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RocketCEO is an interesting collection of startup stories, where we interview inspiring CEOs and Founders who have taken a leap from Zero to One and tell their stories to the entire world.
Recently we got an opportunity to interview Shirish Kulkarni - Business Consultant, Transformer & Entrepreneur and below is the essence of the same, an incredible journey towards success.
Amit Unboxed: What “STROTA” is all about? It really seems an interesting name for a business.
STROTA in the Sanskrit language stands for “Origin of Energy”. STROTA has been instituted to be the “Origin of Energy” for “Synergizing Transformations”. Since its inception, STROTA is enabling extraordinary transformations for business growth through a close understanding of its business context and operations.
Amit Unboxed: In which cities/countries you are providing services or operating your business?
Physically-based out of Pune (India) currently but virtually can help and make difference anywhere in the world.
Amit Unboxed: How did you get your idea or concept for the business? What made you work on that idea or concept?
Organizations planning to grow aggressively or moderately, typically face certain potential barriers to their growth. They cannot leave anything to chance and have to carefully construct and implement well-thought-out plans to generate maximum value for themselves and eventually for their customers and other stakeholders. Having a strategy in place to accelerate growth and scale the organization to the next level can pose a challenge to Small and Medium Businesses.
Moreover, the challenges, opportunities and structure of each company are in one way or another unique. To address these unique challenges, STROTA ConsulTech Pvt. Ltd. (STROTA) has created a suite of Business Consulting Services to offer expert advice or facilitative assistance to help businesses examine the problems that are holding them back now as well as the opportunities they may have in the near or longer future.
STROTA has differentiated itself in the Business Consulting space by helping the organizations not only identify the challenge and the solution but also helping them to realize their growth dreams by working shoulder-to-shoulder to achieve the business results.
Amit Unboxed: How did it started? Can you tell us more about your starting days of entrepreneurship?
It all started as a dream, in Feb 2015, when the company was instated to benefit Small and Medium Businesses from the knowledge, skills and experiences acquired from global exposure. Over a period of time, it has served many prestigious clients like CoEP and SIBM in the education field, Palash Healthcare in healthcare, Yeshshree Auto components in manufacturing and about 50 odd customers in other verticals covering logistics, food and beverages, creative fields like photography, dance studios, etc.
STROTA is now poised to take a leap in delivering unique models to help businesses on a regular and long-term basis, so that they see the continuous value addition all through to reap benefits of the business outcome, without risking or over-committing or overpaying. STROTA constitutes like-minded and highly motivated professionals bringing together their intellectual abilities to enable, instill, demonstrate and execute these transformations for organizations that need them.
Amit Unboxed: What is your background? What you were doing before you got into the entrepreneurship?
I am an experienced hand in the fields of IT, Manufacturing and Consulting. As an engineer at heart, I have a formal Master of Engineering degree in Manufacturing & Automation and have completed my Executive MBA from IIM, Bangalore. I am a certified PMP, ITIL Foundation and SCRUM Master.
I have served global companies like TCE, KSB Pumps, Tata Motors, TTIL, PTC, BMC Software, Geometric Software, and TCS. I also have contributed in various capacities in global organizations in the areas of Product Inception and Development, Innovation and Transformation, Value Creation, and Product Lifecycle Management to name a few.
Amit Unboxed: What is the unique selling/buying point about your business? How do you manage to deal with your competitors?
At STROTA, we constantly work on the need of our customers and identify the appropriate solution for the same; we deliver the value and demonstrate the results.
STROTA is my inception for instilling innovation and entrepreneurship in the industry through business consulting. I have focused on innovation, transformation and rationalization throughout my career, and I am helping the SMB segment to push their limits higher by leveraging my skills and experiences for their growth, turnaround and optimization in business performances. I think that’s the most important and unique point about us.
Amit Unboxed: Business Consulting is tought thing to sale because it is very difficult for people to realize that it is needed for their growth. How do you tackle and manage this?
Yeah. You said it.
Business Consulting is not a very well-known and well-accepted term in the Small and Medium Business segment. To convince the management for a short-term engagement and lay down a plan for 30–60–90 days and establish credibility in the form of outcomes is the “uniquely established” execution model for STROTA. Reaching out, analyzing and working with 100 odd SMB businesses with no barrier for the industry verticals has taken STROTA into a very unique league to get visibility into the market, establish credibility and help clients build their profitability.
There are ample businesses in the market that do not have the new generation to be continuing with the same business — STROTA has built an umbrella framework in which a company like this becomes the part of the ecosystem, and STROTA provides the management and executioner support required for the turnaround of the organization by taking over equity stake in the company. This is a very unique offering in the market and complements IT enablement and LEAN initiatives getting driven for both the top line and bottom line of the organization.
Such a strong success story is already created for Dynalec Controls Pvt. Ltd., in which is last 1.5 years transformation, apart from improvement in Operational Efficiencies — leading to the betterment of the bottom-line through better cost-control, the top line has moved 2.75 times, with global logos as new customers bringing new northwards push to the revenue, with the new offerings like IIOT Based Remote Monitoring giving Dynalec the early mover advantage in this space and Opex Based Funding modeling helping customers reduce their decision-turn-around time, resulting into faster value-delivery to them to reap ROI faster with reduced financial risk.
This story is getting Dynalec to improve its credibility in the market with better brand value and hence market valuation — this will pose Dynalec into a very advantageous position for the IPO planned in the horizon 2 to 3 coming years. This is a very unique success story and would definitely fit well with other organizations needing such a deep and serious transformation.
Amit Unboxed: What kind of service offerings you provide?
STROTA has a very simple business model — identify a need, match capability and deliver value. The services could be sectioned as follows:
Due Diligence
Business Requirement Analysis
Business Value Proposition
Business Case Creation
Product Evaluation
Go-live Business Support
Business Strategy
IT Support for Pilot
Competition Analysis
Industry Trend Analysis
Business Analysis
The new offerings which are making waves in the market are:
Quick Business Diagnostic Analysis — your current state of business
Website Business Content Analysis — business effectiveness of your website
Annual Business Support Contract — For any of your business problems, we are a call away.
Amit Unboxed: What are your near future goals? Basically what’s on your immediate To-Do list?
India is an extremely tough market as a “proving ground”. If any business is able to sustain the market for 3 years and able to generate the revenues required, then it’s an acid test for the business to be able to succeed in the global market. STROTA has done the needful and is poised to soar in the global markets with a plunge.
STROTA is working on online systems, which will help businesses globally to assess themselves online. Then STROTA will be able to address their business consulting needs across the communication and collaboration tools. The company is focused on continuing the growth of the success pie in the Indian SMB market. It will build online tools to support the global market and create more awareness about the success of STROTA’s model through all the possible marketing channels.
Amit Unboxed: Can you share some of your “Success Stories”? This would be an extremely helpful insight for those who are currently scratching their heads to get into business consulting.
Why not sure. I would love to be a helping hand, always. I can think of a few different kinds of success stories apart from Dynalec. I would also like to share the testimonials our clients have given us. So let’s start one by one.
Franchise India — Gaurav Marya (MD, Franchise India)
STROTA joined the journey of Franchise India one year back to provide them access to market and business analysis skills to be able to get the brands onboarded and also investors to be recommended with businesses fitting their risk appetite. STROTA has effectively contributed to mastering the franchising models and getting @ 15 brands to be set on their expansion roadmap.
STROTA is currently working on establishing the franchising of newer segments like the Manufacturing and Services Industry, which is going to open a new market in the franchising space.
The client says — “We would like to recommend contributions by STROTA and Shirish Kulkarni in specific and look forward to more and more business traction for a mutually benefiting relationship.”
Yeshshree Press Comps Pvt. Ltd. — Milind Kank (MD, Yeshshree Group)
STROTA joined the journey of Yeshshree 2 years ago to build an IT roadmap for business benefiting applications for Yeshshree. STROTA completed the analysis of the features, helped the creation of the roadmap for the application — named as K-Ways (AEMS) and helped the application to be enabled on the cloud for supporting 300 business users and 1000 blue colored workmen in Yeshshree.
The client says — “We would like to thank STROTA for their efforts to help Yeshshree to set itself on the IT automation path.”
Dessign7 Interiors Pvt. Ltd. — Shabbir Sabuwala (Director, Dessign7)
STROTA has helped Dessign7 to go to the next level from where it was within a short span of six months — he not only influenced to double its top line but in addition implemented various tools and systems which helped the sales, marketing and operations processes to reduce the overall turnaround time and improved visibility to the end-to-end business.
The client says — “Shirish has not only been a very astute business advisor to get the required business focus, he has helped us become more tech-savvy and implement various tools — but he has been always a good friend and someone just a call away to make us feel business-safe all-the-time.”
FFD (Freedom From Diabetes) — Dr. Pramod Tripathi (Founder, FFD Program)
STROTA joined the journey of FFD to IT to enable the complete business ecosystem for FFD with an online application and mobile solution. STROTA not only helped to size and document the requirements but also evaluated and finalized an appropriate IT product vendor to take the implementation forward.
The client says — “We would like to recommend STROTA and Shirish Kulkarni for their contributions in the FFDs journey for freeing India from Diabetes.”
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That’s it for today :-)
Hope each of you has a great start to your day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.
— Amit
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