Here is an interview with Manjeet Dhariwal, CEO of Netsmartz Inc.

How does it feel to make the Top 100 for the first time?
It was good. It was the first time we applied, and we were really anxious to see where we were going to be. We knew we were going to be on there, we just didn't know where.

Think you'll make it again this year?
Actually, we missed applying this year. We thought it was in August and they said the deadline was the month before. And we said, "Aww, can we still get it in?" because we did phenomenal this year, but they said rules are rules.

Ouch. Well, you don't have to tell me about what a pain deadlines can be.

Yeah, but it's fine. We'll be on next year.

How did the company get started?
It's actually a pretty fun story. I went to RIT and then Simon School at University of Rochester and then worked in the telecom space for Frontier and Global Crossing.

We had a couple good product ideas so we started this company in 1999. It was really three people that just started with an idea, and we had a good product — it was an information mapping product — and a fair amount of luck, and it took off and started doing well, and we got to about 45 employees in about a year.

Three to 45 in a year. That's some fast growth.
To be honest, I think most of us were so young that we didn't know what the hell we were doing, but we were having fun. As the dot-com bubble started to burst, we started to see that business and a bunch of other activities starting to slow down. We were determined to succeed and we knew we had to lower our cost of development, so that's when we opened up an office in India and started working through in that manner.

But those early years were tough. I didn't take a paycheck for a year and half. But they were fun times because there was so much energy.

Today as we stand, we have Netsmartz as a global company, we have over 400 employees, and we've got four different lines of business that we're in, so we're not going away any time soon.

How are your revenues broken down among those four lines of business?
About 40 percent of the revenue comes from software development, about 30 percent comes through elearning, about 20 percent comes through Internet marketing and then the remainder comes from the products.

The products are a great avenue though, because once that starts to get popular, that revenue stream grows very quickly. You make the investment one time and then it's just a marketing expense afterwards.

Tell me about some of those products.
One of our products is called Docsmartz, which is a product you can buy for $30, and that's a product that will convert from Word to PDF and from PDF to Word, and then we've got a $40 product that people will buy to create logos. We sell thousands of these.

Then there's upper-end products which will run from $200 to $2,000, which will be business-proposal generation and so on, and then we've got products that are very high-end products which will start at a quarter-million dollars. Those didn't exist until last year.

We just introduced one last year for telecom companies that will run their entire operation. We developed that one and with a local company here called Fibertech, and it was a huge success, and now we're marketing that to other companies.

We're also on the brink of releasing a brand-new software solution that is going to allow for photo book printing and things of that nature for the digital marketplace. It's for printing companies and the like. So there's a lot of fun stuff happening.

As far as the service branches of the company, what makes Netsmartz stand out in the marketplace?
With the e-learning, we started that practice in 2001 and we partnered with a very good company called Ardent Learning. Along with them, we do all of the e-learning for a lot of large automotive companies like Volvo and Honda, and a lot of pharmaceutical companies.

Custom e-learning work in the early 2000s was very unique, so we got really good at it early on. Today, seven years later, we've got the processes down, we've got the templates down, we know the right balance of audio versus video versus text and what kind of questions work online versus what doesn't. So we got good at it and we got in at the right time.

How about for the Internet marketing? I imagine that's a pretty competitive industry.
Is it tough out there? Absolutely. But we've got a portfolio of things that we go out and show the clients, so the case studies that we have are pretty significant and that's what helps us win over other clients.

Now, most companies can come in and say exactly what I said, but having a significant work force in India will bring our costs down. Along with the expertise and high quality, if we're coming in at half the cost, that tends to help.

But we are a U.S. company which happens to have a branch in India, so all the intellectual property and all of the business property is protected working with us, and that's how we beat the companies that are purely India. So, it works on both angles. They come in much cheaper than us but they don't have the U.S. base and project managers and so forth. So we've seen growth in both areas. Our work force in India has grown but so has our work force in the U.S., and I expect they both will grow at the same rate.

How do you spend your time away from work?
Well, I have two very young children, a 2-year-old and a 2-month-old, so that's a lot of fun and takes up a lot of my time. The way the company is structured, I do tend to travel a lot and I take my family with me for most trips, so we try to sneak a little vacation in here or there.

And I enjoy golf. That's my stress reliever.

See for me, playing golf just elevates my stress.
Well you know, I got to a point where I got pretty good, and then I declined, but for a while I kept thinking I could get that good again. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to be a professional golfer.

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