Trust, thy name is Ma Foi

We hire somebody every five minutes,’’ says Hastha Krishnan, CEO, Ma Foi, Global Search Services Ltd. You walk into one of Ma Foi’s offices in Chennai and you feel the palpable energy of the organisation. Ma Foi is in the business of finding people jobs. ‘‘We don’t just head hunt, we do more than that,’’ smiles K Pandia Rajan, founder and. Managing Director of India’s largest Human Resources services provider. Ma Foi Management Consultants Ltd has grown in its 15 years of existence as a global one-stop shop for HR requirements. Today, the organisation has a strong presence across Europe, Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, and offers a diverse range of HR services and HR outsourcing solutions. It ended last year with a turnover of Rs 500 crore and employs 1500 people. Ma Foi registers a growth rate of 70 per cent each year.

Pandia Rajan and Ma Foi are the true representatives of the new India, India after liberalisation, where boundaries are disappearing and dynamic growth is not just a dream. Pandia Rajan, who was born in Vilambatti, a small village near Sivakasi (famous for match factories among other things) is what Indian entrepreneurship is all about. He saw opportunities opening up in West Asia, foreign firms grabbing those opportunities, and decided to strike out on his own, with little capital but huge ambition.

How did this man from a small village end up setting up this big HR firm? Pandia Rajan’s father worked in a match factory in Sivakasi. He passed away when his son was barely three months old. Pandia Rajan was brought up by his maternal grandfather who started a small match factory in his name. ‘‘The whole family worked. I come from a typical lower middle class family in these parts of the world. They were 45 members of the family who were involved in the business and we all lived in the same compound,’’ says Pandia Rajan.

The factory kept him in school. Always a good student, he went to the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore to study engineering. a rank holder till the last semester, he was also a bit of a rebel. He led the students on the College’s first ever strike, which became a violent mob scene and which also provided the turning point in his life. His interest turned to psychology. Guided by a senior, he did his MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur, in Industrial Relations. Not many engineers opted to do IR in the 80s. And IR was certainly not the subject aspiring entrepreneurs wanted to do. Pandia Rajan always knew he wanted to set up something on his own.

He started his career in Indian Oxygen before moving on to BOC India Ltd. He then worked directly with V Krishnamurthi, the former Chairman of BHEL, Sail and Maruti, and now Chairman of Nation Manufacturing Competitive Council, when he was setting up his IDEA group of companies. Pandia Rajan, who had to recruit 300 people in three months for IDEA for deputation for a Reliance project, started understanding the dynamics of recruiting and the concept of temporary staffing. He got a lot of exposure in recruiting for overseas software work (what was then known as body shopping). He travelled all over the world, placing people. He worked with Krishnamurthi for three years and says they were exciting times.

Pandia Rajan got married to Latha in 1989, a chartered accountant, also from a small village in Tirunelveli. Latha had set up a small all women’s audit firm, and together they decided to strike out on their own. He had been involved in recruiting skilled engineers for ONGC. During this time, when the Rawa oil field went up n flames, legendary fire fighter Red Adair was called in. People had to be deputed to work with Red. Pandia Rajan realised then that foreign HR firms were hiring people from India to be placed in Indian projects. And that they were making something like a million dollars per project. ‘‘This really triggered something in me,’’ says Pandia Rajan.

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