Consulting on steroids for high growth companies

“We do not have time for steering committee updates and detailed presentations. Please tell us the findings in an email and then just go ahead and implement the actions on the ground. Let us meet next when you have fixed this problem for us.”

At Praxis, we understand what high growth companies need from consulting, and that is where our “next-gen and technology-driven” approach blends in like butter on toast. In this short transcript, we would like to talk about how the consulting needs of high growth companies vastly vary from that of large scale consulting buyers. We will also elaborate on how Praxis’ unique approach provides the highest ROI on consulting spends of high growth companies by addressing those needs.

High growth companies need consulting very differently from traditional companies in 5 ways:

• Problem statements are continuously evolving. Agility is paramount. The problem statement can change overnight, and hence consulting teams need to be highly flexible and agile. For example, in one of the capability building projects which we were implementing for a fast-growing financial services firm, we had to co-create training modules for their feet on the street. Overnight, the need changed to re-looking at the feet on the street model and if actually an online sales channel was the best way to scale. The problem was then a sales model benchmark and creation exercise. We shuffled the team instantly to bring in a specialist in sales models in financial services firms.
• The natures of the problems are different. Fast growth companies are very close to the customer, employees, suppliers and investors. This is both, a bane and a boon. Given the diverse nature of each stakeholder, clarity is required more in prioritization of the bigger issues and less in unearthing all the issues. For example, for one fast-growing real estate firm, the problems of the market development team were crystal clear, but what was not clear was that which were the biggest issues the management must go after to improve team sentiment.
• There is a need to get answers quickly. Really quickly. This might seem obvious but unlike a large multi-billion dollar retail company, where we did a 6-month engagement on “improving price realization through bundling”, for an e-commerce company, we did 3-week diligence on “bundling in the electronics category”. Was the level of value addition different? No. Was the level of accuracy different? Yes. Given a large base, even a 1-2% accuracy means much of a business for a large conglomerate but for high growth companies, the sky is the potential and the effort-value addition curve is extremely high slope. Thus, the process of getting to the answer needs to be really quick and engaged.
• Technology is at the core of problems and delivery requires technological comfort. Tech is disrupting almost all industries and giving birth to a new breed of “high growth” companies. A lot of the problems and the solutions of these firms are purely business-driven but technology-enabled. For example, one of our hospitality clients was unable to create a mechanism in which it could regularly have performance reviews with its franchisees. A lot of franchisees were leaving the firm mostly because they were in the dark about their drivers of low performance, which, in most instances, were quick fixes. The company did not have a large ground team and needed technology to create regular and interactive dashboards for their partners, which could be accessed on a mobile device. At Praxis, this is our strongest capability. We use proprietary tools and technologies like crawling, prototyping, wire-framing, etc., to turn business solutions into actionable technology modules.
• Employees at high growth companies are relatively younger both in age and how they work. Steering committee updates, “project” kick-offs, executive updates, email threads, client pre-wires are stone age to high growth companies. The demand for co-creation and engagement is much higher, and mostly the expectations are to having a real-time view on the progress and emerging answers/recommendations.

“We are impressed with the speed and action orientation of Praxis teams. They bring in a very different experience, fresh energy, exciting new ideas, modern techniques and an extremely collaborative way of working. They don’t just talk at a high level and love to get their hands dirty."

The Praxian DNA is extremely well suited for consulting high growth companies. It does not come as a surprise as we also like to refer to ourselves as a “startup”. 

Authored by (at the time of writing):

Aryaman Tandon, Leader, Technology and Internet Practice

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