In 2003, James A. Taylor met Arun Pasrija at the Houston Technology Center. It was an appropriate address for an introduction that would become a business: a place where people arrived carrying possibilities and hoped to leave carrying something more useful. Taylor brought an appetite for building companies. Pasrija brought an operating temperament. Their collaboration would eventually put hundreds of people to work serving communications providers.
There is a familiar way to tell this sort of story. Start with the meeting, insert a few acquisitions, finish with a large number. Taylor’s career offers a more interesting route. The recurring question is what happens after the beginning: after the partners agree, after the purchase closes, after the founder has built a company large enough to require a different kind of leadership.
He has kept finding new beginnings. Telecom was one. Advising businesses became another. More recently, rental housing has occupied his attention. The industries change considerably. The practical questions keep returning: who needs the service, who will pay for it, and who will make the daily operation work?
A partnership with different working hours
Taylor came from southern Missouri; Pasrija came from India. By the time they crossed paths in Houston, both had experience to contribute. Their joint venture began in 2003 as Global 1 Source Group. In 2006, it merged with CHR Solutions. The distinction matters: Taylor co-founded the modern enterprise, whose history includes businesses that existed before that meeting.
By 2009, Taylor was spending roughly 85 percent of his time in the marketplace, developing business and pursuing acquisitions. Pasrija concentrated on operations, costs and delivery. This was a division of labor with a useful degree of candor. One partner could seek the next opportunity while the other attended to the obligations created by the last one.
The partnership makes sense without turning either participant into a caricature. Sales creates work that operations must fulfill. Operations creates the credibility that makes another sale possible. A customer has little reason to admire a beautifully organized company that offers nothing useful, and even less reason to renew a useful promise that nobody keeps.
CHR occupied the space where information technology and telecommunications were converging. Its founders saw fragmented services and an opportunity to bring capabilities together. That meant building a business whose parts could cooperate. The proposal sounded straightforward. Acquisitions would give them plenty of opportunities to discover how complicated straightforward things can become.
The company grows by joining things up
The Martin Group acquisition in 2009 changed the scale of the operation. It added software capabilities and 275 employees, while tripling annual revenue. Western Datapro extended the business into the Pacific Northwest. Inkrea Consulting, acquired in 2010, added a presence in Bangalore. Each combination expanded what CHR could offer and where it could do the work.
A list of acquisitions can resemble a collection of trophies. Here, the useful question is what the collection allowed a customer to accomplish. A communications provider might need engineering, operating support and software, all within the same business relationship. Combining those capabilities offered a reason for the purchases beyond the pleasure of owning more companies.
By 2012, CHR had about 500 employees and nearly 1,000 clients worldwide. That February, it launched Omnia 360, a cloud-delivered billing and customer-care system integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company also expanded its data-center and network-operations capabilities. Its proposition reached into the administrative machinery behind communications services.
Billing is a wonderfully unromantic subject for a technology company. It is also where a service must become intelligible to the person paying for it. A network can be technically impressive while its commercial operation remains awkward. Taylor’s business was growing around that gap between having a capability and making it work for somebody else.
CHR’s scale during Taylor’s tenure. These are historical figures.
The small matter of getting along
Growth also produced an awkward human problem. Two executives inside an acquired business could barely cooperate. Taylor and Pasrija separated their reporting responsibilities, coached them and gradually rebuilt a working relationship. The process took about three years. That is a considerable amount of calendar space for a problem that a transaction announcement would never mention.
Taylor’s view of acquisition included keeping and developing talent. “I believe you can never have too much talent,” he said. The partners also established an internal leadership program in 2008. By 2012, it had graduated 60 people. Taylor had received leadership training at Sears; he and Pasrija were putting development into the company they now ran.
The episode offers a useful way to read their expansion. Adding staff creates obligations as well as capacity. A management team inherits people’s habits, expectations and quarrels along with their expertise. The purchase agreement can establish ownership in a moment. Cooperation keeps its own diary, and it seldom consults the closing schedule.
“I believe you can never have too much talent.”
James Taylor · 2012
A roomful of hands, and then fewer
At TelcoVision in 2013, Taylor gave a rural-telecom audience a small practical test. He asked how many had MPLS networks, a technology used to move traffic across communications networks. Dozens raised their hands. Then he asked how many had used standard naming conventions that would make interconnection with neighboring operators easier. Far fewer hands remained.
It was a compact demonstration of a large problem. Buying modern equipment did not automatically make separate networks easy to connect. Taylor was concerned that rural operators could end up carrying traffic for larger businesses without capturing the fuller opportunity to provide services themselves. Technical investment needed coordination to become a stronger commercial position.
The exchange is revealing because it turns a general ambition into a question people can answer. Cooperation sounds attractive from a conference stage. A common naming convention is the kind of detail that decides whether cooperation survives the trip back to the office. The hands supplied a more economical illustration than another slide full of arrows.
The students heard about the attempts
On January 11, 2014, students from Houston’s Youth Leadership Development Program visited CHR. Taylor and Pasrija spoke about their careers and took the group through the operation. For Taylor, the account included leaving college to pursue entrepreneurship and making several unsuccessful business attempts before establishing a venture that worked.
The student response is a useful counterweight to the polished executive biography. What caught their attention was the sequence of effort, disappointment and persistence. A tour of a functioning company gave those earlier attempts a visible destination. The people listening could see both an operating business and a route to it that had included wrong turns.
There is something generous about including the unsuccessful attempts in a talk to young people. A success story with every failed beginning removed leaves an audience with very poor directions. Taylor gave them a version in which trying again belonged inside the career. The lesson required no promise that their own results would match his.
- 2003Meets Pasrija; Global 1 Source Group begins.
- 2006The venture merges with CHR Solutions.
- 2014Hands the CEO role to Pasrija.
- 2022Gated Rentals announces its housing fund.
The founder hands over the keys
In April 2014, Taylor resigned as CHR’s CEO to pursue other opportunities. Pasrija took on the chief executive position in addition to his existing responsibilities. Taylor remained a director and a substantial shareholder, with a special advisory role to the board’s chairman. Leaving the executive job did not mean severing the relationship.
The handoff also arrived during a period of operational correction. Omnia 360 had encountered development problems, and CHR had brought in additional software expertise. Taylor acknowledged that his abilities were better suited to the startup phase. That admission gives the career a useful piece of proportion: building a business and being its permanent chief executive are separate ambitions.
His later work included MNA Advisor, a firm offering mergers-and-acquisitions, growth-capital and advisory services. The Venture Capital Investment Competition listed him as an MNA Advisor judge in earlier Rice-hosted regional events and again on its 2026 MBA South roster. Experience accumulated inside companies had become something he could bring to other people’s decisions.
A different sort of infrastructure
In January 2022, Gated Rentals announced an inaugural private-equity fund with a $65 million target for modular rental communities around Houston. Taylor and Clayton Hagerman were named co-managing partners. The plan covered acquiring land, developing communities, assembling homes and managing the properties. The announcement described an intended undertaking; a target is a statement of ambition, rather than a receipt.
By July 2026, Taylor was discussing a planned community near Montgomery as Gated Rentals’ managing director and chief operating officer. Residents had raised traffic concerns; county officials said development requirements were being met. Taylor described the intended residents as people already living and working locally. Housing brought its own version of the old operating question: how does a plan fit the place it serves?
From communications services to homes, the distance looks large on a résumé. In practice, both bring him back to the daily needs around an investment. People expect the connection to work. They expect the place they rent to function. Starting gets the enterprise onto the page. The following years supply the harder verbs: deliver, maintain, adapt, and occasionally begin again.