Few people in the advertising and marketing ecosystem are better equipped than Sanjay Mehta to lead this online Masterclass on Digital Transformation. In our discussions with him, we were inspired to ask Sanjay Mehta to formulate a three-part series aimed at motivating founders and owners of mid-sized businesses in India to embrace digital transformation.
While Digital Transformation is a much-touted (and often incorrectly used) buzzword in Indian business circles, Sanjay Mehta’s series highlights the real growth potential that comes with the right retooling. This insightful series, ‘Digital Transformation 1-2-3 with Sanjay Mehta’, will culminate in a Zoom-based webinar on Wednesday, August 7, at 3 pm IST. The webinar is exclusive to 40 professionals on a first-come, first-served basis.
Masterclass #1: July 17, 2024 – Boards and Founders need to see “outside the box” for the multiplier effect (published last week. Link: https://www.mxmindia.com/advertising/digital-transformation-1-2-3-with-sanjay-mehta-part-1/)
Masterclass #2: July 24, 2024 – Exploiting Opportunities, Overcoming Challenges (published last week. Link: https://www.mxmindia.com/marketing/digital-transformation-1-2-3-with-sanjay-mehta-part-2/)
Masterclass #3: Today, July 31, 2024 – The Specific Nature of the Beast
Masterclass #4: August 7, 2024 – Live webinar (Registration will open tomorrow, August 2)
The Specific Nature of the Beast
Over the previous two articles of this series, we have understood that there are many growth multiplier opportunities in business. Several of these are revenue and profit growth related, and where, due to various reasons, it may be imperative to look beyond the current Board and team and reach out to the right experts outside.
While this looks perfect in theory, when it comes to implementation, is where an extent of challenge comes in, due to the ground realities that we cannot ignore.
The focus at this time, when we speak of companies, is on the very large middle of Indian businesses – which may collectively be referred to as mid-sized companies, for the sake of understanding. Let’s think of these as companies with revenues ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 cr, and mostly family-owned businesses. These are often based out of Tier 1, Tier 2 centres all around the country, and often these are multi-generational in terms of ownership within the respective family. Most of these may be in traditional areas of manufacturing and trading activity, and several of them could be listed companies as well.
With a lot going in their favor, considering the extremely large Indian consumption space, they may not always have the advantages that larger MNCs or bigger industrial houses based in urban metros of India, have.
On the one hand, global consulting firms and other similar service providers are keener to work with larger MNC and Indian corporates. If they do pick up engagements from mid-sized companies, they often do not put their best teams on those accounts. Likewise, larger system integrators and other tech companies are also keener to go after larger MNC and Indian corporate accounts, and mid-sized companies need to find their best partners from smaller tech companies.
While these may be the situation when it comes to the supply side of service providers, as founders and owners, there is often an issue of finding the right trusted resources that they can work with. Trust is a big factor when it comes to working with founders, as they want to be sure that their money is in good and safe hands, with high levels of integrity, with people who will value the company’s resources as their own, and who will seek value for money solutions.
This is not to say that mid-sized companies don’t have ambition or would be hesitant to spend larger sums on say technology. They just need a higher level of comfort and assurance that the money is being spent wisely and that they are getting the required value for money.
These being the constraints or the lay of the land, if I may call it that, what is needed in terms of external experts who can open newer growth opportunities for these companies, is for them to have a good “dhandha” attitude! The agility to get things moving fast, valuing the cost of time, but at the same time, ensuring that the ROI is clear and measurable.
It is indeed a tough combination to find. When you look for subject matter experts, say, people with a good technology background, these folks could easily have been techies who have worked in corporate world, done a lot of good work, but who would have been earning salaries and using corporate budgets that got allocated for their requirements.
What is really needed is someone having those same skills, but who might have run his / her own business, potentially bootstrapped it, so as to get a really good value of money, and yet delivered on ambitious goals using technology.
So, what becomes a clear ask is to find not just the right kind of external experts to enhance growth opportunities for the business and for the founders and the Board, but also find those kinds of experts who have been-there-done-that when it comes to running and growing businesses of their own.
The ideal insider go-to person then, who can join the Board as a director or be a strategic advisor to the Board, will then need to ideally come from founders who have created successful ventures and maybe exited those, and during the time that they were running their shows, they were becoming experts in their respective areas of focus, be it technology or whichever.
Inviting such people to help the company and the Board to make the most of the immense opportunities and creating the growth multipliers, would then be the perfect answer. Whether these folks are invited to join the Board as experts in their respective fields, or brought in as strategic advisors, or asked to join expert committees constituted by the Boards for specific purposes, such would be the ideal utilization of their expertise.
And which will set up the company well, for astronomical growth, going forward!
Three-part text series concluded
Next week (August 7, 2024): Masterclass #4: Live Webinar
Sanjay Mehta is one of the pioneers in the digital world in India, having founded and spearheaded several companies: HomeIndia, Mirum (earlier SocialWavelength before WPP took it over) to name a few. He is also an author and commentator on all things digital, and beyond. He is an investor, mentor and also helps organisations – large and small – in their process of digital transformation.
He tweets @sm63. Linkedin.com/in/spmehta
You can still hear rumbles from Budget announcements through the media, with the most emphasis on the removal of indexation for long-term capital gains. The markets have responded by crashing, recovering and staying flat. The media has tried to hype the government’s job creation scheme – a budget of Rs 2 lakh crore to create jobs over a five-year period. This sounds good to the innocent, but given the unemployment crisis and our well-known bureaucratic and general efficiency, a five-year window can also be seen as a neat excuse of future inaction. Most of the national media is hard-pressed to report on the reality of budget reactions.
