Fusion Gets It In Inc.

CASH INFUSION: Fusion Solutions’ Tahir Hussain (left) is Inc.’s fifth-fastest-growing private company. photography by Kris Hundt

Tahir hussain’s friends thought surely he’d gone crazy. It was 2002, just after the crushing dot-com bust, when Hussain decided he wanted to open a tech-consulting firm. “At first I thought that anyone starting a telecom-focused technical consulting firm right after the bust would face quite a challenge,” says Howard LaMunion, founding partner of The Consulttus Group and a friend of Hussain. “But then I heard his vision for the comeback.”
Hussain, who had spent 8 years at Ericsson and come to know the telecom industry well, was sure those downed tech companies were not out for good. Eventually, he thought, they would come back, and he figured they’d need some help when they did. That’s where Fusion Solutions would come in, providing strategic consulting and staffing services as well as IT and network support for telecom companies.

Despite his optimism, times weren’t easy in the beginning. Employees began leaving, but still Hussain remained confident. “We focused on the right area at the right time and had a lot of patience,” Hussain says now. “I knew I had to have a lot of patience because success doesn’t happen overnight.”

If Hussain took a gamble starting the company, the payout has been huge. Fusion Solutions now employs more than 200 people, and the company’s clientele includes names such as Alcatel-Lucent, MetroPCS, Fortune Wireless, and even Hussain’s former employer, Ericsson. And in September, Hussain hit the jackpot: Just five years after its founding, Fusion Solutions was named the fifth-fastest-growing private company in the world on this year’s Inc. 500 list (see sidebar). It seems his patience has finally paid off. “There have been a lot of times that opportunities have tried to drift us,” Hussain says. “But we stayed the course.”