Wow!

A 23 year old Delhi girl is one of Business Week's Asia's 25 Youngest Entrepreneurs.

Her company, DesiCrew, has a simple business idea - a distributed BPO model. Essentially, they find 10-15 educated people in rural areas, train them, and get them to do non-voice based BPO work (such as claims processing, data entry, transcription etc).

Companies find them useful since they are cheaper to work with, and face little attrition. Finding the right talent in each village is a bit of a problem, but the enterpreneur claims that with longer training, they do come up the skill curve. Connectivity is taken care of, since the small BPO shops are set up using technology and wireless kiosks from nLogue, another startup incubated at IIT Chennai.

Needless to say, it works well for the employees, since they can stay in their own village, and save more money than in a big city. And it bodes well for consumption in the countryside as well.

The company is 10 months old, and have 60 employed people already. They plan to ramp up to 200 people in a few months. I'm not sure how the economics work, but working out some rough numbers, I estimate that capital expenditure of Rs 50,000 would have to be incurred on each seat established (incl. computers, furniture, network equipment etc). Indian BPOs typically work at $4 / hour for low end work, so if one assumes half this rate as billing rate for the distributed BPO, it gives the company revenue of Rs 16,000 per month per employee. I think employees would be happy with Rs 6,000 - 8,000 per month as salary. Overheads, connectivity etc. would be another Rs 2,000 per seat per month. Essentially, you recover your capital investment within 8-9 months of employment, and after that it is all profits.

The girl in question had to work quite hard for this though! She quit her job in Delhi and camped out in Chennai and surrounding villages for 2 years, preparing groundwork for DesiCrew. She was helped by the incubation cell at IIT Chennai, of course, but it still must have taken enormous amounts of courage and belief in the time that it took to prepare.

Hats off to her!!