No ideas are small, but equally it is unfortunate that many a times these ideas are stuck with its initial inertia on finding its trigger point. It’s about where to start, how to start, when to start, who to start and many more questions. It involves writing a business plan to evolve revenue models, forecasting an operations blue print and identifying the break even points and ROIs’. And this list goes endless. This is more prominent with internet based start up ideas that may need a good mix of online and offline strategies.
However the solution lays in the fact that one need to look at these issues from within and they will be surprised to admit the fact that many of these challenges they perceive to have need not to be tackled by them. As owners of ideas that have a fair share of their heart, their role is to keep dreaming high and rely on partners with necessary execution expertise, who can come along with them in realizing these ideas. It necessitates a need for these partners to possess broader breadth in business analysis, and deeper IT expertise. It is about an ability to combine unconventional methods, business wisdom and proven standards & methods to propose an evolutionary solution. The outcome will be a superior framework to evolve programs for platform (technology), data and marketing. We call it Start up Business Consulting Framework!
At a platform level, it is about associating the expected features list of the beta launch on a suitable technology stack that goes in line with the time to market and TCO. At an execution level, it necessitates deeper business analysis expertise that can transform ideas into actionable programs. It is about providing a peer level champion from these partner organization who typically engages very closely with the client team. This forms a foundation phase, as high level functional description of ideas gets transformed into a system level use cases that shall be implemented. This is an excellent way to start the program since this gives visibility on feature sets that shall be available as part of the beta launch.. However one needs to realize that this is just the beginning and they need to have good blue print of operations roadmap post this beta launch. The key here is to have a comprehensive online marketing program and data management program.
As a business consultant, it is imperative that the consulting partner takes a significant role in both these dimensions of marketing and data management. On the marketing side, it is about how an online business enterprise fares though the following life cycle,
- Building the base channel – membership / subscription models, building a product merchandize , value added service delivery models, promotions etc
- Building revenue models / channels – Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and web analytics
- Building a framework to Know Your Customer (KYC) – Customer loyalty management, CRM management, & Campaigns Management
Finally one cannot set aside the need to have a good program for data management as data is the king always! For an online business model to stand tall amidst peer competition, it is its ability to maintain the most recent and real time data. Consider a case of an online portal that does the price comparison for a product from different merchants. The result view of price for a product across different merchants need to be real time since there are possibilities that some merchants may provide discounts / promotion at that point of time and the online portal still need to capture those. This will be the essence of the robustness about the solution. It may happen via an online channel where the merchants can upload their data or by having comrades on the field, which does the work of collecting these data and uploading it into the application. Hence irrespective of the fact that the product data can come from both online and offline channels, it is a must that a comprehensive quality management program exists to make sure the data are accurate and managed in real time.
At one level above the above said transactions, data program also need to have an ability to gain insights on these real time data. It can be customer data, transaction data, web traffic data etc that needs to be stratified to identify and isolate cohesive data groups. This will involve interesting and multi dimensional data analysis that will result in enterprise level metrics. Hence it is definitely an icing in the cake if the consulting partner brings in the necessary process management skills to define a back office framework for these enterprises. When you are a start up, you may think you can manage it yourself along with your other founding members but equally the irony is that you wish you grow at a rate that cannot be managed by you and your team. Remember, as your enterprises grow, your data grows and so is your business process overheads. So better lay the platform ahead so you don’t get into a data trap.
At OptiSol we understand these dynamics and bring in expertise in Technology outsourcing, Business Functions Outsourcing and Online Marketing Management. We have created many success stories as a technology partner to internet startups. This includes building prototypes that has facilitated our clients to generate investments and it has been a growth story since then.
Our Business Consulting Services are
- Start up Consulting
- eBusiness Channel Management
- Business Process Outsourcing Management Services
For more details please visit us at www.optisolbusiness.com
