How I Overcame Discrimination Within My Own Family to Crush It in Chemicals
Charu Jain, 45, has had to jump through some pretty exacting hoops to win customers such as Ecolab, the USDA, and the U.S. Navy. Still, the biggest barrier to her ambition was actually living with her back in her native India: her own family. Jain had to leave them all behind to carve out her slice of the $500 billion U.S. chemicals market with the bulk chemical supplier she founded a decade ago in Houston. And now, after clocking more than $3 million in revenue in 2022, her success is the envy of everyone back in New Delhi.
“A piece of paper, a bottle, a laptop—to manufacture anything in this world, you need chemicals. Gasochem International gets bulk chemicals from overseas and sells them to the U.S. government or to the private sector in small quantities. We provide water treatment chemicals, coating chemicals for machinery parts, even ammunition chemicals. Not everybody can do that. You have to go through a lot of approvals.
For me, it was also a personal challenge to start a business in a technical field. I grew up in a very conservative family in New Delhi, where females get married at 21. I wanted to study engineering, but my family said no. I kept fighting to go, and eventually my grandfather supported me. He told me, ‘I am investing in you.’
I was 8 years old when my father died in a car accident. He had just started a chemical manufacturing business; he was
38. The company shut down. I didn’t know at that age what chemicals were, but I made up my mind that I had to fulfill my father’s dream. So after four years of studying in India, I got a scholarship to a master’s program in the U.S., at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I moved to Texas in 2001.
For 10 years, I worked for KBR, a large Houston-based government contractor. I started Gasochem after I got my green card, in 2012.
Being a woman of color engineer in the chemical businesses is tough, and there are very few female CEOs. The chemical industry is dominated by big boys—old generation. Whenever I would approach a private company, I’d explain I used to work for KBR on chemical projects, but it was still a struggle to be taken seriously.
Then somebody suggested I try to sell to the government. I put a bid in for the City of Beaumont, for $20,000 of fluorosilicic acid for water treatment, and I got it. That was the break I needed.
Government contracts often support diversity in suppliers and create opportunities for small businesses, veteran-owned businesses, LGBTQ-owned businesses. Gasochem at least has a chance with those jobs, but the orders tend to be small, so we still needed to sell to the private sector. That’s why I decided in 2015 to get an MBA at Rice University: Once you have that tag, I thought, people will not question you. Within two years of graduation, I was supplying large private-sector clients. It took me 14 years to be able to give a presentation and have people believe that I can sell chemicals.
We’ve had exponential growth in the past six years. I had started getting some chemicals in greater bulk and storing them in a warehouse. When Covid happened, the ports closed, and there was no supply of chemicals from anywhere. But government never sleeps; they kept buying chemicals, and we made a lot of money. We sold our chemicals at 300 percent markups, because we had them in stock.
We have only 10 full-time employees, and our size gives us an advantage because clients don’t have to wait for us to go through four different approval processes to get a quote. We offer great customer service and quick turnarounds. And because I have employees in India, we are able to offer 24-hour service. If you call at 1 a.m., somebody will pick up the phone and help you put an order in.
Now, whenever I go to India, everybody uses me as an example. I’m the first female in my family to become a U.S. citizen, earn two master’s degrees, and start her own business, and I make more money than the rest of them. I opened the door for the whole family: Today, my female cousins are studying medicine and law. I was able to bring my mom here and buy her a house.
My family still has the plant where my father started his business. It’s empty. It’s been 30 years. I plan to revive it, to use it to manufacture some new products for the U.S. market.”