“I like to achieve things,” says Ravinder Shahani. But as a child in India, he probably couldn’t have imagined what he’d achieve halfway around the world.
“Here, if you work hard, you can achieve your goals,” Shahani, who goes by Ron, said. “But in India, success is not necessarily measured by merit. There, if your family is not influential, you don’t have access to the same opportunities.”
Today, Shahani creates opportunities for thousands of people as president of Acro, a Livonia-based staffing firm that specializes in providing highly qualified workers in the fields of information technology, engineering, accounting, finance and more. What started in 1982 with one small office now has 34 offices across the United States and six in Europe and India.
His journey started in his last year at college in Mumbai, where he was finishing a degree in commerce. Shahani, who had wanted to move to the United States for years, decided the time to move had come, so he went to the consulate to research U.S. colleges. Leafing through The Handbook of American Universities, he discovered University of Detroit. He applied at schools in other cities where people he knew lived, but what attracted him most to University of Detroit Mercy was a paragraph describing the scholarships available. His family helped him with the application fee and it wasn’t long before he was accepted to the University, and received some of that financial aid he had read about.
Shahani arrived in Detroit with enough money for only one semester. It was stuffed it in his sock because he heard Detroit in the mid ’70s was a tough place. Knowing he’d have to work and attend classes, he asked around on campus. He washed dishes at the cafeteria and was pleasantly surprised to discover the job included free food. He got a second job at the tutoring center and a third, arranged by his department chair, as a teaching assistant.
“I bought my first suit for that job, because I was teaching students who were mostly older than I was, and I wanted them to look up to me,” he remembered.
He found great value in the fact that so many of his professors worked outside the University.
“I learned how the real world worked,” he said. “I got the sense early on that I was getting good information and knowledge.” He was so pleased he recruited two brothers to the University where they earned master’s degrees.
Upon graduation with an MBA, he went to work as a financial analyst for Ford Motor Company.
“I was very happy there,” he said. But things were changing in the automotive industry. Japanese automakers had made major inroads into the U.S. car market and the Big Three were losing billions of dollars annually.
“The auto industry is cyclical,” he said. “So when things are good, there are lots of jobs, but when things slow down, the companies have to lay off workers and it creates huge costs and bad publicity. One of the things you do as a financial analyst is to look for ways to convert fixed costs into variable costs,” he said.
Shahani started to think that perhaps payroll could become a variable cost. Couldn’t the engineers, draftsmen and designers be hired on a contract basis, he asked himself and others. This was happening on a small scale—to skirt hiring freezes—and he determined that the U.S. auto industry had to change and that he could be part of that change.
Much to the dismay of his parents, who tried to talk him out of leaving a job at a company like Ford, Shahani left to create Acro. The company was inspired in part by Kelly Services, a Michigan-based company that provided temporary clerical workers to businesses. Acro, however, specialized in high-paying contractors for automotive engineers. It seemed to be just the solution the auto industry needed, and his company grew rapidly.
Shahani, keeping in mind the cyclical nature of the auto industry, saw the need to diversify and he pursued the aerospace industry, which needed workers similar to the automotive engineers Acro had specialized in. He expanded from there. Today, though the automotive sector is Acro’s biggest client, the company provides contract and temporary workers for government, pharmacology companies, energy, utilities and the medical fields around the world.
Shahani’s wife, Chitra, and children, Rajiv and Sanjeev, help run the global company that was named a 2016 National Best and Brightest Company to Work For by the National Association for Business Resources.
