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Suchit Bachalli, one of the founders and the current CEO of Unilog, appears on this episode of our B2B Founder Stories podcast. He describes how his passion for sales and building relationships helped him grow from a door-to-door salesman in Mumbai, India, to a co-founder of Unilog alongside his father. He also speaks to authenticity, optimism, and personal identity, and identifies how being in challenging sales positions set him up for success as the company’s CEO.

“At the heart of it…I think you have to have an enormous amount of optimism for your business… That belief, telling that story, is what I think is “sales.” I don’t think of sales as a transactional price and sale of a product or an item, I think selling is telling the story. It is telling the story with passion, it’s telling the story with a deep sense of belief, it’s having purpose.”

Suchit Bachalli, Unilog

Transcript of Podcast Episode 7: The Journey of an Indian Emigrant Turned CEO of a Ten-Figure Biz (w/Suchit Bachalli, Founder and CEO of Unilog)

Julian Lumpkin: Welcome to B2B Founder Stories. My guest today is Suchit Bachalli. He is one of the founders and the current CEO of Unilog. I met and got to spend some time with Suchit and many of his team members at a customer event last month. I saw the relationships they’ve built with their clients and the culture at Unilog, which is why I wanted to bring him on the podcast. In this interview, we speak about his personal story of coming to the US from India, starting Unilog with his father, how sales and cold calling prepared each of us to start our respective companies, his first acquisition as the CEO of Unilog, and his approach to running the company today. Suchit, thank you so much for joining me.

Suchit Bachalli: You’re welcome, Julian. It’s great to be here.

Julian Lumpkin: So we’re going to talk all about Unilog and your history as a founder, but you and I got to speak a few weeks ago and I got to hear about you coming to the US from India. So to set some of the context for how we talk about your story building Unilog, can you start by telling us about how and when you came to the US?

Suchit Bachalli: Well, the first time I came to the US, I was 19 or going to be 20. I came on a youth exchange program. So I’ve never been on a plane before I flew from Mumbai, India, to Montgomery, Alabama, and it was quite the experience. I landed in Alabama. I had home stays with my host families. I stayed for three months. I toured the country. I toured a lot of places down the south as part of an exchange program and we were 52 students from 25 countries. I was the only one from India and so very quickly, over the course of those three months, I really met a lot of wonderful, interesting people and I ended up making some lifelong friendships. And obviously, I also got to understand the culture of the US, the culture of the people and everything that I think has, since then, held me in really good step.

Julian Lumpkin: And how did that go from a three-month program? What led you to ultimately come to the US permanently?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah, so I went back to India after the program was over and that was around the 2000 timeframe. We started Unilog in the 2002, 2003 timeframe. I had built some relationships and friendships during my first youth exchange program and we started selling into the US as an Indian offshore outsourced provider and we did that for many years, successfully. We grew the company to one of the largest catalog publishing houses, we did a lot of the pre-press work for industrial catalogs. And as the world transitioned to eCommerce, we launched our own eCommerce product in 2014. That’s the year I actually made the move to live in the US and I’d been going back and forth for many years, three to four times a year, but in 2014 is when I moved from Bangalore, India, to Philadelphia.

Julian Lumpkin: And that’s really interesting, and to back up a little bit to talk about the origins of Unilog, if I remember correctly, you founded the company with your father, is that right?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah. At the beginning of the company, my father, essentially, after 25+ year career in the private sector in India, working in executive positions in other industries, such as petrochemicals and whatnot, essentially saw this need for the catalog publishing word because part of his role in these large manufacturing companies was to procure products and that was being done using paper catalogs and so he was, in fact, all credit to him, was the person that came up with the audacity, in my opinion, at that age, I think he was in his early fifties at the time, to quit his well-paying job and dive head into it. I was still coming out of this youth exchange program, I was working in Mumbai and so I joined the company a little later and then my father also had a co-founder who exited the business in 2020, but yeah, that was the original founding team. And we essentially grew the business from 2002 to 2022, where we are today.

Julian Lumpkin: Nice. And tell us about when you started working there. I know you’ve taken over as CEO now, but when you began working at Unilog, what was your role there? What were you focused on?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah, my strength has always been in sales, and I can tell you a lot of my stories from my youth as a door-to-door salesman in Mumbai. I just love sales, the process. And so when I joined forces with my dad in the early, early days of Unilog, my role really was to go get customers, clients that needed data entry, and their offset publishing, desktop publishing work, to be done in India. And so most of my time was spent cold calling, cold calling emails and there’s a time difference. So my day would essentially begin at 6:00 PM in India and I’d be calling into businesses here in the US up until 2:00 AM. And I did that for many, many years and over the time, got opportunities to come back to the US several, several times as we started to meet customers, build relationships. So my role was essentially BDR, rep, and then I eventually headed up the sales organization and was VP of sales for a few years, and then eventually when I moved to the US, I was president of North America and then took over as CEO in March of 2017.
Julian Lumpkin: I have so many follow up questions and I don’t want to go too far in a tangent, but I have to ask if you could quickly tell us about door-to-door sales cold, I’m assuming just going up to places cold. What were you selling door to door in India?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah, we used to sell an estimation software. We used to sell an accounting package. Most of it was shrink wrapped on a CD back in the day. So this is prior to cloud computing, prior to SAS, software was essentially an executable file that you put on a CD. And so my strength, actually, was in building relationships and I was really good at demoing the product. I knew the ins and outs of product. The person who actually developed the product, and I forget the name of the product now, but he actually showed me a demo and then I just glammed off of him and then just became really good at demoing that estimation software, the accounting software. Remember, this is in Mumbai. If you haven’t walked down the streets of Mumbai, it is an experience to behold. It is everything that you see in the movies. It’s busy, it’s bustling, people don’t have time for you, and so in order to get to the decision-maker in a small business in Mumbai, it’s challenging and I learned so much during those four or five years that I was in Mumbai and did that. I think that has helped me in really good stead over the years, everything that I learned there.

Julian Lumpkin: Yeah. When I started SuccessKit, I, for the first two years, did a lot of cold calling, myself. So I know how hard that can be and you alluded to it yourself, but I wanted to ask, how do you think spending that time in these really tough sales positions helped you transition and do so successfully, to taking over a company like Unilog?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah. I think at the heart of it, whether you are a founder, whether you are sort of the tech builder, whether you are the salesperson, whether you are the fundraiser, the money guy, whatever position you are in, I think you have to have an enormous amount of optimism for your business. That essentially comes through the sales function, because at heart, I am probably one of the most optimistic people you’ll meet and sometimes it’s foolish and sometimes it is… From the outside, you may look, “Well, what gives you that kind of optimism it’s because you just believe in the product, the service that you’re working on.” For me, what Unilog was doing at the time was an invaluable service to our customers. When we launched our product platform, I knew that it was going to be transformative to our customers.

Suchit Bachalli: That belief, telling that story is what I think is “sales”. I don’t think of sales as a transactional price and sale of a product or an item, I think selling is telling the story. It is telling the story with passion, it’s telling the story with a deep sense of belief, it’s having purpose. I think when you combine those things, you really get someone that’s really the evangelist for the business, and that’s why I think the leadership role comes easily because as a leader, you have to lead from the front, you have to have optimism for the business, you have to have empathy, you have to have belief, you have to be passionate, and those are things I think that just come naturally to some of us that grew up in sales. It’s a natural fit.

Suchit Bachalli: Then, I think, you have to surround yourself with a really strong team. There’s definitely weaknesses I have and things that I don’t know, I’m not an expert in, and having a really strong team around you, whether it’s operations, whether it’s finance, whether it’s HR, whether it’s compliance, technology development, surrounding yourself by people that are better than you in those areas, I think, is super important. So I think, to answer your question, my sales background gave me a phenomenal sense of belief, purpose and optimism.

Julian Lumpkin: I love that take on what sales is and I’m sure we’ve all heard times where sales gets a negative reputation, and I think your explanation of why you did it and what you did well speaks to a very different side of sales that a lot of founders experience and see. One of my favorite, I think it’s John Barrows, who’s a sales trainer, says that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm and that applies to prospects and also to your employees and the people who work for your company. And I got to spend some time with a lot of the folks that work at Unilog and I saw that enthusiasm and was one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast. So it’s a good transition to my next question. You sort of already answered, but what do you think… I’ll preface this again, by saying your team is really excited about working at Unilog and everything about it, what do you think you did well to build that culture of enthusiasm internally?

Suchit Bachalli: I think you live your culture, you don’t build it because culture is, to me, the outcome of the kind people you are. Let’s say you had 20 employees and you brought them all together in the room and you looked at each one of them, you would find certain common themes, because we all end up working with the people we like, we all end up being attracted to the people that resonate with us, that speak to us. And so sometimes, I think we get carried away with the idea or the notion that you can build culture. I think, to me, culture is really living it, living your authentic self in the workplace.

Suchit Bachalli: And if everyone lived their authentic self in the workplace, that to me means that then you can look at it from the outside and say, “The culture of that company is amazing. The culture of that company is, they’re humble, they’re hardworking, they’re caregivers, they love customer service.” Or you go to another company and you say, “I look at these 100 people. This group of 100 people under this umbrella in this brand in this company, their culture is they’re competitive, they’re audacious, they’re brave, they’re courageous.” Or third company, I go in and I look at this group of 500 people and I see that the common theme that’s emerging here is that they are creative, they’re innovative, they’re thinkers, their archetype is creating things and that’s the culture of the company. It’s the living embodiment of our authentic work life that, to me, becomes the culture of the company. So what can we do as an organization to move it in one direction or the other? I think it comes down to hiring.

Suchit Bachalli: To me, it’s much, much more easier to recognize behavior, identify characteristics rather than change it. I think we have to spend a lot of time trying to find people we enjoy working with, we align with. Our typical interview process, you would meet at least five or six people within the company and all of them would have to say, “Yeah, I enjoyed my time with the candidate. I went out and had a meal with them”, or, “I had a beer with them. I sat down and had a Zoom call with them and I think that they’re going to be a great fit.” That’s the feedback we’re looking for as we’re hiring, because I think that if we’re finding the right people, they’re adding to our culture, but if you end up bringing the wrong type of people with a different mindset, then, I think, you end up taking away from your culture.

Suchit Bachalli: The last thing I think, the textbook definition of culture is, the common beliefs and values that a group of people have. At Unilog, we have a set of core values that we live by, which is, again, not something that we wrote and said to our people, these are our core values, follow them. Instead, we talked to everyone and we asked what their personal core values were and we took the five most common ones and put them into our core value system. So again, to us, this common belief, the common purpose, the common work life that we’re living is our culture and we’re trying to make sure that we’re bringing in people that are aligned with what we have inside of Unilog.

Julian Lumpkin: I really like the approach. Tell us, if you would, I want to talk about where you and Unilog are now. Can you give us a sense for the size of the company and where Unilog is present day?

Suchit Bachalli: Sure. So, after we started the company in the early two thousands, we made a couple of big pivots. One of the big pivots was launching our own eCommerce platform product, which is a SAS software that is used by B2B companies to sell more, to grow more online. And so our eCommerce platform essentially provides the infrastructure to do that. We also have a product content subscription, which, if you’re setting up a B2B storefront for, let’s say, industrial products or HVAC or plumbing products, we also provide you with the products, the digital products that go on your digital shelf. So we’ve made some big, big pivots over the last seven or eight years.

Suchit Bachalli: In 2014, we took on some additional capital from a venture fund in India and then in 2020, we found an amazing partner in Investcorp. Investcorp is one of the world’s leading private equity groups and they partnered with us to essentially help us get to the next stage. So today, as we sit in May of 2O22, we have close to a 100 people in the US. We’re about 600 people in our facilities in India and they’re spread across software, RND, engineering, as well as our product content business. So the product catalog business, we have this really large desire to, and we’re probably going to be the first and only company that is combining product data subscription and eCommerce and we’re building a massive B2B open catalog, industrial supplies catalog. It’s already at nine million skews. So it’s a fairly intensive effort, which is being backed by our partners at Investcorp. It is a very, very exciting time in our lives too. In the story of Unilog, this is a very, very exciting time.

Julian Lumpkin: Yeah. And I know that you recently acquired Bravo Business Media, can you walk us through what that decision process was like for you and why you decided to go forward with it?

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah. Most acquisitions, you want to look at three underlying thesis for making an acquisition. One would be you’re acquiring revenue, you’re acquiring incremental revenue, and then what are you paying to acquire that, that becomes a decision point. The second would be product. If you’re acquiring an amazing set of technology or product, that’s a second component to it. And the third one is people. Sometimes you’ll acquire a company for the people and the talent and the methodology and the process that they follow and the things that they’re doing. In the case of Bravo, it was one of those, to me, unicorn type deals, because all of those three were just the best fit for us. Bravo Business Media was local in the Greater Philadelphia area.

Suchit Bachalli: They were very adjacent to what we were doing, they were providing eCommerce as a platform and had a product content service, a subscription associated with it. They were in a vertically focused area of decorative plumbing and we had common customers. And that could maybe be the fourth pillar, which also they meant, which is you would acquire to buy into a customer or market segment. So they checked all the boxes. Number one, I will say that Ace had built a company with great culture, which was, again, we were similar people. We had the same beliefs. We had the same values. We knew we would be able to work well together. So he had done a great job of building that. They were growing, they had good revenues, they were profitable, so that was the financial aspect of it. They had a great platform, raving customers, raving fans in their customer base that are close to 200 customers at the time and the tech piece was really strong. So they checked all the boxes and when Investcorp came in, we did the deal coterminous where Investcorp acquired Unilog and then Unilog, in turn, acquired Bravo, and so that’s now part of the overall structure.

Julian Lumpkin: You’re running a 600-person company now, if I heard you correctly. Tell us what is your day to day like as the CEO of Unilog? What do you focus your time on?

Suchit Bachalli: Great question. I’m very blessed to be surrounded by a phenomenal team. My day really revolves around making sure I’m acting in support of my teams. What we do in leadership positions, I think it’s a lot of times you look at a org structure and you go top down. You look at the boxes and you go CEO and then water falls down to your direct reports, then water falls down to management, middle management, and the teams. If you flip that org structure and you say, “All of us as leaders are actually in service of our teams.” So my question to everyone that is reporting to me is I ask them, “How can I help you do what you are doing? How can I help that be better?”

Suchit Bachalli: So if I’m talking to a sales leader, our chief growth officer, “How many demos, deals, meetings, client visits, can I go to? Put me on the road. Let me talk to customers if that helps telling the story. I’m happy to help and be in service of our customers and the sales process.” Operationally, wherever their silos are formed or we need to open up teams and restructure things, I will always want to step in and offer my services in helping do that. There’s a lot of people in Unilog that have spent 10+, 15+ years in the company and so I know them all and I’m able to help our operations leadership really break down barriers, pull teams together, make changes in a dynamic environment where we have to sometimes make changes on a regular basis, I service them in order to help them be able to do that.

Suchit Bachalli: On the financial side, currently, we have an interim CFO and we’re looking to bring on a full-time position, but again, what can we do in order to make our financial reporting better? What can we do in order to make our controls and our budgeting process better? So I spent a fair bit of time, and again, sometimes it depends on what time of year it is. If you’re in the middle of budgeting season, that’s kind of front and center for the whole organization. So we go through that. My role there is to help, again, make sure that everyone understands that finances is a business partner and for finance to integrate as a partner to all parts of the business.

Suchit Bachalli: So again, my role is really facilitating that dialogue, facilitating that conversation, bringing teams together, making sure that they’re working well. On the tech side, I do still end up driving a fair bit of the strategy and the vision for where the product needs to go. At the end of the day, I think, again, going back to your original question of why sales leaders and how are sales leader different in leadership positions? I think because we are so close to the customer and we can anticipate which way the market’s moving and which way our competition’s moving. We have our ears to the ground on that and therefore it’s easier for us to give direction and set strategy for where the product needs to go. This morning, I was on a two-hour demo for a new platform and giving feedback and directing where our resources should go.

Suchit Bachalli: I think that’s what I still end up doing. I break my day up or my week up into the sales operations, finance and tech, and that’s how I look at the company and the thing that covers all of it is the essential question that you have to ask as a leader every morning is, are we providing value to our customers? So to me, talking to customers, talking to them on a regular basis, being engaged with them, participating in conversation. If you lose sight of that, I think you might not be able to guide the company in the direction that in which it needs to go, so I still spend a lot of time with customers.

Julian Lumpkin: That’s awesome. And I really do agree with that approach. I’ve gotten feedback and gone through this process in many areas of the business as the company owner and, granted, we’re a much smaller company, so there’s very different dynamics, but of trying to remove myself from certain processes, but I’ve long said, and I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind on this, that I would never want to be a founder or active CEO of a company and not be directly involved in sales, because for all the reasons you’ve just stated, there is something special for your clients of getting to work directly with you and hearing you on those calls, knowing that you’re going to not just listen to them from the perspective of how do we close this account, but what is this person saying and how should that influence the broader direction of the company?

Julian Lumpkin: So I think that’s a great approach. I want to follow up on the question about you spending your time in a more personal way. I interview a lot of founders or CEOs and some of them really prioritize their own lifestyle and say that whether it’s family or hobbies, a lot of other things come first and work exists just to support those things, and you talk to other founders who are ultra passionate and want to invest the majority of their time and life into the business and are willing to make those sacrifices. So to the extent that you’d like to share, I’m curious how you think about and what your approach to work-life balance is and when to push yourself and when to give yourself freedom.

Suchit Bachalli: Yeah. I think you need work-life balance. If you think work impedes your life, or if you feel your life impedes your work, that’s the whole point of the phrase, work-life balance. If that’s not the case where you love doing what you do for work, and you love living your life and work is an integral part of your identity, I don’t think you need to necessarily use work-life balance as a phrase. I tend to more think of it in terms of priority balance, which is, how do I prioritize my time in giving myself to the people that love me in my personal life, my daughter, my family, my parents, my friends, how do I give my time to them? Because that’s an important part of our lives, and how do I give my time and my love and my work to my work?

Suchit Bachalli: How do I give myself into my work? I only have 24 hours in the day and I can choose to work and give all of my time to work and then that comes at the cost of not giving time to people that love you and the people that you love. And I think that to me, I’ll give you a great example, in the summer months, if I have to go to work and certainly pre-COVID, we were in the office a whole lot more, I’d take my daughter with me. If she wasn’t doing anything, she’d come into the office, we’d spend a day and give her a little assignment here or there, and we would have a great time. I think it’s about prioritizing those things. Anything else and everything else, to me, is noise.

Suchit Bachalli: I think it all comes down to, who do I give my time to? I give my time to the people that love me, people that I love and care about and I give my time to the work that calls me in the work that I love doing. And if those are my guiding principles, I think, whether it is going on vacation, whether it’s playing golf with friends, whether it is working till 2:00 AM to finish a client proposal, it all falls under the same bucket of really doing the best I can in service of my passion and service of the mission for my life.
Julian Lumpkin: I love that approach. And yeah, I think what you’ve pointed out that doesn’t get spoken out about enough in the balance is that work is life. There’s not this clear delineation where you go and you are one person for eight hours and then you’re someone else when you come home. And I think that especially becomes true as a founder where the CEO of a company is so personally invested that there doesn’t need to be this direct trade off and I like the way you’ve described that.

Suchit Bachalli: I was going to say it’s the question of identity. What is my identity? I identify myself as a father, a friend, a son, a brother. That’s what I identify as, but I also identify as the founder and CEO of Unilog. That’s my identity. So everything I do is in service of that identity. That’s my life. Some days and weeks, I will be all in in work, neck deep, and some days I will make sure that people that are in my life have time with me and so I think that’s how I look at it.

Julian Lumpkin: Nice. Well, I know we’re a little bit over the time we had aimed for so I’ll put you on the spot with my final question, a little bit different, which is, what do you think you would be doing if you weren’t running Unilog?

Suchit Bachalli: That’s a great question. When I was younger, I wanted to major in English literature and I thought I would make a great teacher. Actually, I happen to come from a family full of teachers. My grandfather was a teacher, I have uncles on both sides that are teachers, my great grandfather was the founder of a university and all that good stuff, so I think that is what I might have ended up doing. I think I would’ve been a good teacher.

Julian Lumpkin: Awesome. Well, there’s certainly room for plenty of teaching in your current role and everything that you do. Suchit, thank you so much for joining us. This has been really interesting. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to address or talk about?

Suchit Bachalli: No, Julian. This was fantastic. I really enjoyed meeting with you in Orlando, and I’m glad we could reconnect and have this conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time along, with your team.

Julian Lumpkin: It’s my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and we’ll see you next time.

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