Our services
Services
for Early Stage Companies
STRATEGY
To win you need a plan. The plan is often the most important determining factor of success for early-stage companies. We work with founders and CEOs to evaluate competitive landscapes and market opportunities, and to develop the strategic direction for their business. We help clarify the vision and build the tactical plan to achieve the day-to-day objectives. The right partnerships, joint ventures, and acquisitions can also be make-or-break decisions. We help identify, evaluate, and negotiate these opportunities.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
Why do most early-stage companies go out of business? They simply run out of money. There is a graveyard of good products, services, and teams that didn’t have a long enough cash runway to reach their full potential. It is never too early to optimize your financial management tools and processes – monthly flash reports, updated forecasts, cash flow analyses, KPIs. We build this infrastructure and provide review and financial management of the business.
RESOURCE ALLOCATION
By definition, start-ups are resource constrained. They have limited budgets, time, and people. Effectively allocating those scarce resources is one of the CEO’s toughest jobs. We work with management to build budgets and set revenue and profit targets. As businesses evolve, so does spending. We provide ongoing advice on regular adjustments to the overall budgets, as well as the allocations of those budgets across departments.
SALES & MARKETING
Products and services rarely sell themselves, particularly at early-stage companies. Revenue generation requires effective strategies, structures, and processes underpinning sales teams. Pricing and positioning products, staffing, onboarding, and training sales teams, creating playbooks and putting in place well-aligned incentive and commission plans are all critical to ramp and drive revenue growth. We advise across all of these aspects of sales effectiveness. Then when it comes to marketing, there are many pieces to the puzzle: Brand identity, manifesto, tagline. Awareness, acquisition, retention. Paid marketing, social media, blogs. Public relations. We work with management to create the marketing plan, prioritize initiatives and execute tactics across all of these areas.
CAPITAL RAISING
One of the most important decisions entrepreneurs make is how to finance their business. When to raise capital? How much? Through what vehicle? At what valuation? With what terms? With what positioning and narrative? We advise and directly support outreach to potential financing partners (e.g. angels, VCs, banks). We also make select investments in angel rounds.
ORGANIZATION
Growth places new demands on an organization’s people and structure. We help prioritize human capital needs, including critical decisions on when and how to increase staffing levels, when to hire or outsource, and how best to improve retention. We’ll often serve as recruiter and interviewer, leveraging our network to help identify and assess candidates.
CORPORATE
As start-ups grow up, so do corporate responsibilities. Managing various constituents – shareholders, boards, partners, vendors – requires time and attention from CEOs. Effective communication becomes increasingly important, as do decisions on corporate structure, employee equity pools, selection and use of legal counsel (where our legal background can be very helpful), among other unanticipated demands.
Services
for larger technology, entertainment
and media companies
STRATEGY
We will be an ideas factory, a sounding board, an independent analyst (or more typically, all three at once) as you create and define a new direction for your business, or refine and optimize an existing approach. Being able to leverage our many years of experience in media and technology as well as what we see outside your company’s walls will provide you with a significant advantage in ensuring that no stone has been left unturned as we review all available options together.
DEFINING SUCCESS
Too often, innovative, disruptive and necessary projects in larger organizations fall at the first hurdle due to a basic failure clearly to define and articulate the objectives, deliverables and KPIs necessary for success. We will give you an independent, objective and clear eyed view of what is essential and what matters less. And we will help you to ensure the buy-in and participation of all the stakeholders within your organization necessary for success.
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Knowing where you want to go and how to get there is only clears the first couple of hurdles. Successfully executing on that plan will ultimately define whether you win the race. We can contribute to this in many ways: from working you and your team to ensure that no operational stone is left unturned, all the way to taking on full management and control of a specific project, leaving you and your team much freer to focus on the necessities of your ongoing business.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
We can help you in defining and maximizing new market opportunities as you put your strategies into effect, including:
Media rights acquisition, negotiation and strategy: identifying what you need and where to get those rights from, managing negotiation from high level deal terms, through term sheets, to final contract.
International expansion or entry into the US market: where to go in terms of market opportunity, talent pool and strategic partnership potential; how to cut through the red tape.
Outreach to strategic media and tech partners: leveraging our network to help you find new (and often unexpected) partners.
Go-To-Market planning: ensuring that your definition of success becomes a reality, by helping you identify the right people within or outside your organization, and giving them the right tools and incentives to succeed.