The Silicon Review ^Asia

The business landscape has been through several modifications since the past few years. So, firms looking to climb up the ladder to success in the present day business climate, have to think and act according to the changing requirements that define success across a plethora of industry sectors. In a dynamic business climate like this, Evolution Strategy Advisors LLP comes forward to help companies strategise their business growth and restructure them to be financially healthy and globally competitive.

Evolution Strategy Advisors (ESA) is a company based out of Mumbai & Gurgaon that offers innovative solutions for business growth to large and mid-sized corporates in the B2C sector. It offers consulting services in the following three areas:

• Business Transformation: Restructuring and transforming organisations to grow
• Business Diagnostics: Identifying issues which are holding back growth of a business/division
• Executional Excellence: In sales, marketing, brand management and analytics

ESA offers Business Health Improvement solutions in sales and marketing for consumer, pharma, building material and automobile companies in India. It is the first and only company to offer business diagnostics in sales and marketing in India. ESA has aided business growth for many industry leaders and is now poised for offering this solution to midsized companies too.

In conversation with the CEO, Vineet Trakroo

Q. How do you explain the technological and business market scenario in India?

ESA offers business health improvement and transformation services to B2C organisations. With the advent of sales automation, online sales, and online reputation and search, most B2C organisations are digitizing their operations of sales and marketing. With the additional data already generated by ERP systems, this is leading to a data deluge.

The challenge is in gaining insights from data, marrying it to what’s happening in the market and understanding the causes for this effect (which is recorded as data). Many organisations have still not been able to digitally tap into the market insights to identify issues and solutions. Organisations still face challenges in interpreting and using data as against their instinct.

Q. The number of companies in India is way too many, and the competition in the market is at its peak. Do you think budding entrepreneurs can still make their own way?

If entrepreneurs can identify a need that’s big enough which has not been fulfilled, they can definitely create a sustainable business provided they follow the basics of business management. Furthermore, it’s easier for new age companies to use technology as compared to older organisations which may be using conventional means to grow. As more and more businesses get digitized, the opportunities for entrepreneurs will increase. Moreover, as long as the services are unique and uses skills that can’t be easily digitized or adopted by AI in the near future, the risk for failure will be lower.

Q. How successful was your first project?

Our first project was on sales and marketing transformation. We were able to increase the company’s gross margin by 50% and improve sales by 70% in the first year, reversing a 7 year loss. We could also change their brand name, re-launch their products and add a new portfolio to complement their distribution expansion by more than 100%. It was an organisational transformation which also helped them to prune their inventory by 30%.

Q. Any company, big or small, must have the sense of authenticity and originality to succeed. Is your company a leader or a follower?

We are pioneers, as we introduced business diagnostic in India. This is a proprietary technique in understanding why a product, brand or business is not doing well and how it can scale up.  The authenticity is in our performance wherein we have improved growth in sales or profits within a year for most of our clients. Our success is rewarded with almost 70% repeat business from our clients.

Q. Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

We are soon planning to introduce two new products, Business Health and Marketing and Sales Analytics. Business Health is a service which will help organisations understand the key issues which need to be addressed. We can identify the extent of each challenge faced by corporates and also prioritise them. We will also generate solutions to resolve these challenges which give quick results. We do this on a cloud analytics platform which improves the analytical abilities and speed to market.

The Marketing and Sales analytics will help consumer companies discover new data based insights from the companies own data as well as syndicated industry data to create a strategic path to improve performance. This would have analytics on data generated by sales automation and the same will be correlated to marketing parameters of market potential, market share and media reach.

Q. How has the journey of the company been so far?

Evolution Strategy Advisors LLP was established in mid-2013 for representing international companies in India for JV and licensing. We have represented large brands like Honeywell, Westinghouse, as well as a few companies from Israel and East Asia. In 2014, we started our consulting operations, advising mid-sized Indian companies for sales and marketing transformation.

Later in mid-2014, we added a technologically enabled service of Business Diagnostic along with a US based company. We started building this business with some of the large corporates in India many of which are Fortune 500 leaders. Over the years, we have done more than 70 assignments with leading companies in Pharma, Auto, Consumer and Building Materials both for Business Transformation and Business Diagnostics. We have partnered with organisations to grow their business from 15% to 200% within a year.

The Man behind the Plan

Vineet Trakroo, CEO

Vineet Trakroo, CEO, Evolution Strategy Advisors LLP, Marketing and sales strategist, has over 25 years of corporate experience and is now consulting large and midsized companies since 2013. He has been CMO with Usha International, Head of Marketing for CavinKare, Pidilite-Fevicol. He has also headed the Sales and Marketing for Beiersdorf & Ahmed Oil Mills.

"We believe performance is about focusing on what our clients can do better.”