Success Stories

When I started off to be an entrepreneur I was clueless on all the activities of setting up a company, including, registration of the company, capital required, various statutory approvals required, product road map, securing partnerships, establishing B2B client relationships etc. As a lone entrepreneur I was also looking forward to a co-founder, investments, understanding the regulations in the education market, where we face new unique challenges everyday.

During the initial days of the setting up of the company. I was looking for to a Business Management Consultant who can guide me on setting up the company including whetting the Master Plan of the company.

While there were established players already in the market I did not want to be yet another company and wanted to create my own differentiator in our products services, and market segment.

With scarce capital, time and resources in hand I was looking forward to guidance from an experienced entrepreneur.

Initially I was not sure how and what to do, there were so many things to be done, and there was a never ending to-do list, some of them was taking just too much time and at the other end I had to focus on getting some quick revenues to get the place running. At this stage I was looking forward to guidance in time management, prioritizing between tasks that had long term and short term outcomes.

Having worked with a Mentor for so long I can now understand the base attributes that we would want in Mentor. Surely the Mentor should be a seasoned entrepreneur who has been through a similar journey which includes, boot strapping, partnering with a co-founder, forging strategic partnerships, hired large enough teams at least in 100s , have set up office across different continents, closed multiple round of investments, and reported to a governed functional board of directors. It is great if the Mentor has also experience acquiring and selling his companies.

I was looking forward to forecasts and brushing future plans with the mentor and brainstorm on innovative strategies

One area where I wanted help most was in financial planning and prudence. As a first time entrepreneur I was just too careful not to invest scarce money that was in hand even in potential great revenue generating areas for fear of failure and wastage of funds.

While I have very good experience of our market and the competition, I just did not jump into the market and implement my understanding of the gaps in the market, but wanted to brush my thoughts and brain storm on pros and cons of our product, service, pricing and geo strategies

One word ‘Excellent’. A Growth Hacker. Just what we needed to keep the company on track towards growth and as their name suggests helped us achieve escape velocity. For us 11.1 KM-S has been a Growth mentor

The discussions with the Mentor encompass all aspects of business including, future planning, strategy , growth tacks, support in senior hires, advise on strategy when engaging in new partnerships, treasury management, investment advice and other operational issues

The Mentor at 11.1 KM-S not only supports as a Business Strategy Advisor but also regularly reviews progress of earlier discussions to ensure adherence to all activities laid down to achieve targets and timelines. The Mentor also suggests course corrections if any

First and foremost Mentors association gave us focused direction and discipline in conducting internal reporting and reviews

It helped us focus on certain lines of business, while pushing some towards a later date thus helping us generate much faster growth in revenues in the short term

One area where Mentor has been very helpful is in Financial discipline whether it be in reporting, follow through of discussions and also cashflow & treasury management

First and fore-most the Mentors experience in building companies and running them has helped us in avoiding experimenting with ideas and processes which would have meant our product & services line up, and academic partnerships would have been delayed by more than 1 year and which in turn would have translated to not having any revenues in the 1st year and would have led the company to losses, instead of the profits that we made in the first year itself.

Undoubtedly without 11.1 KM-S our company NAET would have had a much slower growth which is because we would have been targeting different potential market segments at the same time and thereby not focussing on the fastest growing market segment and would have spread our management thin in developing all market segments at the same time

Secondly the academic partnerships that we have developed is based on an extensive execution of a targeted Business Development plan which included a very short target base of partners to start with and prospecting on limited numbers so that the limited management time we had was more effectively utilized. These plans were fine tuned during multiple strategy sessions with the mentor

As a small company we would not have indulged in so many structured reviews and reports both monthly and quarterly as we would have assumed that the company is too small for such needs. However these review meetings gave a mirror to ourselves and helped us understand our achievements, deviations and helped in course corrections, without which our current growth would have taken another 1-2 years which means we would have had to look for external funding which in turn would have taken our focus away from generating revenues and capturing market share.