Vantage Agora's back-office work for area firms sometimes misunderstood

 Sudhir Achar doesn't immediately get

offended at the occasional 

  person who says his company is little more

  than an outsourcer that

  wants to send jobs clear across the globe.

  He views such encounters as educational

opportunities.

But prod a little more and you'll witness the slight ire of a man who

 has had to defend himself and his back-office and manufacturing

firm, Vantage Agora, more than once.

"I'm an American business owner, so is my partner," Achar said this week from his Concord

Township home office. "I'm an American citizen and I pay taxes.

"The more money I make, whether I get the job done in Timbuktu or Parma, I'm paying taxes.

I'm paying actually more taxes than a lot of companies here."

But Achar finds far more people who want learn about what Vantage does, especially now that

cost cutting is a near necessity for most small and medium-sized businesses. For those,

particularly ones in the  IT, finance and health care sectors, Vantage offers data processing

 and entry, rating, quoting,Insurance IT support, policy issuance, logistics tracking, and customer services

like cancellations and returns. Much of that work is done in Achar's native country of India on the

 Bangalore campus of the PES School of Engineering. Meanwhile, the company's operations,

accounting, sales and marketing are handled both here and in Coppell, Texas, by Achar, some

of his hires and partner Harsha Chaturvedi, a childhood friend with whom he founded the company in

2004. From trepidation to concerns over costs, Achar knows his company's services can be a tough sell.

Still, he points to those same worries as the reasons why current clients have signed on and

why others should consider it.

"Everybody shops at Walmart, they don't shop at Nordstrom's because of the money —

it's the same thing with companies," he said. "We perform the back-office services, while

they do the front end. ... We execute to their strategy, like an extension of their department.

"We can save you 30 to 40 percent, easily."

The services are handled in Bangalore while business owners here are sleeping. It's also done

 on the client's servers, not Vantage's, by about 55 employees. Though the company became

 incorporated six years ago, it has only received full-time attention from its owners in the past

couple of years. Prior to that, he served as director of quality assurance for Mayfield Heights-based

DATATRAK. All the while, he split duties between that company and his own. Achar networked

his way to Vantage's first client, which was a big-name one: Eaton Corp.'s Hydraulics unit.

Since then, Vantage has secured about a dozen regular clients.

"We came to the U.S. to become entrepreneurs," he said. "America is known for two great things:

 inspiration and inventions. That's what we need to push.

"What we do is something like partnering. We're not just service providers."

Achar said he has had exploratory talks about his company's services with the likes of Classic Auto

 Group and Cuyahoga Community College.

To land recognizable clients like that, Achar said the company will continue making moves to gain

the trust of those in the markets he wants. One example is attaining SAS 70 certification for auditing

compliance.

To land others, it still may come down to dispelling myths about the "O" word. Pointing out examples

of foreign-made products we all use and the global manner in which most successful businesses have

expanded are a couple ways he quells uneasiness about outsourcing.

"We get bananas from Mexico, so can we stop eating them," he asked. "Apple (Inc.) is fantastic with

inventions, but they went to China. The iPad I got is from China, so should I walk away? No.

"Why is Apple doing that? Because of cost."

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EDITOR’s NOTE: To schedule interviews before, during and after the IIABL Annual Convention

 with Arvind Gopalakrishnan or Sudhir Achar, contact Ms. Judy Cerne or Ms. Laura Lytle at McKinney 

Advertising & Public Relations at +1 (216) 621-5133 or by e-mail (Contact Vantage Agora).