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This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the February 5, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Limy John: NewAge Entrepreneur

NewAge Systems is an unusual software services company

because it is surviving the economic downturn. The eight-year-old

company made the New Jersey Fast 50 list for the past three years.

It has also distinguished itself by having a woman engineer at the

helm. Limy John, president and CEO, graduated from an engineering

school and has a master’s degree in computer science. She founded

the company with her husband, "Johnny" John, who has the title

of vice president and chief technology officer.

Though Limy John can do programming, she doesn’t have much time for

that now. "Initially I used to do sales, and now I spend more

time trying to find good people and doing strategic planning. We are

looking for good salespeople and high tech consultants," she says.

NewAge has 12 employees on Vaughn Drive and 60 employees on the sites

of its clients, which include New York Life, Aventis Pharmaceuticals,

Merck, Chubb Insurance, Hoffman LaRoche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, IBM,

Dow Jones, Lockheed Martin, Computer Associates, Telcordia, CompUSA,

and Unisys. Some work is done offshore, in Cochin, India.

The company expanded from 1,200 square feet in Somerset to 3,600 feet

at Vaughn Drive in order to be near the train station. The Johns and

their two children (a preschool daughter and a first-grade son) hope

to move from Franklin Park to West Windsor soon.

NewAge Systems offers IT solutions and support systems, including

networks and data centers, customer relationship management, and custom

software development (client/server, multi-tier, and E-commerce).

It also sets up, administers, and maintains large databases.

The company made the New Jersey Fast 50 list (of the fastest growing

technology companies) for three years in a row. In 2000 it made the

Inc. 500 list. Figured over a five year period it charted a 1779 percent

increase in revenue.

Limy John credits her ambition to her mother, who kept telling her

to never stay home and to find a job. She grew up in Cochin, in the

Indian state of Kerala, where her grandparents and parents farmed

rubber, cardamom, pepper, ginger, and coconut. Talented in math, she

went to M.A. College of Engineering in Cochin, Class of 1989, and

to the regional engineering college of Karnataka for her master’s

degree in computer science and custom software. She worked for Tata

Consultancy Services in Chennai and Bombay.

Both she and her husband are Roman Catholics and as often happens

in India, the couple were introduced to each other by parents and

family friends. Johnny was on vacation from a job with IBM in Florida

when he met his future bride. He had graduated in 1986 from the Regional

Engineering School in Calicut, Kerala. Just after the couple settled

in New Jersey, in 1993, Limy got a job at PaineWebber and Johnny worked

as a database administrator for McKinsey & Company. He has also worked

at Chubb, and she has also worked at Medco, PricewaterhouseCoopers,

and Merrill Lynch.

"I was basically an ambitious person. I worked as a consultant

and talked with consulting companies to know a little about what they

do, and slowly I started this business." They kept their day jobs,

hired some employees, and worked on the weekends. Limy remembers that

they landed their first client, Georgia Pacific in Atlanta, by doing

"cold calling, cold calling, cold calling."

She hires workers from both her own country and from here. "We

used to do H-1 visas, but now we hire mostly U.S. citizens because

there is a big labor pool over here," she says.

From the beginning, Limy has had the title of CEO and owns 60 percent

of the company. That is partly because her husband kept his day job

while she had two children and started the company. "I was putting

more time in the business," she says, "and I had my parents

here to help me with the children."

Having Limy as CEO also qualifies her company to be certified as both

a woman-owned and minority-owned business by New Jersey, the Small

Business Administration, and the Port Authority. She has not gone

after government business but has instead concentrated on the private

sector, going to the diversity representatives of corporations to

get on the approved vendor list.

Such certification helps in a down economy. Asked for other reasons

why her company has managed to grow when others falter, she says that

her consultants are extraordinarily hard workers who can think of

business needs as well as technical solutions. "They have to know

what the client needs instead of the client telling them. We are very

very particular about the quality of the people we hire. When the

market was shrinking most of the clients retained our consultants."

Another secret: She did not take the easy money that went with Y2K

projects. Companies that staffed up for the Y2K found themselves without

work afterword. "We are always thinking long term."

— Barbara Fox