When Implicit Beliefs Exceed Even the Best Plans

Walt Disney once said, “When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.” And that sentiment was exactly what drove Mahesh Vinayagam to pursue entrepreneurship.

He believed employees were not meant for monotonous, repetitive tasks — tasks that could easily be completed by a bot, freeing the team up to do knowledge work. Mahesh saw these tasks unnecessarily consuming up valuable hours, slowing productivity and eating into revenues. He believed there was a better way, so he set out to build it.

That belief eventually manifested itself as qBotica, an enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation provider. The idea for qBotica, however, came to Mahesh nearly a decade earlier after reading an article that predicted automation would become the future of outsourcing. At the time, he couldn’t see how this would be possible, but his intrigue drove him to study the subject.

Eventually, Mahesh decided to leave his corporate job to begin his own venture — and it was then the idea for qBotica resurfaced. And though the company has grown tremendously in a short time — even making it on the Inc. 5000 — Mahesh had several challenges to overcome along the way. One of which was unlearning from the corporate world.

Read on for more of Mahesh’s fascinating entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned.

What is qBotica?

qBotica is a robotic process automation firm. We help enterprises take the robots out of humans that are working in their offices. If you think about it, most humans work sort of robotically on their computers day in and day out. We take the robots out of the humans.

How did qBotica come to be?

I was in the software outsourcing world for nearly 20 years. About 10 years ago, a paper was published saying outsourcing was dead and would be replaced by automation. I was quite intrigued by it. If there are millions of humans doing the jobs across the world, how could it just be removed? I was intrigued by this thought and as I looked into it, realized, they’re doing what needs to be done. Most jobs are monotonous and that is what automation is trying to take.

In my previous firm, where I worked for 25 years, we trialed it. And when I wanted to start my entrepreneurial journey, I knew this was the path I would follow. When I quit the corporate career, I thought this idea was going to change the way that enterprises work. It’s a critical element of the future of work. So I followed that path.

How long did you spend building it prior to launching it?

It was really on a whim. When I quit, I wanted to move away from the corporate world. I made the decision to be an entrepreneur and I had two or three broad ideas. It was really diverse across the three topics but qBotica was one of the biggest ideas in my mind. I started working on it for probably four to five months in a library or a coffee shop, whichever place would give me free wifi. We worked on it full-time to come up with and strengthen ideas.

What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?

In the initial stages, it was unlearning my corporate career. I managed accounts with portfolios of hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis. The scale was very large which made me think doing this as an entrepreneur and getting the first million would be easy. There was also the struggle of having a small firm where you have to do everything. The initial challenges were understanding the rigor and structure of a small firm.

Another thing was starting at 40. You’re not a 20-year-old, launching a startup. You have a family and dependencies on finances. Overcoming that and being focused and persevering through the objections was the second challenge I had to face.

The third challenge was the newness of the idea and product we were trying to launch. The topic was new so promoting it and launching clients was a little tougher at first. I think even today, the biggest problem is acquiring new clients and making them believe in us.

What’s been one of the biggest contributing factors to the company’s growth?

Just being there to inspire all of the stakeholders and making them believe in the cause. I think as the founder, that’s the most important job. It goes further than employees, customers, and investors. For example, the employees’ families need to believe in it if a family member is going to shift their career to join a small company. That was a really important contribution that I made to our team.

What’s next for qBotica?

We have a strategic plan and part of that was getting customers who believed in us and committed to us long-term, so that’s been a huge win. This was something in the making for some time while we were trying to create a launchpad from which we could really grow.

We are going to come up with a managed services offering around intelligent document processing. That’s the key automation that we are working on. When I talked about taking robots out of humans, that’s more of a technology. What we really do is help automate processes that involve documents.

In an enterprise, the employees will look at their emails, open attachments, read the attachments, and then they take action. The actions could be orders, invoices, or letters. There are so many different forms of unstructured data. We are really carving the niche around reading documents on emails and extracting that information, and then taking the information onwards. We tell companies who are doing those processes within their enterprise to lift it and shift it to us and we can do it end to end at a fraction of the cost they are currently incurring.

Our next step is to take on the BPO world and those providers. This technology is what the BPO industry is talking about. I want to take that out of the equation and talk about transaction costs to help those enterprises get the benefit of a bot-based BPO. Humans are just there to help process things whenever they get stuck or there is an oversight, but they should not be performing the process. That’s where we’re heading, and we already have a deal signed for that. I’m hoping to grow that to a bigger extent.

What are you looking forward to with the StartupAZ Collective?

Sometimes you feel that you’re the only one facing a problem, but when you talk to others, you come to realize others have also faced the same problem, and they can share how they have solved it. I think that’s the most important thing.

Also, the comfort of sharing these things with somebody on the same level. It’s not like you’re going to share it with potential clients or company leaders. We’re meeting entrepreneurs who really understand what we’re going through. It’s not company-specific but they understand the personal side.

There’s obviously an emotional quotient to those things. You might not tell an employee what you are feeling on a specific day. As I said, the founder’s most important job is to give the belief and trust that things are all okay. If employees see some doubts, that’s going to be a problem. There definitely will be problems, but I think it’s better to discuss them with somebody who has been in the same position as me.

What advice would you give to other startup founders in Arizona?

Believe in whatever you are doing and give it all it takes. Don’t hold things back. Just go and do it. When I started the firm, I didn’t have a startup plan. I didn’t even get enrolled in an incubator or an accelerator or anything like that. Right now, I’m joining those programs, but at the beginning, I just did it on my own. There is a lot of information and groups that can give you a feel of things. If you believe in something, just do it and give it all it takes.