Challenging to work in a male-dominated business, says SEI founder.
By Deepak Chitnis
Prachee J. Devadas is the founder, president, and CEO of Synergy Enterprises, Inc. Started in 2003, Synergy grew from a two-person operation at a kitchen table into one of the most important small consultancy firms in the Washington, DC-metropolitan area, even earning Devadas several visits to the White House including a a meeting in the Oval Office as well. Ms. Devadas’ efforts as an enterprising small business owner were also recognized by President Barack Obama at a Rose Garden Press Conference in June of 2011.
Ms. Devadas earned her Bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pune before immigrating to the US. Before founding Synergy, she worked for several small businesses in various management capacities. She has received Distinguished Service Awards from the National Association of Professional Asian American Women in 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2002. She is also actively involved in several charities in and around the nation’s capital, which she speaks about in more detail below.
In this interview with The American Bazaar, Ms. Devadas speaks candidly about several timely topics, including her arduous climb to get to where she is today, the importance of businesses stepping up to the plate for charitable causes, and the future of India and its IT pursuits given where the country is today.
Synergy began as a two-person start-up, and eventually grew into a company with over 100 employees. With so many IT and consultancy companies out there, particularly in the DC-metro area, how did you manage to grow so quickly and successfully? What factors were most critical to this?
I think the most important thing is having a very solid infrastructure from the get-go, and always be scale-able so you are ready when you bid on contracts and are successful. The initial investment has to be for the long-term. You have to realize you’re in this business for the long haul, not for a quick short-term period – so you make the right investments up front, in both infrastructure and people. Did that cause me to have a lot of heartburn and sleepless nights? Yes, since I had basically taken a mortgage on my house to start the company because no bank would lend my startup company any money. It was a huge risk, but it was a calculated risk, and it paid off.
The second thing is being very, very client-centric. I know everyone says their company is “client-focused,” but are they? When it comes to being client-focused, you have to truly ask yourself “what can I provide for my client more extensively, more efficiently and with less cost than my competitor?” One should always be looking out to see what are innovative ways of thinking for each client, each project. For example, something that we may be doing in one NIH [National Institutes of Health] institute may not be the best thing to do in another institute. Because we fully understand the cultures of our clients we are able to create something uniquely suited to their needs. Customizing your product to meet the clients’ evolving needs is critical.
The third and most important thing is to be involved on a day-to-day basis. Getting a contract is just the beginning of what you have to do. Your performance and your relationship with the client–making sure your clients and your own consultants’ needs are met–are the most important things to keep in mind. And that requires a lot of hard work and long nights, and one has to be prepared to do that.
You and your company were singled out by President Barack Obama for your work, and you were even present at the White House press conference in which President Obama spoke about you and Synergy – can you tell us how that came about?
Ever since I got into small business, I’ve believed that small businesses are very underappreciated for their contributions to the community and society. We not only make money for ourselves and compete with the big guys, but we also give back in a big way to the community. So in 2008, I was very active in working with the SBA [Small Business Administration] and [was] talking to them about different programs, things that needed to be reviewed such as NAICS codes, what was the government doing about certain issues related to minority owned and woman owned businesses, and I guess that kind of got me on [SBA’s] radar.
After the election, during the transition, President Bush’s acting director of the SBA invited some small business owners, including me, for meetings with the SBA. So the Obama administration got to know that I am a small business owner who also cares about the small business community and its role in the economy. In 2009, I was nominated and then selected as the Business Person of the Year for the Washington, DC-metropolitan area. This is not just based on how much we grow business, and the innovative technologies we offer as a small business, but overall, what we contribute to society and to the community. So as a result of having received that honor, I was invited along with other similar recipients to the White House. Then again, in 2010, the SBA was looking at area small businesses that had been able to sustain their businesses and grow them during those difficult economic times, while still giving back to the community. I got a call and I was invited to the White House.
Before you began Synergy, you worked for many different smaller companies – please talk about what those companies were, what they did, and what skills you picked up that helped you with starting and growing Synergy.
Well one of the most important things I can tell you is what you learn as an employee is what NOT to do as an employer. And I’m saying that from the perspective of a small business minority woman employee. In this world, this age, it is really quite shocking that there are still biases and pre-conceived notions about minority women, and especially those who do not have very advanced degrees or levels of education. The bias is basically “how much is that [kind of] person really going to know?” And it was a mold that I had to break out of. When you come across those biases and those attitudes, you learn what not to do. You learn to treat people with due respect for who they are and what they bring to the table, regardless of their ethnic or gender background.
The other thing I learned was that in most companies I was in, very few owners ever made an effort to get out of their office and to show their faces – to their staff or their clients. The lack of involvement from the top management, especially the owners, was something that did not agree with my way of doing business. But I understand that it has worked for many employers. I’m not saying that my way is the only way to ensure success, since there are certainly many business owners who just don’t need to be involved on a day-to-day basis. But it’s something that I need to do, and I learned that during my time with those other businesses.
As a female CEO of an IT start-up, can you comment on the state of gender diversity in your field? What kinds of adversity have you faced along the way in this regard? Have you faced adversity as an Indian American CEO?
A tremendous amount. There have been a lot with the gender issues. As a rule, I find that many, perhaps most, male business owners are extremely uncomfortable working with a woman [who is a] business owner. Unless she has a Ph.D. or is a medical doctor or she has an advanced IT degree of some sort, that’s how it is. It seems that men just prefer to work with business owners who are men. It is a very male-oriented field. As a woman, I often feel that male owners start with an attitude that says “oh you must be providing very soft services – like conference management what would you know about statistical evaluation programs or designing a highly secure interactive online training tool?” as an example.
Of course, I have found that the best way to turn that way of thinking around is not just by talking but by producing results. I’m not going to say that it’s been absolutely wonderful and that people have been very accepting – no, they have not. And unfortunately, it sometimes seems that the more successful you [as a woman] become, the more men feel threatened. And that’s not just with me; there are many women business owners who are very successful and they still have these issues.
Are these biases insurmountable? No, not at all. They can be overcome if you represent real value. If you have a strong set of skills and experience to offer, then biases tend to fade away because you now bring tremendous value.
Your company focuses a lot of its resources on the public health and public education sectors – why is this? Do you feel more importantly about these sectors than others, and if so, why?
Absolutely. We truly are committed to the betterment of society and the community as a whole, and we know that public health and public education are of paramount importance, not just on a local scale but on a national scale as well. Our staff is very passionate about pursuing these areas, and we strive to engage and to improve policies and programs on local, community, state and federal levels. We’re not interested in simply placing people here and there to do IT coding, we’re here to truly make a difference. Some of the programs we evaluate involve helping people with disabilities, people who are new English language learners, students in magnet school programs, people in military families, and so on. We have several experts on staff who are very well versed in a variety of such issues, and are able to help us in those areas. So we’re invested in this, and we’re here to make a difference.
In addition to your work in the IT field, you’ve done a lot of work with NGOs and charities in both India and the US – can you talk about what kinds of work you’ve done in this arena and why working with charities and NGOs is such an important pursuit for you and your company?
We’ve been doing quite a lot. It is an important part of who we are. One of the most important members of the Synergy family, a real mentor in the early years, was Glen Fischer. He was deeply committed to sharing his gifts to help others and improve our communities. Each year we honor his memory with an award to an employee who gives in the way that Glen did. Members of our staff do remarkable and generous things, because that’s an important part of who they are. For example, one of our division directors along with his wife have started a library in Mumbai, and also started a very small arts school for underprivileged, at-risk children in the Dharavi slum there. And this is totally on his own; even before he and I met, he was already doing this, and Synergy has now been helping him with his projects and with the projects that mean so much to other staff members. I am on the board of some charitable organizations here in the nation’s capital, one of which deals directly with homeless children and finding foster families for them. For the past several years we’ve bought pizza every Thursday for children at some of these shelters, just to sort of give them some happiness and break their routine. Synergy buys them school supplies like backpacks and even computers, as well. We do some charity work with NIH, providing support for terminally ill children being treated at their centers. That’s just some of what we do; we try to spread our efforts and our dollars as best as we can, for the people who need them the most.
As a female business owner of an IT company, how do you feel about the fact that girls often stay away from STEM fields? Does Synergy and the other organizations it works with do any work in regards to encouraging girls to tackle STEM-based career paths?
Unfortunately, we haven’t quite focused our work in the public domain in that particular area. But honestly, at least in my experience, I’ve been seeing a lot of women getting involved in the IT field. So I’m actually encouraged to see that this is happening. In fact, there is very little recourse – unless you want to go into the softer sciences, as in providing services rather than doing qualitative or quantitative research – to go into any field these days and not have some solid understanding of IT.
With cloud computing becoming an increasingly indispensable technology for both professional and consumer-level devices, do you ever worry about the safety of information that is kept “in the cloud?” Do you do a lot of work with cloud-based technology?
I think that, unfortunately, nothing is truly 100% safe. We can rely on the experts that we contract with to help us with cloud computing but in my opinion, the information is as safe as it’s allowed to be on that given day. People make technology, so if smart people can build it, there’s always going to be smart people who can hack into it, too. And that’s just the way it has been. No matter how secure something may be, all it takes is one person to hack into it, so there’s always a human element that can compromise something.
Small businesses across the nations have been feeling the effects the recently launched Obamacare, many in a negative way. How has Obamacare affected Synergy? Since your company works frequently with other firms in the healthcare industry, can you comment on the effects that Obamacare has had thus far?
I’d rather not comment. All I’ll say is that I hope it gets off the ground and works the way it’s supposed to.
With comprehensive immigration reform floundering in Congress at the moment, do you think that it will ever get passed? Specifically, as an IT professional, what are your views on the bill formerly known as the “Gang of Eight” bill, and its provisions regarding highly skilled IT workers from India coming to the US?
Again, I’d rather not comment.
Going off the immigration topic, do you think that the age of outsourcing is over in America, and that we’ve now entered an age of “insourcing?”
Insourcing and outsourcing have two different connotations in my field. We’re a federal government contractor, and so we have always been prohibited from outsourcing our work to other countries. Because the contracts are being paid for by federal and taxpayer dollars, we need to keep the jobs in America. So outsourcing has never really affected us [at Synergy]. But the other connotation is to ask, is the federal government now going to reduce the number of contracts that they’ll give out because they want to insource, they want to use their own federal staff to do the work? Then yes, we will obviously get affected, as will any other business, large or small.
Bangalore has become a new IT haven – do you agree with the perception that Bangalore will become the new Silicon Valley?
I honestly think it already has become that to a great extent. What I am really concerned about is the infrastructure in India, and its ability to support and sustain the kind of growth India is experiencing. I’m also concerned about India maintaining its competitive edge from a cost-pricing standpoint. And the other thing is that for any [Indian] city to become the next Silicon Valley, the innovations must be in-born to India. India can’t just be the implementer; it has to be the innovator as well. And I think that that is happening, but it’s not happening as much as it should be.
So what do you have to say about the reports indicating that China is doing more for IT development than India is?
Well, that seems to be the case, and people wouldn’t be making those comments if they didn’t feel the same way. So I think India needs to really invest more in R&D [Research and Development], in innovation, and must also be able to commercialize those innovations on a large-scale. A lot of times you’ll hear about an innovative technology in a small, remote part of India, but most people will never hear about it because it hasn’t been commercialized. The government in India really needs to back these innovations, but I think the red tape there and the way the government is set up, it’s not as easy as it is over here.
A trend that’s been championed by Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! is to have CEOs basically work from home – do you have any thoughts on this, especially since you’ve said how much you value a hand-on approach by CEOs?
The funny part is that she’s the same person who said women should be coming in [to the office] everyday, and not doing too much tele-working. But I disagree, I think the CEO really needs to make their presence felt and really know what’s going on within their company. It’s also a huge staff motivator, and it helps a CEO connect to their employees and learn. I always interact with my staff, ask them questions about what they’re doing, what we could do better, and I find a lot of that invaluable.