Vinay Kumar and Poornima, Founders, V- Solutions

Vinay Kumar is not the average engineering student. This over-achieving ambitious 20-year old, along with his friend who is pursuing post graduation in marketing and management started a web design and development company – V Solutions – and they intend to hire through the recession that will leave the “big players staring” at them in awe.

“V Solutions is a Web design and development company founded by me and my friend Poornima, while we were still in college. We undertake orders ranging from simple webpage design to large portal development. We also deal with online application development and provide maintenance services to existing sites. Also, we have the latest tools and technology at our disposal and always keep ourselves updated with the current trend.” The first things you might notice about Vinay are his exuberance and confidence, and he insists that, “What makes us unique is that from the time you start to interact with us, you will realize the fact that experience can easily and effectively be replaced by passion and expertise.”

How did Vinay and Poornima reach the decision of taking up entrepreneurship at such a young age? Vinay says, “I might be studying engineering but I am basically a salesman at heart, and I love coding PHP. So, I pitched this plan to Poornima and she immediately got me my first order of about. Then we found out that we formed a good team and perhaps it was time we did something different from other people. And here we are today.” V Solutions might be a result of their combined vision and ambition, but how can entrepreneurship on such scale be balanced with academia to get optimum results from both? “I am in college from morning to evening and I come to office in the evening. I feel balancing my student life and my work has been the biggest challenge so far. But I have been successfully managing it for two years by doing only one thing: loving both.”

Vinay also recognises the value of reticence, despite his youthful exuberance which he claims had landed him in a difficult situation once. “I think the biggest mistake I have made so far was while we were being featured in Bangalore Mirror and Deccan Chronicle, out of sheer excitement, I blurted out the profit figures and turnover which affected our business for some months. As a result, we had to answer quite a few questions by friends and family.” But this is not to say that exuberance gets the better of Vinay on such occasions, because they have been consistently featured in the mainstream media for their efforts. “We have been featured in Bangalore Mirror, which in terms of circulation is Bangalore's second largest newspaper. Deccan Chronicle has also featured us. My opinions on hiring during recession have been published in a local magazine called Citizen Matters. Poornima is a business counsellor with AWAKE (a women entrepreneurs organization). We also have numerous testimonials from our clients appreciating our work ... We believe that getting featured in English newspapers or getting some famous names in our list of client list are achievements. The biggest achievement so far has been giving employment opportunity to talented but disabled people, and we just started last month by recruiting one such person. We are really proud of it.”

Vinay claims that the biggest advantage in working with them is that they are very young, and extremely willing to learn. Coupled with this willingness to learn is the mature realisation that each customer has distinct needs, and therefore their work process remains very flexible, and this enables them to accomodate multiple customers and multiple needs. Further, they hold their employees in very high regard; “Though they are all engineers and graduates and much older than us, they respect us, and we reciprocate the same.” They also ensure that their relationship with a particular customer is not confined to a single order, and this is made possible through high quality work and consolidation of existing relationships.

Vinay’s future plans include scaling up “by making franchisees throughout the country. We have already started on this, and right now have about fifteen associates. We plan to set up physical presence in Singapore, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and Middle East in the next 5 years. We have plans to scale up to about 500 employees, expand our service range by taking on IT consultancy.” His vision for 2010 is to commence their expansion plans, and acquire a building where they can move their office.

Yourstory wishes Vinay and Poornima the very best for future endeavours.