It's time to think different: Harish Bijoor

"Be bold! Take the battle out into the bastion of the competitor's brand. Wake up and smell the change" - if these words can exemplify the man he is, Harish Bijoor not just another brand domain guru, but "The Brand', that operates out of Bangalore - somebody who has made many sit up and take a close look at the success stories his consulting firm has been scripting.

Brand-expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, Bijoor spent eight years of his initial days in career with the "University of Lever's" as he recalls Hindustan Lever Limited, moving through its Sales and Distribution department to Brand Management, and from thereon to Zip telecoms, before he moved the cheese when the going was good to start his own venture.

Bijoor is a business strategy specialist who operates on a 'build-operate-transfer' consulting model in today's pari passu marketing environment. With a firm belief in consulting being thought-leadership in action, Bijoor pegs the USP of his consulting biz as its pro-participation technique instead of passive planning and hopes to be counted among people who walk the talk and not just talk the talk. Pursuing a refreshingly different type of strategy consulting business with passion ” the zero-solicit model of business ” Bijoor's firm today operates out of four offices strewn across the globe. Never stooping to tout for clientele, the credit of this 11-year-old firm lies in the fact that today its roster of who's who clientele makes an impressive reading!

A widely traveled man and a much sought-after public speaker, Bijoor has authored a book on Branding besides having another on the pipeline. A self-proclaimed "coffee evangelist" Bijoor vouches that his affair with the body-good oriented staple beverage will continue. Highly effective in the field of marketing, Bijoor had masterminded a series of innovative campaigns to popularize the beverage among the masses. And to quote his words: "You can take me out of coffee, but you can't take the coffee out of me!"

Adgully talks to this specialist in business strategies. Excerpts:

Adgully: Please elaborate on the functional areas of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Harish Bijoor: We are a niche brand and business strategy consulting outfit. That is the mother offering. We started with that eleven years ago. Over the years we have garnished our basic offering with a few other things. We now offer a complete In-house Training division that looks at the training-cascade need of full organizations. We tend to outsource the planning, monitoring, mentoring and nurturing needs of corporate organizations. In addition we offer an outsourced Brand-management module for smaller firms that cannot afford to recruit, nurture and retain precious brand management resources of their own. The latest additional offering is a qualitative research wing that offers very efficient and new-wave consumer-insight probes.

We are a zero-solicit consulting practice. This means that not a single of my 91 employees is a Business development Manager. We do not go after business. Business happens” by word-of-mouth of satisfied clients. Firstly we love deepening businesses with existing clients, and secondly, we love it when a prospective client approaches us and says he/she/it has heard about us and wants to explore what we can do for them.

We follow out zero-solicit model of business with passion. We do not have a formal website that a typical consulting firm touts as a window to its operations. We instead have a 3-pager on the company URL which lists no clients and lists no work of ours. We do not participate in client pitches. We do not participate in RFPs (request for proposals), we do not participate in Government tenders for work, we make no credential presentations and send out no brochures. We do not whine and dine with our prospective clients. In short we run a refreshingly different type of strategy consulting business. We focus on the business and not on bringing in the business. This makes us that much more of specialists and that much more focused on good output.

We typically work on a 'Build-operate-transfer' consulting model. This means that we build strategy for the client, we operate it for a short period of time to prove the merit of what we recommend, and then at an appropriate and pre-agreed period of time, we transfer the work to the client organization. In this manner, the credibility of what a consulting outfit recommends is physically and robustly tested by the same organization before a formal hand-over happens. We therefore put our money where our mouth is and our mouth where the money is.

We do cross-domain work and are not restricted to a niche. We work with clients across domains and across geographic regions. We do work in the erena sof generic advertising work, Technology, FMCG, Durables, Entertainment, Education, Pharma, Media, Biotech, IT/ITES, and 16 other verticals.

We currently operate out of four offices ” one each in Bangalore, Hong Kong, London and Dubai. In Istanbul, we do not have an office yet, but have five of my senior colleagues working out of their homes.

AG: How has been your journey from Unilever to HBCI?

HB: It has been an exciting journey for sure. My early days in Brooke Bond with teas, coffees, spices and condoms were fun. They taught me a lot. My brand-management stint at Lever's was a highly enriching one. I learnt a lot. I really call it the University of Lever's from which, many of us are grateful alumni. I learnt the basics of hard, dedicated ans insight-led work here. This was a solid 8-year-old foundation that shaped my marketing ethos at large.

My stint with the Tata's was even more exciting. I spent 8 years with coffee and learnt the science, art and philosophy of building a business from scratch. My consumer-orientation deepened in this company and became a part of my overall work-philosophy. I had the opportunity to work under visionary leadership. I picked up with power of thinking big and the power of ethics in business from none other than Mr RK Krishnakumar, a person I deeply-deeply respect.

Starting my own business was always a dream. A dream most people used to a salary cheque at the month-end and bonuses at the year-end seldom materialise into an actuality. I do believe I have always believed in moving the cheese when the going was good. This has held me in good stead. It was tough in the beginning, but has been a completely satisfying experience at large.

The journey is still on.

AG: What inspired you to start HBC? Was it an uphill task all the way?

HB: In my working career across the realms of FMCG and Telecom, across three companies, I had scented a gap in the market. This gap was in the realm of outsourced strategic brand management. There were and are just too many companies and brands and too few good brand marketing minds. Every company cannot afford to recruit, nurture and retain such resources. The idea, therefore, was to form a company of my own, attract good minds to work with me, recruit carefully, nurture with care offering both mind-challenges and money as incentive, nurture these resources carefully, do good work that will show up on their resumes as bright achievements and spur the business on.

I tested this model with just two people and 5 clients eleven years ago. It was a leap of faith. The challenges have been many.

One of the biggest has been retaining people. Most senior consultants want to move on and move their own cheese after an initial three year contract period. Ours is a mind-business. This business needs to be able to retain its bright minds. This challenge was addressed by me keeping a deep bench of sorts. I have experimented various kinds of Golden hand-cuffs ” some help, others just don't.

The initial challenge was also of attracting good minds to work with me. Most good minds want to work with big brand names. Those were the days of the Big 5 which became the Big 2 and now are back to the Big 4. My practice happens to be a niche practice. Those who work with me work essentially for the joy of exciting work that is geared differentially. The money is the same in both places. Only the work is more exciting here ” works that you can own as something that comes from personal and personalised strategic thinking, rather than something that comes from a 2 X 2 matrix. Small is therefore beautiful. I tackled this challenge by building an intelligent, creative and open place to work at.

There are many challenges in this business, but most others are very manageable.

AG: Your contribution to the growth of tea and coffee industry is immense. Are you still associated with the industry in any manner?

HB: Yes, I am. Till recently I was a member of the Coffee Board of India under the auspices of the Union Ministry of Commerce. I also participate actively at the level of the 11th 5-year plan implementation in the Plantations category. I have always been a coffee evangelist and will continue to be. You can take me out of coffee, but you can't take the coffee out of me!

There is plenty of work to be done in the space of tea and coffee. The recent JV between Tata Tea and Pepsi is a keen one to watch. Good work will result out of such short-term specific-purpose marriages.

AG: The pattern of consumption of beverages is a lot different today from the time you pushed for changes in terms of consumer mindset as well at the government level. Your take¦

HB: Tea and coffee are what I call staple beverages. They come from plants, are nutrition and body-good oriented. These contrast against carbonated, coloured, sugar-laced drinks. I categorise the soft-drinks category in the country as non-staple beverages. And then there is a basic category: water. The best drink of them all.

Consumption across these beverages has grown in the category. When we were in the forefront of evangelising a coffee-future for the country, per capital consumption was a mere 38 gms. Today, it is a more robust 72 gms. Still far from what we see in countries like the US where it stands at 12,000 gms and in Norway and Finland where it stands at 15,000 gms per capita.

The Cafe has been a big driver of image on coffee consumption in India. Though it contributes little in terms of volume, it contributes big on image and has helped changed the attitude to coffee in India.

AG: Given your expertise in the FMCG sector, do you serve a clientele from the same domain or do they come from various other categories as well?

HB: My personal expertise in FMCG helped me build my basic business around FMCG. Today however, the horse has bolted. We work in 23 different verticals across 11 different countries. The kind of work we do is all about two factors ” one, a consumer and the other is the money in their pockets. Any category that dabbles with these two basic factors is a sector we can contribute to.

Consumer-insight led marketing is a precious leverage item in today's market. We offer that. Consulting is thought-leadership in action. We offer that.

AG: What is your team size and how many locations do you operate from?

HB: To be precise, 91 as of today. We have made three offers to Senior Consutants who may or may not join by May 1. One of my precious resources is serving the three-month notice period and will leave on June 10. And I also don't know who else will quit from now to then.

AG: Any inventory made of your client size? What's the current turnover and growth rate in terms of revenues and clients size?

HB: We can talk in terms of number of clients. We do not name a single client as a matter of policy. In terms of numbers, they stand at 74 as of on April 1, 2010.

Turnover numbers are confidential. We have grown 31 % in terms of top-line revenues in the last year. It's been a brisk growth, but one is greedy for more ” the usual story.

AG: The first client always remains close to any entrepreneur's heart. Please share your side of the story and the experiences with the client?

HB: Sadly, I cannot share the name of the first client, going by our policy issues, but would just like to say that this is my favourite client to date. We have done very exciting work with them for the last 11 years and our relationship continues, though the equations have changed ” today it no longer that of a client and strategy consulting firm at all. We work literally as peers in the space of strategy. The client itself has grown 1,200% over these 11 years.

AG: Please share any story where the efforts of HBC team delighted the clients¦

HB: We have worked to date with 142 clients so far. As of today we are handling 74 active clients, of whom, 51 are clients who have been with us for more than 5 years. We do a continuous tracking of client satisfaction and dissatisfaction scales. It is our way of checking whether we are going right or wrong.

Of the 142 clients we have worked with, four were disappointed with our work ” we under-delivered them on promise. But, 81 were satisfied. We delivered what we have promised. The rest were delighted. Our delight-ratio has therefore been good. Since we are a zero-solicit practice, the delight-ratio of customers is all that we have to generate future business. Therefore, each of my Senior Consultants and I strive hard on the count of delight.

AG: Where do you see HBC 5 years from now?

I hate making a prognosis for the future. We typically plan our business one step at a time. I hate 5-year plans, so we look at one year at a time ” baby steps!

I see us taking on new clients in the realm of Government work. The Indian Police Service for instance does require a lot of intervention in terms of soft-branding, as does the Public Distribution Service. We have also just developed the modules for a practice that focuses on Green-branding and Inclusive-branding. We are spinning these off as separate practices that have a relevance to every business. I have put together a 4-member team for this. Three of them are to join in May.

We hope to be seen as people who walk the talk and not just talk the talk. We intend to be active participants in the business of our clients rather than passive planners at the back-end. That is our USP and we will focus on this. We intend to remain low-profile and let our work speak rather than our websites and brochures, PR hand-outs and PPT pitches. That's how the year ahead will look like. Inshallah!

AG: Do we foresee another Marketing Bible from you?

HB: On the personal front I am working on two things ” one is a book on some very unique and self-distilled concepts on branding; and two, my focus on what I call "Gyan Trips.

HB: If you have started it all up, just don't give up. Start small. Resist the temptation to open offices all over. Take baby-steps. Build the physical empire only when you really have revenues around. Do not spend ahead of the curve, especially if you are an entrepreneur without funding. Smell the coffee first and then get your cup ready.