R Vijay Kumar, chairman and managing director of Gemini Communications, is a graduate in mathematics. It’s no surprise then that he should be a whiz in finance. And, the way he puts it, for his company it’s the finance that came before the plans. After the money was raised, the imperatives of meeting investors’ expectations forced Gemini on the path of success. “We were faced with the responsibility of handling a few crores,” says Kumar. He delivered.

“When I try to trace back where my business journey started, I can vividly remember the day in late 1994 when a few friends, my brother Ram — who was then manufacturing computer monitors in a small way — and I were sitting together chatting,” says Kumar.

The subjects were mundane — “what boys of 22-24 would talk about”. Continues Kumar, “The topic shifted to making it big in business. Just a few days earlier, I had been told that to be a big company, you have to raise money from the market; you must go in for an IPO (initial public offer). I was all of 22 then and naively convinced that I had found the escalator to making it big. ‘We must go public,’ I told my brother. I started working on it.” By the end of November 1995, they went public.

“When the IPO was fully subscribed and the congratulations started rolling in, the realisation dawned. We were just 22 and 24. Our parents had financially struggled to give us the best they could (and there was no safety net).” Gemini now had to deliver on the hopes of thousands of investors.

It was quite a struggle. There was some sort of a business plan in place, but it was weak. “With no one to tell us about strategy or guide us, we went about doing things our own way,” says Kumar. “Often, this may not have been the best way. We faced more problems than we had ever dreamt of. But when the going wasn’t great, I would fall back on the inheritance our parents had given us — the inheritance of energy, perseverance and attitude.

By the turn of 1998, they had seen many troughs and were pushed to the brink. There were several times Kumar contemplated giving up. But then he thought of his parents and continued.

“This was the time when B. Sree Krishna joined us to add one more committed hand in our swim against the tide. By the end of the year, we saw signs of turning around. Slowly, yet surely, we finally did; from 1999 till now, there has been no looking back and we have been growing at an average rate of over 50 per cent, year on year.”

What Kumar considers one of the key strengths of this networking company is the loyalty the staff has shown. Even during the worst of days, the attrition rate was low. Some 60 per cent of the people who were with them in 1998 are still there, giving the company stability, balance and leadership choices.

“I recognise and realise now that the more I share with people, the more I grow. It is not just sharing wealth, it is also sharing responsibility, authority and independence. People stuck with us because we continuously challenged their intellect. We made them accept responsibilities, at times prematurely, making them feel important and challenged. We continue to adopt the same mantra. Though we have not met with 100 per cent success here, and quite obviously so, I have been surprised many times at the levels people will scale up to perform when given the authority and trust to do so.”

Today, they have created four CEOs and 20-odd business heads. “We call them our intrapreneur team. Intrapreneurship in our parlance means an entrepreneur within an enterprise. All our intrapreneurs have been with us for six years or more and there is a strong bond of trust and friendship.” Money, according to Kumar, has become just a by-product of this success. “I read somewhere that every great invention happened by accident. We came into this business by accident. But our future will not be an accident.”

It is not written in the stars that Gemini will succeed; it is deeply etched in the determination of the people who work for the company.

Based on a conversation with Shubhobroto Ghosh in Calcutta