Growing Aurora biz reaches worldwide
By Brandon Johansson
The Aurora Sentinel
AURORA | Early this month, TouchStar announced record first-quarter sales of $7.9 million.
The first quarter sales marked a 31 percent increase over the first quarter in 2007.
"We have a unique opportunity," Bederman said of the company that started in an Aurora garage in the late 1990s. "To go from a company with zero income to a company with billion-dollar revenues."
TouchStar is ranked No. 1,540 on Inc.com's list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the world.
Bederman said the company, which has about 300 employees worldwide, 100 of them at its Aurora headquarters, plans to go public within the next 30 months. The company plans to double its current revenue before going public.
According to Inc.com, the company has grown 238 percent since its founding and in 2006 had revenues of $15.9 million, up from $4.8 million in 2003.
With those sales numbers and eight offices worldwide, TouchStar has come a long way from where it was less than a decade ago.
But Bederman said the company has goals that extend beyond the balance sheets.
"We have a largess, but at the same time we have an interest in contributing back to the world as best we can," he said.
Last year, TouchStar launched Commerce For Change, a nonprofit group that helps bring call centers to impoverished parts of the developing world.
Bederman said call centers are good for jobs in the developing world because they require little space and little infrastructure.
"We believe that builds a middle class for those countries and the best protection for any country, especially developing countries, is to build their middle class," he said.
Brian Smits, global director of marketing for TouchStar and director of Commerce For Change, said the organization's goal is "peace and prosperity through commerce."
"If people are doing business together, it creates economic opportunity, and people are less likely to be in conflict," Smits said.
Smits and Bederman will be going to United Nations headquarters in New York City next month to meet with world leaders and discuss the program, Smits said.
Bederman said much of the company's success can be credited to the work they have done oversees.
While a handful of industries - such as collections agencies or telecom providers - rely on call centers to a far greater extent now than they did when TouchStar started, Bederman said the company's success wasn't just a matter of entering the call center business at the right time.
"When I got into the business, it was a mature market," Bederman said. "I walked into an industry where I had a ton of competitors and they had all been around for a long time."
After the company got some traction domestically, Bederman said they looked to expand to other parts of the world.
At first, the international market seemed just as difficult as the domestic market, Bederman said, but the company was able to find a niche and compete well overseas with bigger companies.
"When we went outside the country, our competitors we found were already there," he said. "The difference was that we could appear more mature there. Here where it was clear we were the new guy on the block, there we could create a perception that said 'we are one of the guys.'"
Now, through natural growth and the acquisition of a few competitors, TouchStar has offices on several continents, including Mexico City, Manchester, England and Mumbai, India.
Having a presence around the world has been a key to the company's success, Bederman said.
"How do you manage a remote business?" he said. "You move there, you open an office there."
Bederman said the company is probably one of the biggest in Aurora and has plans to continue to grow, but despite its success around the world, the company has no intention of leaving its Aurora roots.
"Our goal is to be one of the largest companies in the world," he said. "And we'll stay here based in Aurora."
