By: Amy Sorter

When Aquent's John Chuang attended Harvard University during the late 1980s, his intent was to be a student of economics rather than a business entrepreneur. But at Harvard, Chuang become both. While studying economics, he launched an employee contracting business with friends, Steve Kapner and Mia Wenjen.

"During college, we formed a business doing typesetting work," said Chuang, Aquent's co-founder and CEO. "We had Macintoshes that we rented out and we also did people's resumes and small typesetting jobs. We soon became known in the Harvard Square community as people who knew how to do desktop publishing well and people were requesting that we go onsite to do some work for them."

The result of those requests was MacTemps, a company that sent temporary personnel well-versed in Macintosh protocol to firms that had Macintoshes on site.

"We didn't do any business plans. We didn't do any focus groups. We just ran an ad in a local newsletter and it cost us $80," said Chuang, a native of New York. In response to that simple ad, Chuang said, the phone rang off the hook. MacTemps became a success and the company's successor, Aquent, became a multi-million dollar international firm.

Aquent today is a Boston-based company that offers IT solutions through consulting, outsourcing and staffing services. Aquent's client list is impressive and includes Accenture, Fidelity, Motorola, IBM, Boeing, Martha Stewart and the Discovery Channel.

In addition to earning a tidy profit, Chuang and his success have spurred a great deal of publicity. Aquent was included twice in Inc. magazine's list of "500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America."

Chuang himself has been on many leadership lists including the Boston Business Journal's "40 Under 40," the Asian American Commission's "Massachusetts Directory of Outstanding Asian-Americans," and Transpacific Magazine's "Top 10 under 40" and "100 Great Asian-American Entrepreneurs." He also received the "Excellence 2000" award from the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce.

Chuang was even the subject of a Harvard Business School case study entitled "Building Loyalty Among the Contingent Workforce." He works with a variety of organizations, as well, serving as a board member for the American Staffing Association, Angie's List (a consumer advocacy network), JustTechJobs.com and the Massachusetts Association of Staffing Services.

Part of the reason for Chuang's success is because of his innovation. During 1986, when MacTemps was first launched, the company was the only game in town for companies that needed Macintosh-trained personnel on a temporary basis.

"At that time, the whole world was DOS-based," Chuang said. "If you called Kelly or Manpower and asked for someone who knew Macintosh, it was likely they'd send you someone who knew WordPerfect, and that was it. The graphical interface we see on PCs today just wasn't available then and a lot of people weren't familiar with it."

The company was also the first in the industry to offer benefits to its temporary employees, beginning in 1992. "Prior to the 1990s, temps were basically people who got an hourly wage without access to other benefits," Chuang said. "That was okay in the 1940s when people temped as a supplement to a full-time job."

But contracting is a way of life for a great many employees today, Chuang continued. "We were the first to offer a comprehensive benefits plan including health insurance, dental insurance, disability, a 401k program with a match, and vacation pay," Chuang said.

Meanwhile, in 1996, Chuang introduced 1-800-NETWORK to offer system administration and tech support contract employees, and Portfolio for designers and art directors. Also on the agenda was WebStaff, the first nationwide agency that focused exclusively on web placements. All of these arms, in addition to MacTemps, were merged into Aquent in 1999.

This is not to say that the path for Chuang and his partners was always smooth. The early days of the business brought funding challenges, which required bank loans.

"Our first loan was to buy a laser printer, and at the time, those printers cost $5,000," Chuang said. "We got a bank loan - we all personally guaranteed the loan, plus we had to have our parents co-sign the loan. The bank basically made the three families responsible for this loan."

But six years later, "We were that bank's largest commercial customer," Chuang said. "We had to go elsewhere for our loans because we exceeded their lending limit.'

Chuang is starting another innovative process - that of outsourcing.

"What we're doing these days is not only sending people onsite, but running their departments," he said. The departments mainly involve corporate communications or design. "Companies want to focus on core competencies," Chuang said. "Take the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. The CEO probably spends zero hours a year thinking about the design department and careers of designers."

Outsourcing that design department to Aquent, Chuang continued, means that "I'm thinking 100 percent of my time about the designers and department," he said. "The clients can focus on what they do best and leave the peripheral tasks to experts."

Although Chuan and his partners have made many changes in the business, some things have stayed the same. His partners are still with him after 15 years, for one thing. And Chuang has clung to this economic education, believing that one grows a business in the same way that one would grow a monetary investment.

"There are no quick schemes," he said. "The way you grow a large company is by growing it a little bit each year. The next thing you know, it's a huge amount."

From a business sense, Chuang also cautions entrepreneurs against using equity to grow their businesses. "When you use debt rather than equity to grow a business, you can keep the benefits of what you're building when it grows," he said. "When you use equity, though, you're selling your future, and that can be extremely costly."

Although much of Chuang's education has been in the real world, his Harvard years were definitely not wasted. He received two degrees, a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's in business administration, and a wealth of information that has helped lead to his current success.

"A lot of my coworkers today were people I met in college," he said. "Plus it provided a good grounding in terms of how the economy works and how businesses operate."