YSA in the Year 2023
Your Strategic Advisor was born as a small spark of an idea. We proceeded to validate the idea by starting some basic marketing in social media like LinkedIn.
The initial feedback was very positive and that encouraged us to delve deeper into Business Strategy and Strategy Consulting frameworks available. We also looked at tools and platforms available for business strategy.
There is a lot of confusion with respect to business strategy as against business innovation and this also further varies when you think about them as a startup or as an existing business. However, our interest was more towards the startups and smaller businesses struggling to grow to the next stage.
Our premise was, if the large companies with armies of employees and well paid highly educated ivy league employees need advisory services, more of that is needed for the smaller players
We created lots of marketing collaterals, videos and shared across various social media. These experiments led us to look at the Small, Medium Business or the MSME segment as the area to focus on for our advisory and consulting services.
Our due diligence yielded further insights. In designing firms, we looked at 3 primary areas.
- The product/service being offered
- The distribution strategy
- The monetization strategy
An interplay of these 3 things can be used to invent a myriad of business models to satisfy the business goals (the reason for its existence)
The next important thing, we looked at is the business itself. The why? Why is that business needed? Just for making money or for making a social impact. Our specific leaning was in helping humanity at a large scale and hence was always purpose driven.
Hence the purpose comes first beyond everything. Having clarity on the purpose helps to develop the remaining portions of the business with the right lenses and not the wrong ones.
Having gone through all the above, we created the distribution strategy to be a business blog to start with. There are a number of channels that can be used once client discovery happens but until then it is a broadcast of thoughts and ideas to potential clients, employees as well as investors.
Monetization is a long-term strategy and we are more concerned with delivering value. This takes time as we need understand the top 3 business problems of MSMEs before we attempt to make this viable.
We intend to leverage conclaves, meetups and other MSME focused events to create the momentum and networking as we progress later on in this journey.
Very few basic steps have been taken and a lot of work to be done. Looking forward to higher productivity as we leverage the latest AI and other productivity enhancement tools and understand how to use them better.