Chris Robinson’s Indian adventure began while he was watching a 2003 Newsnight programme on outsourcing in India.
The programme showed young Indian call centre workers, enthusiastically selling office products over the phone to customers overseas. It was clear to Robinson that these individuals were not only excited and motivated, but highly educated too. He wondered what would happen if you gave such individuals more rewarding work if you moved them up the ladder and gave them more complex business tasks to carry out.
At the time, Robinson and his business partners in a medical recruitment company JCJ Ltd were wondering where to site their second office. Robinson, a KPMG-trained chartered accountant, and his partners, former clients of his from his days as an audit partner of a Yorkshire management consultancy, had bought the locum agency in October 2002 and the business was growing fast.
Armed with his bright idea that placing locum doctors into hospitals and medical practices could be done as readily from the Indian subcontinent as it could from Skipton Robinson set about researching locations, finding premises and a local partner and employing his first 15 staff tasks he achieved by and large over the phone.
The groundwork for the Indian office of the medical agency came together by mid-2003, and the company’s managing director was preparing to leave England to spend four months in Ahmedabad overseeing the business’s first phase. Unfortunately, she fell ill, and so a problem arose. The overseas venture was already underway and needed management input. Robinson’s fellow directors felt that he was the obvious candidate to replace their ailing MD. ‘It was a case of “This was your bright idea; off you go”,’ he says.
Eastern promise
It took him two days for him to fall in love with India, Robinson says, and he fell heavily. ‘I just loved it. I loved the people, loved the excitement of the place. So I called my wife and explained that when I returned to England I wanted to talk to her about moving to India for a couple of years. When she started speaking to me again she agreed to come out and look.’ A two-week holiday in January 2004 succeeded in winning her over to the radical move and in July the couple and their three sons aged eight, five and two, began a three-year stay.
By the time Robinson arrived in India, the business focus was already beginning to change. The medical recruitment business had attracted a series of compelling offers and by the end of 2003 had been sold, but with a two-year earn out. Robinson found himself looking for new opportunities. ‘Out there, I talked to a lot of CAs and found we spoke the same language,’ he says. ‘Being a former colony there are a lot of similarities in education and business practice. There’s a Companies House, and India’s company law is structured very similarly, for instance.’
So his next ‘what if?’ led him to explore outsourced accountancy services. QX, which stands for quality and excellence, opened its actual and virtual doors with five chartered accountants, four of whom are still with the firm, and an initial focus on payroll work.
Keen to overcome homegrown objections to outsourcing accountancy work to India, Robinson focused on employing the brightest CAs he could find and then bringing them on secondment to the UK, not just to learn the firm’s procedures, but to gain a greater understanding of UK culture. One of outsourcing’s high-profile failures, Network Rail Enquiries, bit the dust, Robinson believes, because its operators were simply not familiar with the UK’s geography and vernacular. If client companies were to be comfortable with the arrangement, they needed to feel at home with QX staff. ‘It helps with the cultural awareness and that helps build a better service,’ says Robinson.
One of the objections to outsourcing is that it over-emphasises cost-cutting in order to make returns. Robinson’s answer is quite simply that he ‘doesn’t do cheap’: employing CAs, using high quality telephony links to ensure that calls between the UK and India aren’t afflicted by delays, clicks or fuzzy lines.It’s all there to provide a reassuringly high level of service.
He’s also adamant that QX has staff in sufficient numbers to cover the workload, with the three-level peer review and sign off that people are used to in the UK. The wage differential, he says, enables him to put the right number of staff on the job. ‘The Indian team allows for attention to detail. This is not something we sell as a cheap product.The wage arbitration in India means we can afford to employ the best people and pay them the best rates. We use it to our advantage.’
From payroll, which has the advantage of being easily defined and delegated, the firm expanded its offering to accounts preparation and management accounts. Management accounts, says Robinson, is attractive because it is a regular service, but it is more difficult from a marketing point of view. ‘Really the focus of this business is towards accountancy practices,’ he says.
Staff onside
His aim is to persuade managing partners that not only do Indian accountants do the work to a high standard, they also free up management time, enabling partnerships to focus on their own business development. And that’s a benefit that should be passed right through clients’ practices. ‘If the staff don’t buy into it, it won’t work,’ he says. ‘They have to understand that it’s more rewarding to be doing a business plan than a bank reconciliation.’
Outsourced services may also provide the means for small and mid-tier firms to get over the staff retention hurdle, he believes. ‘A lot of newly qualifieds move on,’ he says. ‘Staff retention in the medium and small firms is a big issue. Quite often in peak times they don’t have the staff base.’
In fact, losing a member of staff or two is often the prompt for small firms to approach an outsourcer, but the quality controls at QX make this model more than just a means of solving a staffing crisis, he argues.
‘It’s often only when they get further into the process that they see the advantage of the peer review.’
QX has certainly seen strong growth. From five chartered accountants plus a small management team in 2003, it has grown to just under 100 members of staff. In April last year, Robinson took on an Indian business development manager, Ravi Kurani.
Kurani has spent the last six years working in business process outsourcing in India, with two years in accountancy outsourcing, and since he joined QX, the business has acquired 15 accounting firms as clients.
Robinson wants to double in size over the next 18 months. The firm recruits people most months and puts an emphasis on having a high ratio of qualified CAs in order to maintain the peer review. There’s a rigorous testing process to assess candidates’ technical abilities and their English language skills.
Other than technical ability, he’s not big on rules in the workplace and initially struggled to prevent staff from addressing him as ‘sir’, but largely, the cultural mix is a happy one. There’s an Indian work ethic and enthusiasm with a relaxed English management style.
‘If you employ intelligent, motivated, well-educated people you don’t have to go around waving a big stick and that’s not always the case in India.’
Robinson’s choice of location was something of a happy accident. At the time of his arrival, Admedabad, also known as the biggest village in the world at five million people, only had two buildings with internet connectivity of sufficient quality for an outsourcing business and the state of Gujurat was heavily criticised for its failure to ride the first wave of IT and communications outsourcing that had been transforming the country’s economy. But there is something to be said for avoiding the mistakes of early entrants into any new industry. Gujurat is now seen as the powerhouse of India with 12% growth per year compared 9-10% for the country as a whole, Robinson points out.
On a personal level, his love for the country shows no sign of abating. As the business expands, he continues to divide his time between the firm’s UK base in Skipton and Admedabad. From schooling, to travel, to meeting local people the three years spent in India have also been fantastic for his family, he says, turning three young boys into seasoned travellers. And all, he maintains, quite by chance. ‘If someone had said to me five years ago that I’d be working in India, I would have thought they were mad.’
Positive change
For many people, suggesting that routine work should be outsourced to India is tantamount to handing them their P45.
For Robinson, the key to success lies persuading people that if routine jobs can be done cost-effectively elsewhere, their own jobs can develop along more fruitful lines - for themselves, for their clients and ultimately to the benefit of their practices.
Clients must encourage their employees to see the move as one that will enable them to move up the value chain. 'You've got to add more value to clients. Without staff buy-in it won't work.'
To read the CLIENT'S VIEW, click on the next page
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