TEOCO at 30: A Conversation with Atul Jain, CEO

This year, as TEOCO celebrates its 30th anniversary, CEO Atul Jain shares his thoughts on this important business milestone, how the years have shaped his management style, and how he sees the future.

Looking back, what are you most proud of achieving in your first 30 years?

The word that comes to my mind is “Trust”. We have created a relationship of immense trust with key clients like T-Mobile and AT&T.

They not only trust us to deliver value from our existing solutions, but they also trust us to innovate and solve problems that we have not tackled before. This has allowed us to build new solutions and innovate in partnership with our clients.

Examples include our business analytics platform, SmartXDR™, which we built in partnership with Qwest (now Lumen). SmartCircuit™ is a solution we built in partnership with T-Mobile that manages and optimizes wholesale circuits. We’re also now processing utility invoices on their behalf and have added this feature to our cost management platform.

What are your key priorities for TEOCO’s next chapter in the coming decade?

On the technology front, we want to integrate emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, large language models, and Blockchain into all our solutions. We have always done an impressive job of improving our clients’ profitability through cost management, analytics, and automation. We now need to take it to yet another level.

On the leadership front, I want to see a greater adoption of the Servant Leadership style across all layers of the organization. This is a management philosophy that emphasizes collaboration, trust, empathy, and the ethical use of power. At TEOCO, we have built a strong culture of employee-ownership, but I would like to see it result in an unprecedented level of engagement that enables our team members to ‘ignite from within’ and burn brighter than they ever thought possible.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to build a successful software company over a long period?

My first piece of advice for any new entrepreneur is to focus on recurring revenues. This enables steady growth built upon a foundation of profitability. Getting to profitability may take a little longer initially, but once you do, ongoing profitability is relatively assured.

My second piece of advice is to avoid venture capital. Only take on expenses that you can support with your limited capital and customer revenue. It is amazing how much more careful one is when you are spending your own money as opposed to OPM (other people’s money). More than that, you can grow at a pace that works for your business as opposed to chasing growth that can bankrupt your business.

My final bit of advice would be to understand that failure is always just around the corner. Build strong relationships so that when tough times come, your team, your clients, and your business partners stand with you. Tough times will invariably come, and it is your resilience during these periods that defines you more than the good times.

How has TEOCO’s company culture evolved over the years to support its long-term success?

Very early in the life cycle of TEOCO, we defined our core purpose as “Advancing the practice of Principled Entrepreneurship.” In doing so, we declared that if we built a successful business but compromised our core values, it would be deemed a failure. This has provided me with a compass for how to behave during challenging times.

One of our leading core values is: Alignment with Employees, Clients, and the Community. Having this as a core value requires us to treat our employees and clients as partners. We build our success by creating success for them.

While the business has gone through many evolutions over the last 30 years, being true to our core purpose and core values has provided a stable foundation.

Over the past three decades we’ve made many acquisitions. This means we’ve had to face the challenge of integrating new employees who’ve been spread out across various countries around the world. We have also faced the financial challenges and pressures that come with taking on business debt, but we’ve never compromised on our empathy for people or our business ethics.

At TEOCO, we believe in sharing our business financials with all our employees globally. We also believe in owning up to our failures with our clients. We travel the extra mile to meet the needs of our clients without demanding additional compensation. This has led to the alignment that I talked about earlier.

We’ve succeeded not because we are perfect, but because our employees, our clients, and our stakeholders have not allowed us to fail.

For more information about TEOCO’s commitment to innovation, visit www.teoco.com/innovation/