Enterprise: Stratacon Business Advisors LLP
Founder-Partner: Savio Fernandez
Industry: Business Services & Consultancy
Year it was founded: 2014
Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat

All businesses aspire to increase revenue, maximise growth and achieve breakthroughs but often require strategic guidance (and even handholding) to succeed. Stratacon Business Advisors LLP is an Ahmedabad-based boutique management consulting firm that focuses on strategy development and business transformation. The firm is spearheaded by industry veterans with decades of experience in business management and training.

In conversation with GlobalLinker (GL) founding partner, Savio Fernandez (SF) shares his business journey.

GL: What motivated and excited you to start Stratacon Business Advisors LLP?

SF: All three partners of the firm have over 20 years of industry experience each and while in the past, we have hired management consultants ourselves, we often saw there was a big gap in walking the talk. Essentially in terms of being there to implement the recommendations offered and often consultants shied away when we offered to link fees to performance.

We knew we could do better and hence was launched Stratacon Business Advisors LLP - a firm committed to its core value, which was and is to accelerate an advisory delivery approach that actions ‘involved consulting’. Another huge gap in the market was the lack of professional consulting firms (not individuals) catering to the SME group with this premise. There were the large global firms which were out of reach for small businesses owing to the large fee brackets. So we decided to bring in the best of professional consulting in the manner most suited to SMEs and startups.

Also read: Vineet Kumar, Founder, Meditantras

GL: How does your business differentiate itself in the industry?

SF: We centre on a few key words that are elementary for us – impact, involved engagement, value added consulting and above all being creative in thought and execution. We work in and above the business, providing quantum improvement for long term impacts. Our approach is focused on recommendations and implementations thereby enabling our clients to see the success of our strategies or help the business complete its transformation exercise.

There is no formula for success but it must always begin with a fantastic idea that has a market and hard work along with some opportunity creation, innovation, ingenuity, foresight and pivots.

GL: What are challenges for your business to grow bigger, better and faster from here?

SF: New competition, new technologies and newly empowered customers brings a need for every business to transform, be market ready and ecosystem agile. The same applies to us as well. The freelance economy is getting stronger each day and this has brought about a double impact in our industry as well as in other industries too. Highly qualified individuals are offering their services at ‘everyday low costs’ and this has increased competition and put a downward pressure on prices. The need for skill enhancements is also a very big challenge owing to new technologies and their integration across all sectors to drive efficiency and lower production (manufacturing or services) costs.

Since our work is in advisory and implementation we are better placed than most boutique firms, and at the same time we are focused on increasing value and end benefits to clients. We focus on 99% success rate to ensure we satisfy our customers and win more referrals as this is a credence goods industry (a credence good is a type of good with qualities that cannot be observed by the consumer after purchase, making it difficult to assess its utility). The only way a client will assess utility is if they see our strategies and recommendations providing benefits in the real world. On the skill development front we consistently mentor startups to ensure we continue learning and the same time helping startups succeed. Our startups are invariably tech based across industries involving technologies such as IoT, Big Data, Blockchain, Business Analytics, Robotics, Augmented and Mixed Reality.

GL: How has GlobalLinker helped your business?

SF: We are new to GlobalLinker but I think this is a great platform to reach out to more businesses and make a difference. I believe it is a must use platform for all new and existing businesses.

Also read: Vijay Shah, Founder, Petals Professional Services

GL: Could you name 3 things that have been instrumental to your success?

SF: I suppose having strong industry experience has helped us understand entrepreneurship and their challenges better than most. I could list down the below as what has attributed to our success

• A 50 year plus combined experience and expertise of managing businesses.
• Long term commitment for success and we don’t shy away in implementing what we recommend.
• Proven techniques and continuously evolving frameworks to bring about a wholesome change, rather than incremental and short term improvements.
  
  

GL: What is the next big thing on your business agenda?

SF: I believe as a consulting firm we would like to work more on digitization across industries. This is a growing space owing to fast-paced technological developments, political uncertainty, the regulatory landscape and risk management. There is great opportunity here and we would like to make the most of it. But most of all we have been working quite a bit in the background and in 2020 we would now like to get our name out there in the reckoning of top consulting firms.

GL: What advice would you give to a new entrepreneur?

SF: I would like to pick an excerpt from an article I had written earlier on titled 'Starting Up Successfully'. There is no formula for success but it must always begin with a fantastic idea that has a market and hard work along with some opportunity creation, innovation, ingenuity, foresight and pivots. The only recurring pattern of successful businesses is that the founders have always in one way or the other tested their idea for its acceptance, believed in it and worked really hard without taking their eye of the unit economics.

Also read: Entrepreneur fuses concept of co-working & incubation to help startups

GL: We would love to know the person behind the entrepreneur.

• Every day you wake up at – 6 AM
• The first thing you do when you wake up – Go for a 7 km walk
• What do you do to unwind – Hear Audio books while on the walk or in the car
• When you face a big challenge, you – Go back to basics and approach the challenge with a new way of thinking and iterate till I find a solution. I also speak and take advice from friends and family, especially my wife and son.
• The best piece of advice you've ever been given – I have actually read the best advice ever and it has stayed by me ever since. A philosopher Daniel Dennett once used the phrase, "Competence without Comprehension". Meaning to make a perfect machine or process, it is not requisite to know how to make it". I inferred from it "you can do anything, if you have the will to do so, you will always find a way because it is embedded in evolution itself".
• The one book everyone should read – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
  
  

Network with Savio Fernandez by clicking on the 'Connect' button on his profile.

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