think sometimes I’ve worked in technology a lot, and sometimes those engineers that that lead businesses have a hard time figuring out how to adjust the way they work with people, and you seem to have figured it out in a very positive and kind of graceful way.

Anand Basu  15:34

Yeah, no, I was, I was very lucky in that I have always had good mentors. I had a I had a great boss when I was at AT and T at Bell Labs. I still remember her name was Donna, and she would give me these nuggets of advice once in a while, that at that time, I was like, What is she talking about? But then when I look back on it, I was like, that was really helpful. If I remember those things, I wouldn’t have made so many mistakes.

Susan Kearney  16:03

Yeah, that’s great. And so three years ago, you sold ESAC to ICF, where you’re presently a senior vice president. What looking back on that with the benefit of some time? How would you describe that process, and why do you think it was successful? What could other What do other business owners learn from your experience as they think about maybe selling their businesses so that they can be more successful?

Anand Basu  16:40

I would say, Hey, I had a great team. I had you guys supporting me, obviously. So that was a great help. And I had a good attorney. I had a good legal help, and and the whole sales team was excellent. They all came together. But more importantly, I think I made a decision very early on to be very transparent and open about the process with the employees, and to get them involved in the sales process right from the beginning, so that it’s not a surprise for them and be they learn from the experience, and they understand why we are doing something. Why are we selling that’s a very important thing to sort of communicate to employees at at the time, and I think that transparency helped a lot because they help. Actually, I’d like to give them equal credit for being able to position ourselves for a successful sale is their ability to present, their ability to come and talk to the prospective buyers and put their best foot forward. And so the only advice I would have for folks who are thinking about this is to be open and transparent with your employees. If your company is structured like that, where your biggest asset is your employees, if it’s a service which is a services company, is that, and so you have to treat those assets in the right way, and the right way to do that is to be open and transparent. And I’ve seen that behind every successful sale, the few that I have seen is the the employees themselves are engaged and and they see the value of being part of a larger company, being part of giving, given more opportunities. Because once we became part of ICF, there’s a whole world of, I mean, it’s a publicly traded, huge company was, like, 100 times bigger than us, at least maybe more. And so they saw the value. They saw the benefit of such an acquisition, such a merger, and so they were equally engaged in the process. And yeah, I think that would be my one advice that if anybody wanted advice,

Susan Kearney  19:02

yeah, thank you for sharing that, because that’s always a big conversation with an owner when they’re making that decision. Because in the one hand, they want to respect their team and they want them it wouldn’t be transparent. On the other hand, they’re concerned. If they’re transparent, people are going to freak out or leave or get distracted, or, you know, kind of all those other things. And so I really appreciate your experience, which was open transparency, because I know on the day that you closed your deal, all of your employees already had offer letters to join the new company. And in conversation with you, I learned that three years later, most of them are still there and thriving. And that’s really the sign of a great success. When a business sells absolutely, yeah, great. I love that. I love that. And so what were some of your proudest moments at ESAC as you were building a business? We talked about channel. Challenges. But what about the great stuff? What are some things that you were really proud

Anand Basu  20:04

of? I think whenever an employee said something good about the company, that how they loved working here, working at ESAC, how they actually agreed with our philosophy. We always wanted ESAC to be sort of a family, if a very family friendly company where there would be as much work life balance as possible, as as we can afford, in a in a consulting sort of environment. And so whenever I heard that, got that feedback, that made me really proud, thinking that, yeah, at least we were successful in having happy, satisfied employees. And then there’s the usual, you know, you win some big contracts. You’re very happy. Those are not, those are, you know, temporary happiness, things that come and go. But these, these kinds of moments where people tell you that, you know, I really love working here. I really enjoy working here. Those are some of the things that will stay with me forever. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  21:07

that’s great. Can we talk a little bit about you personally now for just a while? Yeah, first tell me, where were you raised? What was it like there, what lessons did you learn as a child or a young adult that you bring with you to the office?

Anand Basu  21:28

So I was, I was born in New Delhi, India. My parents were both. I were both academics. There. They were the farthest you could get from entrepreneurship or running a business. You could imagine they were professors and researchers. I’m the youngest of three, and so by the time I was, you know, in India, it’s a very different culture in the sense academics is very important, and your parents spend a lot of time and effort making sure that you’re properly educated and trained and headed in the right direction, you don’t kind of go off and do something that, in those days, wasn’t, wasn’t that cool. So I was the third of three children. I was the youngest of three, and by the time I was of that age when my parents had to worry about me. They had lost interest. I think my in what is he doing? What he’s doing. So I ended up doing I ended up leaving home early on and went off to a school far away from home. And when I graduated, I came to the US. So one of the things that my parents kind of taught me was to be nice to people all the time that that had stays has stayed with me. They were very nice people, very open and honest with people, and that’s what I learned from them. That’s the one thing that and the value of academics and the value of having a good education was always there, but underlying all that was this theme of be nice and open to people. And that’s what I’ve I’ve tried to tell that to my children all the time too, is the most redeeming important quality. I want to see in you guys

Susan Kearney  23:22

be nice to people. Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I’d love to meet your parents. They sound like terrific people. And so where did you get the entrepreneurial thing from then, if your parents didn’t have it, did we

Anand Basu  23:34

was, like I said earlier, it was almost accidental. I think just being there at the right place, at the right time. I don’t think there’s any other entrepreneur in our whole family, in our whole both sides of the family, maybe on my mother’s side, but now I have a cousin who’s my mother’s brother’s son, who’s also an entrepreneur, who’s a who’s a much bigger entrepreneur than I he’s he runs his own bank, essentially. So I think this generation kind of changed. I think it changed in this generation. But then again, both my kids are headed in the other direction. They’re they’re not going to be entrepreneurs. They made it simply clear, yeah, that was one of the reasons I sold the company, was there was no interest in continuing it as a family business,

Susan Kearney  24:21

yeah, so I guess maybe so you’re the oddball, and your parents and your kids are more the same, yeah, yeah, that’s great. What was your first job?

Anand Basu  24:32

Oh, my first job was, think, repairing computers. I used to take out boards on those old you remember those PCs that were as big as your desk, that had these huge, thick, fat PCs and a huge monitor sitting on top with floppy disks and like that. So I would go travel to different parts, repairing those PCs, change the motherboard, change the graphics. Hard or change the floppy drive, take that out, swap it with a new one, and try to debug things. Why isn’t it working? So that was it was an interesting, interesting job. Got to meet a lot of interesting people, yeah, who would complain about their computers all the time. And back in the 80s, those MS DOS based computers weren’t very reliable.

Susan Kearney  25:23

Anyways. That’s right, that’s right. I remember those days you get your screwdriver out and unscrew about eight screws and take that metal top off, and it was wide open in there, right? All the things, yeah, yeah. Can you tell me? I know people who run companies are pretty busy, you know, they’ve got a lot to do. And I’m wondering if there are any kind of daily rituals or life hacks that you developed to support your success professionally.

Anand Basu  25:56

One thing I have always done, and I keep doing, is, is I block like some my mornings every like three days a week, my calendar is always blocked from morning till about 10 o’clock, so I don’t take any meetings or any calls during that time three days. And I’ve done that for a very, very long time, just to give myself some time, some time to think, stop and think, read and and some people do emails and catch up with all that stuff. I don’t do that either during that time that that’s sort of my time, so I try to preserve some me time every day, every every other day, so three days a week, and that has helped me a lot, keeps you grounded, keeps you balanced, and then you catch up on all kinds of interesting things that are happening in the world of technology during those times that that’s that was my sort of look. I look forward to those times when I would read up what’s happening in Wired magazine or something like that, and keep up to date with the technologies. And so that stayed with me, even during when I transitioned to management and and not not give up that time. Yeah, and on a personal basis. I would take two vacations a year, every year, for sure, with my kids. So that was another thing that I always wanted to do, was to go. I have this, I have this travel bug, so I’m traveling. I love to travel. And so I would do take those vacations too.

Susan Kearney  27:40

So you found a way to to kind of like a double whammy, to have balance in your life and time for yourself while staying relevant in your field by some of that enjoyably reading and researching and so on. Yeah, exactly, yeah. That’s terrific. So I understand that you’re retiring from ICF soon, and my question is, what’s next for you?

Anand Basu  28:07

Um, do you know? I don’t. I recently learned of a new term applied to this scenario. I think, not a new term, but a new application of this term, called, you know, in computers, you go into a maintenance mode for some time. It’s not a reboot, it’s a maintenance mode. So I’m going to go into maintenance mode for a couple of months, I think, and take it easy, slow down, and then slowly wake up and then turn the maintenance mode off. And maybe by December, January, I’ll have something I don’t know what. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  28:50

I hope you get to travel during that time too. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that too. That’s great. So this is my last question. What advice would you give to your peers, owners, leaders of other middle market companies. You know the things that you’ve learned that you’d like to keep them from having to learn the hard way.

Anand Basu  29:17

An interesting question, What advice would I have? I’m not good at giving advice to people. You know that it’s just not me, but give it a shot. I think having a sort of, maybe a decision framework with what do you want to achieve the end so that you can, you can, sort of, if you’re faced with a question, you can use a frame, having a personal framework, to run your life. Sort of, where do you want to be from five years from today, or 10 years? From today, and having that end goal is, I think, very, it’s a very powerful way of running your business, or running your life, or running everything so, so you can, you always have this sort of, it’s not as mathematical as I’m some making it sound like, like, Okay, this x and y together, and the answer comes out in the end, not like that, but maybe having a goal to say that, okay, I need to exit in five years. What can I do now? What? How does that? What is this question? Specific question that I’m working on this specific issue that I have. What’s the impact of that on the exit that I want to have in five years? So something like that, even unconsciously, if you keep that in the back of your mind, and if you’re running a consulting company, if you’re running a people business, and always remember they are the most important asset that you ever have, and keeping them happy, open and transparent. Be as open as you can with them. And it will, it will go a long way. Trust me on that, that that is one thing I can definitely give an advice on, is be open, transparent and honest with your employees, especially if you’re running a consulting company.

Susan Kearney  31:28

Yeah, I think that’s a wonderful note to close on. On him. I love that. That’s been an experience of you. So I know you say that from the heart, and so thank you so much. It was real. It’s really great connecting with you today and getting a chance to have you share some things about your life and your work. I’m sure your your colleagues who have a chance to listen to or view the podcast will find it inspiring and also insightful. So I really appreciate it, and I will look forward to seeing what you do next.

Anand Basu  32:02

Thank you, Susan, it’s been my pleasure to talking to you. It was great fun. Just talking about things that you don’t think about most of the time

Susan Kearney  32:11

is always interesting. Yeah, I always learn something for sure. So we’re going to close out. This is the Growth + Exit podcast, and I’ve been talking with Anand Basu, the entrepreneur, successful business owner and soon to be on maintenance mode for a few months. Thanks. Anand,

Anand Basu  32:27

thank you, Susan.

Intro  32:35

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