Reflecting On a Pandemic Start Up — Ours!
By Jim Tholen, Managing Partner
Many of us have ‘working during COVID stories’. Ours is about starting and growing a business while quarantining during the beginnings of this pandemic.
About six months ago, Mike, Scott and I started True North Advisory.. We thought it would be a good time to reflect on our first six months and think about our journey ahead.
We started True North to provide our strategic advice and insight to a small number of high growth, exciting, disruptive, and entrepreneurial technology companies.
But like any startup, we needed to figure a few things out such as:
What services do we offer?
What is our value proposition? Our value added?
How do we price our offerings?
How do we market and sell — especially when we are all working from home?
What tools do we use to manage our business? How do we manage contracts, invoices, pay folks helping us out?
We have enjoyed both working to figure out these questions and evolving our efforts from a total bespoke delivery of our services to a more consistent and formalized set of services, frameworks and deliverables. Moving forward this has helped us to scale and grow our business.
And most importantly, we are gratified at the reception we’ve received since starting the business.
We work with companies and CEO’s about whom we are really excited and for whom we think we can add value. Our general business model is to work on an annual retainer, often involving our taking equity stakes in the businesses we are helping. We also offer a True North “Sprint” where we dive in on a more intensive review with a Client, for a shorter time period.
Most of our work is concentrated with advising the CEO, his or her CxO team and occasionally their board/investors to work through strategic issues and challenges around strategy and messaging, product and investment and business model advice. We’ve completed projects involving:
Key product definition and value proposition development and refinement
Go to market strategies based on digging deep into key priority use cases
Vertical and horizontal sales and product strategies
Figuring out self service strategies to enable more seamless consumer purchase and use
Transition to SaaS business models, including platform, e-commerce, and sales compensation implications, pricing models and cash flow/investment requirements
It’s been a very exciting and informative first few months. We look forward to continuing this fun journey for us, and updating all of our friends as we go. For our next six months, we want to keep delivering help and insight to our existing clients and hope to continue to add great, disruptive, high potential clients to our True North family.
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