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two and three times a week, even in the summer, while working a full-time job that had a lot of responsibility and required a fair amount of travel. Life was a real challenge. But I was so obsessed with getting it done, I finished in two and a half years.” Ahuja graduated from CSU with a master’s of business administration in 1975. To this day, the family joke is that he pursued a second master’s degree to “match” his wife’s Ph.D.
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I am very blessed and proud of my family. They are (l-r) my daughter Ritu, my precious grandchildren, Raina and Rohan, my wife Usha, and my daughter and son-in-law, Manisha and Neil Sethi. My grandchildren are my joy and my motivation to stay young and healthy.
Ahuja e arned his mas ter ’s degree in mechanical engineering from OSU in 1970. While there, he fell in love with a fellow student, Usha Sachdeva, who was pursuing her doctorate in mathematics. They married in 1972, returning to India for the wedding ceremony. “In the beginning, we had a commuter marriage because our careers took us to different places,” he says. “Usha worked in Baltimore, while I worked as an engineer for Lempco Industries in Maple Heights. Eventually we decided to make Cleveland our home.”
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t Lempco, while gaining experience in the transmission parts industry, Ahuja began thinking of a career change from engineering to business management. And CSU beckoned. “Not many schools offered the opportunity to get an MBA while working full time,” he says. “CSU had an accessible evening program. But going through the MBA program was definitely the hardest time of my life. “Since my degrees were not in business, I was required to take 90 credit hours of undergraduate and graduate courses. It was hard to keep up. I attended classes from 6 to 10 p.m.
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or one of his final classes at CSU, an entrepreneurship course, Ahuja developed a business plan for a hypothetical company. The plan earned him an “A” in the class and within months, became the model for his very successful Transtar Industries Inc. “I was encouraged to follow through with my plan by my professor, Dr. Jeffrey Susbauer, who introduced me to one of his students at the local bank branch. I obtained a small bank loan, sought out an old acquaintance in the industry who became a partner, and Transtar (Delta at that time) was launched within a couple of months as a two-man operation in a small warehouse in Bedford,” says Ahuja. From its humble beginnings, Transtar grew to be the leading worldwide distributor of quality transmission parts to the motor vehicle repair industry. Now headquartered in Walton Hills, the firm has 1,700 employees at 97 locations in the United States and in distribution centers globally. “Our first year was profitable and that was very encouraging. Then we began to grow rapidly,” says Ahuja. “The key to Transtar’s success was always having a business plan to keep us focused on the future. At first I would do a plan for two or three years, then for five years. The plans were ambitious, but achievable, and dealt with every aspect of the business — finance, people, product, market. It took a lot of hard work and perseverance but we always did achieve or exceed our business plan. Transtar became known as the company with the structure and foresight to respond to and take advantage of changes in the industry.” Thirty years after founding Transtar, Ahuja sold his majority control in 2005 but remained actively involved as chairman and chief executive officer until 2009. He sold his remaining interest in December 2010. Ahuja is now the chairman and CEO of MURA Holdings, LLC in Beachwood, a private investment company. The acronym MURA (for Monte, daughter Manisha, Usha, and daughter Ritu Ahuja) embodies the family’s commitment to philanthropy and leaving a lasting legacy in the community.