When Himanshu 'Sue' Bhatia, CEO of Rose International, learnt that she had won the National Entrepreneurial Success Award from the Missouri-based Small Business Administration, in late July, she revisited memories more than ten years old.
Back then, she remembers her husband, Gulab, putting her two small children to sleep while she was in the basement of their house writing proposals for government contracts.
At the time, the couple held full time jobs with different companies and Rose International was still in its infancy.
"We still joke about that," she told rediff.com. "It was our third child and incidentally it even had a nine-month gestation period."
The award is 'very special', Bhatia said, because 'it is a national-level recognition of how a small company evolved into a large one'.
Since 1995, when Bhatia decided to quit her job at Edward Jones and run her own business, Rose International has grown from two people to more than 500 employees.
"It is also a testimony," she said, "to the hard work of each and every employee of the company."
The company specialises in providing 'IT and e-commerce solutions' to an impressive array of clientele, which includes Boeing, Toyota, the US Army and Navy, NASA, and Bank of America.
After getting a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Delhi, Bhatia realised her interests lay not in construction and design but in Information Technology and management.
She came to the United States in 1987 when she was 24.
She joined the Masters of Information Systems program at the University of Missouri. Soon after, she secured a job at McDonald Douglas as a consultant and became a part of Edward Jones following a merger.
At these two companies, Bhatia saw the need to enhance IT services. "There was a lot of room for improvement. Since nobody was doing it, I thought: why shouldn't I?"
So she did. With the help of her husband, who is a technical designer by education and is now the president of the company, Bhatia started the company 'from scratch.'
"I was not sure whether it would work but I knew that I owed it to myself to give [the company] all I had," Bhatia said.
"For months, it was just one person doing the recruiting, the marketing, the cold-calling, the sales, the pricing, you name it."
Initially, in 1993, the couple obtained several Small Business Innovative Research Grants - awarded to small businesses with original, untested ideas - from the federal government.
The company's first projects were government related, but in 1995 the Bhatias decided to add commercial projects to its portfolio.
The results were striking.
In the year 2000, Rose International ranked first in the St Louis Regional Technology Fast 50, 21st in the Inc 500, and 90th in the Deloitte & Touche Technology Fast 500.
By then, it had more than half a dozen branches across the US. It recently added one in Delhi, India.
In 2001, Bhatia was selected for Working Woman 500, was named SBA Small Business Person of the Year by the State of Missouri and was a regional winner of the Working Woman Entrepreneurial Excellence Award.
While giving Bhatia the award, Senator Christopher S Bond, chairman of the US Senate Committee on Small Business said, "Rose International began as a woman and minority-owned small business and Bhatia attests to the fact that hard work, dedication and developing solid partnerships are the stepping stones to success."
Even in the wake of September 11 and the sluggish economy, the company has managed to maintain its size no layoffs and added five new clients.
The National Entrepreneurial Success Award came her way for owning a business that started small, and with the help of the SBA, has grown large.
"Rose International is a great company that has done all the right things at the right time," said Rose Epplin Garland, SBA's public information officer.
"Himanshu is a tremendously organised person which is evident from some of her presentations I have seen. You can tell that she works very hard to get all the facts, [to get] all her ducks in the row. She tries for excellence."
Garland said the key of the company's success lies in Bhatia's treatment of her employees.
"It is a very family friendly organisation where things are flexible in favour of the employee," she said.
"Bhatia encourages her staffers to do community service. She really seems to be doing all the right things and our organisation is excited at her progress."
For now, Bhatia plans to invest in infrastructure, bid for bigger contracts and oversee further expansion of the company's services.
"I had the American Dream like everybody else," she said. "I was and still am very ambitious. But for me the dream is more a journey than an end and in that sense I hope I never achieve it."