The Consulting Infrastructure Gap for SMEs
Strategic consulting, unlike routine operational consulting, involves helping businesses in undertaking rare, critical, complex, high-value, high-risk growth initiatives or helping them in overcoming chronic business problems. They typically require a large external funding or involve very high stakes. "Strategic transactions such as equity funding have been traditionally a privilege of only large companies equipped with a professional board of directors, department of strategy, department of finance, department of corporate management, department of legal & contractual affairs, and department of transactions backed-up with a galaxy of experienced external consultants.
However, on the hand, even the most professionally managed, potent and deserving SMEs don't get access to basic equity capital. This is in spite of abundant supply side availability, pressure and risk appetite. The virtual absence of third-party, independent, merit-based equity funding in SMEs is mainly due to absence of a standard, economic and mass-level strategic consulting infrastructure for them in the country," asserts Arun Joshi, Founder, Apohan Corporate Consultants.
Headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, India, Apohan is an EquityTech (Fintech) company into strategic transactions (e.g. equity funding, business sale, M&A, JVs, FDI, and others) and transaction enablement services. The company has many stringent criteria to separate-out 'deserving' SMEs from the mediocre and carries-out a 4-stage prospect filtration process. This scientific screening process helps in selecting SMEs led by technocrats who have tremendous operational and marketing strengths.
The company provides end-to-end consulting services to the screened SMEs right from SME counselling, problem/aspiration concept note, investment requirement schedule, deal structuring, on-boarding most desirable investors, study of business environment, study of business, study of operational documents, preparation of transaction documents, business plan, financial model, valuation, negotiations, due diligence, investment contract, deal closure to post-contract handholding.
Funding & Strategy Issues of SMEs:
Shailesh Waghmare, Director, BD, Apohan, says, "SME promoters are excellent when it comes to making and selling their products. However, they are equally weak when it comes to selling their company. Despite 10-20 years of experience in the business, SMEs lack experience in hiring consultants, giving them scope of work, providing for transaction costs. They typically end-up hiring brokers which exclusive mandate in place of strategic consultants only to discover that a deal is never happening.
The SMEs don't fail on account of technical, operational or market problems, but due to lack of capabilities of their managements in the strategic & funding domains". Apohan makes SMEs aware of the advantages of equity over debt, importance of strategic transactions, removing their misconceptions, and educating them on the complex process. Apohan provides all-round expertise such as strategic, financial, secretarial, legal with fair degree of understanding of engineering, operations, marketing and other technical aspects of a business.
With the evolution of Apohan's EquityTech platform, high quality strategic transaction capabilities, traditionally a privilege of only the large companies, would be at the doorsteps of the deserving SMEs
EquityTech Platform for Mass Service
Apohan’s roadmap for the future aligns with its objective to eradicate the funding & strategic competence gaps among the Indian SMEs. Apohan is soon set to launch the world’s first equity delivery (EquityTech) platform which would be a far superior experience for the SMEs that are currently unsatisfied with the offers of the deal database platforms, virtual data room (VDR) platforms or brokerage platforms. A delivery platform would not only be economical, but also it would reduce the transaction duration to one-third.
Apohan's EquityTech platform would be scalable, economical, internationally replicable, emerging-technology-enabled and laced with many new-age internet tools. Apohan aspires to close one hundred deals per day on its 15th incorporation anniversary with the deployment of the platform. This is an extremely ambitious target when the current global transaction leader closes around 150 deals per annum.
