According to the Darwinian theory of evolution, humans are the most successful species amidst billions still living and other billions of billions that have gone extinct. If only other species could comprehend the many secrets behind this fact: Bipedalism resulting in the freeing of hands; A proportionately large brain – with its added cranial capacity; and humans adapting to change and progressing through time.
Similarly, there must be secrets to a business’s long-term success. Evolution Strategy Advisors LLP’s CEO, Vineet Trakroo, knows them all. Vineet worked for corporate for 23 years in leading B2C organisations as Head of sales and marketing in Usha International, Cavinkare, Pidilite, and Beiersdorf are some of the organisations where he brought in transformative change and grew the business by over 50% in a very short time managing over 50 large brands for corporates. He also created JVs with Unilever, Coty and many other International brands.
Vineet completed his Electrical Engineering from Manipal in 1990. He joined the Electrical Industry as a Management trainee in Voltas and then moved to ABB, working on power systems. He returned to college to do his MBA in marketing from Jamnalal Bajaj Inst of Mgmt Studies in Mumbai. After that, he headed sales and marketing for a leading edible oil brand Postman followed by Head of Marketing for Fevicol. Vineet went on to Head sales and marketing for Beiersdorf’s India operations in 2001. Later he headed marketing for Cavinkare as VP and CMO with Usha International.
Having grown many businesses, Vineet saw an opportunity to advise organisations to grow them exponentially. He started a consulting organisation to advise mid and large organisations in 2013, making them globally competitive.
One of the first clients was a loss-making faucet brand based in Gurgaon, which was turned around within 12 months with a doubling of sales. ESA expanded into representing international brands, Coty, Honeywell and Westinghouse and many others for licensing and JV.
Vineet informs, “While we continued to offer consulting in operational strategy for sales and marketing to pharma, automobiles, FMCG, durable and building material companies.”
He spoke in an exclusive interview with CIOLOOK INDIA, the highlights of which are given herein.
Please brief our audience about your organization, its USPs, and how you are currently positioned as one of the most impactful companies in India.
Evolution Strategy Advisors has been offering differentiated services for the last ten years. We are one of the few companies which offer services from business strategy to business transformation, executing every aspect of our plans to deliver success for our clients.
We are Growth Enabler for organisations.
At the core, we offer three different integrated services:
Business Transformation for existing organisations: Changing how a business works to get quantum growth with existing products but with a changed approach.
ESA build the complete Business and GTM/RTM strategy post doing a business diagnostic and aligning processes, reporting, and governance for this new way. ESA also drives change management by enabling the existing team to deliver and drive the execution.
*Business Transformation for new businesses: Changing how an organisation seeks growth by entering unchartered areas or areas where they may not have the competency. The organisation that sees new opportunities in different customer segments, i.e. B2B, wanting to move to B2C or vice versa or completely new categories.
*Operational Strategy and execution: For specific functions in sales, distribution, marketing, brand and product management. When a department needs support to deliver better, this could be in areas related to distribution management and improvement, sales productivity, portfolio management, and even brand restructuring.
We have repeatedly delivered for our clients, retaining 80%+ of our customers. Our clients have been companies of India’s top groups and MNCs. Some of our clients are Tata’s, Mahindra’s, Pepsico, Murugappa Group, Pfizer, Abbott, Saint Gobain, Faber Castell etc.
Tell us more about your services and what aspects make you stand out in the cutthroat competition.
We have little competition as the Business Transformation and Business Health Analysis services we provide are not offered by other boutique consulting companies to large corporates. At times we do compete with the Big5.
What makes us different is that we have a team of ex CXO’s from different industries who have had many past successes. They are from the best of organisations and bring in world-class practices.
We have developed our proprietary tool, Business Health Analysis, which is unique and can get an organisation-wide perspective and solutions to challenges. It quantifies and provides a sentiment analysis on many operational aspects of the business. We use this for future planning.
We have also perfected a version of OKR Objective and Key Results tools used by Intel and Google with our clients, which helps us deliver cultural transformation and execution excellence.
Finally, nothing succeeds like success. We have enabled all our clients to grow. Some have added three times their turnover in two years on a large base without adding a workforce. A 20% plus growth is quite normal for our clients.
Tell us about the immersive benefits of the solutions offered by your company to your client organizations.
Our solutions not only help organisations grow but readies them for the future. With large manufacturing companies as our core customers, some follow age-old practices and need to get aligned with the new way of operating. As products become commodities, brand loyalty reduces, and companies lose toplines and profits. A major overhaul of business is required to be future-ready. This includes introducing new products and new ways of building customer experience.
As organisations have a strong culture, this can sometimes be a dampener in allowing change to happen quickly. One of our major tasks is to make the cultural change happen. The task becomes tough when one deals with organisations over 30-40 years old with strong cultures or working styles.
Transformation requires management support and vision with much patience.
Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on how adopting modern technologies like AI, ML, Cloud, and Blockchain; is impacting the modern business solutions sector and how your company is contributing to the change.
Today IT companies work differently v/s the manufacturing lead industry. IT tech and data analytics, AI, ML, and Cloud are the backbone of a tech company, but it’s not yet so for the manufacturing sector. In terms of the value of goods sold, the manufacturing industry is large and will remain. But consumption of technology and data management tools has been low in this sector.
Today many manufacturing lead companies are digitizing their operations function by function. And we lead some of these initiatives as part of change management or transformation. Areas include sales process automation, customer satisfaction through database management apart from data visualisation as part of analytics and predictive sales data analytics.
Considering the current industry scenario, what challenges do you face, and how do you drive your clinic to overcome them?
There are two types of organisations. One which is aware and has identified that it needs to change and others that haven’t. Such organisation usually have strong professional leadership. They take calculated risks and invest in their future.
These organisations come to us and get their doubts cleared, preparing for the future. While some of the older manufacturing lead organisations may not have the skill set and continue to rely on their internal teams to improve. They may take longer or not be as successful as the current team may not have the competency and industry knowledge to succeed. It may lead to mistakes which slow down the success rate and costs.
What would you advise budding professionals aspiring to venture into the business solutions industry?
With the advent of AI and the cloud, there is much analytics. People who plan to work in solutions and services will need to be closer to the customer and should be able to handle change management.
How do you envision scaling Evolution Strategy Advisors’ operations and offerings in the future?
Currently, we have worked with firms like Tata’s: Tata Motors and Titan; Murugappa Group: Carborundum Universal, Parry’s; Mahindra, Faber Castell, Pepsi, Goodyear, Pfizer, Abbott, Glenmark, Lupin, Cipla, Saint Gobain, Asahi Glass etc. That means we are already serving in various sectors.
We plan to expand into different industries and add more experts to our team from Agro and industrial products and Ayurvedic medicines.
