It dates back to December 2002, when Guna was still working for a UK-based company that wanted to shift part of its operations elsewhere. SEO was practically unheard of at the time, so the company promoted its site through directories, the main source of targeted traffic back then.
“When the CEO asked if I could set up a small operation back in India, I agreed, and we started with four people. Eventually we grew into a full range of SEO and digital marketing services, and moved into SEM in 2009, working directly with media agencies and Google.”
The early years weren’t easy. Poor internet connectivity, a shallow talent pool, high attrition and data theft were the biggest hurdles. We tied up with the right infrastructure partners, hired and trained talent, and paid well above the local average, backed by strong learning opportunities, profit sharing, bonuses and other incentives that brought attrition down significantly. Strict data-security measures and a dedicated internal security team helped curb data theft as we grew.
From 4 Staff to 110
At that point, our services were still largely manual labor. We won Top Coder honors on Rentacoder and stayed active on Warrior Forum, Digital Point Forum and other freelancing communities, which opened the door to a new wave of clients, corporate agencies and consultants. We scaled up, renting two more floors and opening offices in Chennai and Trivandrum, with a number of people working from home. We kept a standing policy of at least 15% of our workforce being people with physical disabilities, most of them working remotely.
Our beloved technical director, Karthik Nataraj, who contributed enormously to SIM’s growth, had muscular dystrophy and worked with us for years before he passed away. His work deserves to be remembered, and he was an exceptionally talented and motivated individual. I should also mention agencies like Rhinoforce, whose CEO, Serhat Pala, was a guide and mentor to me; he even had some of our sales pages written for us at no cost. We collaborated with a number of British and US content creation companies too, since clients wanted native English content.