Google makes a foray into providing business consulting to small entrepreneurs

Even as you start on your entrepreneurship journey with that exciting business idea backed by the support of that good samaritan who assures you of required funding, you may soon face a situation where nothing seems to move. That’s when you must know that what’s lacking was a execution blueprint.Search major Google studied this aspect in India deeply and has started a business consulting division for small start-ups. The division, currently part of Google’s online sales business, considers numerous, running into millions, of small and medium business ventures of the country as its target customers. Thus you may no longer have to worry about your  profit and loss statements, returns over a set period of time, fixed cost, depreciation cost etc. Google executives will hear your estimate of topline and bottomline and them provide you with an actionable business plan.

So all you have to do is call up the Google call centre in India, which has already seen daily calls increasing five times from 1000 to 5000 in recent months. The calls are answered by business and accounting experts from Google. Google currently handles calls for 10 different Indian languages.

To guide a budding businessperson effectively, the American search giant uses Google search data related to that specific business line, region, demographics to understand the latent demand or positioning of the business. Google executives then prepare a blueprint analyzing those data and suggest breakeven, cost of capital employed, additional investment, optimizing of investments etc.

So if you are starting or running a small travel agency, Google will analyse the search data of people on various types of travel arrangements, locations, travel budget, age demographics and will come up with a business plan that will answer, what type of travel packages will have what type of demand, will need how much of investment and by when will you start making money etc.

Google ran a pilot of such business consultancy in India in 2008 and found the results ‘very effective’.

The opportunity for Google is huge as out of over 50 million small businesses in India, only about 2 million does their business online in some way or the other. Meanwhile Google also plans to bring in other ways such as SMS based products to induce those who do not access Internet at all for their business.