Oh, Brother!

The entrepreneurial bug bit Arun Parameswaran when he was a teenager in Botswana with dreams of owning a stereo system. His father agreed to pay half, but Arun had to come up with the rest. So Arun began copying tapes for family and friends and charging them for the service—and working on his customer service techniques: With every purchase, he enclosed a note that read, "Thank you very much for your patronage."

"I realized there wAas a market for tapes," Arun says, so he started a small business. At age 13, he traveled to India, negotiated bulk purchases with a retailer who knew his uncle, and began importing music cassettes. "I sold them in Botswana for five times the price," says Arun, now 24.

Along with his 22-year-old brother, Arjun, he has capitalized on that instinct for business and created a thriving Southwest Florida enterprise that helped land them on BusinessWeek magazine’s list of 25 of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs 2007.

Their Fort Myers-based Astutant Group of Companies includes two accounting, tax and payroll businesses—Astutant in Orlando and Budgetax in Fort Myers—as well as Accu-Med Systems, a business in Tampa that provides medical billing and physician practice management throughout the state.

Arun, chairman and CEO of Astutant, and Arjun, president and managing member of Accu-Med, were selected from more than 300 reader nominations for the recognition—national exposure they hope will help as they expand their business into commercial mortgages and beyond.

GROOMED FOR SUCCESS

Their parents, Raju and Ramaa Parameswaran, moved about 30 years ago from India to Botswana, where Raju and a relative bought an accounting firm. The brothers were born and raised there, eventually moving to the United States in 2003 and 2005 to earn master’s degrees in accounting from the University of Illinois.

"At heart, we’ve always been capitalists as a family," says Arun. "We assimilated perfectly well."