Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

One of the biggest things to happen in a long time in the Indian retail scene is Nilgiris acquisition by Future Group. Nilgiris is one of the few retailers in south India that has been very successful for a long time and also has been going through ownership changes for some time now. We do hope that Future group would provide good support for Nilgiris. Having had a chance to work with Nilgiris just once and understanding the dynamics of the Indian retail scene, there are several opportunities and challenges for all the parties involved - Future Group, Nilgiris and the Franchisees. Opportunities for Future group Working with a franchise network Nilgiris is one of the biggest Franchisee network and Future group can learn a lot from them. Better product mix management for various segments Nilgiri's strong point is that it has got the right product mix for every customer segment and the right kind of store for the location More complicated vendor management ...

How does a retailer scale and turn itself to profitability?? There have been several cases of online retailers that have struggled to balance scaling at the cost of profitability. The founders / promoters are at the cross roads on the need for more capital - that cedes control - to expand aggressively. They struggle with the need to attain profitability quickly. Their mentors are also not effective at advising them since there is no proper precedent for one approach over other. Looking at Myntra ’s case - a leading online retailer - It proves that it is never too late to get on the path of profitability irrespective of whether you want to grow aggressively ( Reference here ). All promoters would appreciate that. This case is strengthened by Zappos - an US online shoes retailers - as well that has been profitable right from day one. Myntra’s steps to attain profitability is well renowned and the slew of online retailers can gain a lot of insights from Myntra’s case. Pri...

What is in it for your customer and user to buy and use your product? While we all would have answers for this question, we need to understand what the users think of our product. When we started our product, this is what we came up with: We were all excited and would roll our tongues and try to convince our prospects that this is the business value that it was providing. Turns out we were wrong. While we are providing these value adding aspects in our product, these are not the real “ BUSINESS " values. Notice that the word business is in bold. What they really wanted was a simple web page that tells them how their business is doing without jumping through hoola hoops. The biggest business value for saving time on doing mundane calculations. They did not want to manually consolidate sales of 3 stores every month or every time they needed to take a decision. Once you have captured the business value, how would you track how you are doing on that business val...

Getting leads for a new product is very critical. It helps keep the momentum and helps us get initial feedback. When we design a new product and have a functional prototype ready, we typically do one round of testing and demonstration within our organisation and collect feedback. What matters more is the feedback from our prospects - potential users. When we have a functional prototype ready, we have 2 paths to choose from: Start a web-site , have some information and quickly get leads from the page Go out on the field and interact with potential users and prospects, demonstrate the application While we see a lot of product teams and startups doing the first one, It is the second path that matters till the product goes to beta. Taking a product to beta is a big task. Taking our example, we took 2 prototypes and 8 months to even start alpha and our beta is in 18 months with 2 customers. While all teams are tempted to have inbound leads, the problems there are In-b...

When I started out in the team, I was tasked out with coming out with a plan so that we can demonstrate the product with real data. The idea was to demonstrate it to our prospect with their own data and win them over. However, when I started working, I found out that what we lacked was not a plan but a vision. I quickly put together a one day workshop with our team and our product owner. When we started talking, we talked about several things and figured out that we needed a plan of various proportions. We needed a plan that could help us one the following: Provide a focus for the long term with near term focus on just one thing Help us talk to prospects on what we are going to do Help us decide on when we would need to focus shift on which function - Engineering , sales etc We also did a quick “Product in a box” exercise so that all of us in a team can practice and imbibe the elevator pitch. We needed this since we had to do this pitch at several levels - Inter...