Stratburg Market Research and Consulting -Two Year Old StartupGenerating USD 1 million in Revenues
The company has had Fortune 500 clients and is closing in on a million dollars in revenue annuallyThe emergence of numerous start-ups all over the country has opened new avenues to ventures in the field of market research and strategy management. Stratburg Market Research and Consulting Pvt. Ltd, formed in April 2010, and claiming to give the right impetus for a business towards accelerated growth, is moving towards its goal of being “the Home of Strategy!” While their primary goal is to help clients solve complex business problems that enable better decision-making, their consulting services focus on specific strategic inputs besides adding value to clients’ business needs.
Their major service offerings and business units include market research, business strategy, business services and representation. We got in touch with founder Gappan Annamalai to learn more. Talking about their range of clients, Gappan says, “Stratburg’s clients are our biggest success story. Our clients come in from diverse industries such as Media, Internet, Retail, Automotive, Healthcare, IT/ITES and so on. Even though we cater to a diverse industry base, our strength remains in Media and Internet. In a short span of 2 years, we have worked with some of the biggest names in the world like Microsoft, AOL, CNN, Turner and YouTube. While these large fortune 500 companies give us stability and repeated business, our growth comes from working with small and medium sized businesses including a number of startup firms.”
Gappan Annamalai, with over 10 years of industry experience across diverse business areas, is a specialist in all areas of strategy, marketing and sales, and business development. Stratburg’s other directors AL. Muthiah and AL. Annamalai who come from a deep family business legacy of over 60 years. The management has built and run organizations like Chamundi Silks (manufacturer of high quality silk fabrics for domestic and export markets, India Packaging Products (manufacturer of packing materials that include corrugated boxes and injection molded plastics), Vani Pvt. Ltd (distributor for highly innovative products from 3M and DuPont) and Valnur Estates (leading producer of Coffee and Pepper from the Coorg belt).
Some of the tools that Stratburg uses for problem solving include Spider Charts, Market maps, BCG Matrix, Porter’s Five Forces Models, QFD Benchmarking, besides using a six sigma approach to problem solving and research for accuracy and optimization.
“Our clients are billed on either an hourly basis or a FTE (Full Time Employee) basis. The hourly rate is dependent on the level of effort and expertise a particular job requires. Within a short span of two years we are closing in on approx. $1MM in annual revenues.” Says Gappan about revenues.
Stratburg is partnered by their sister concern Cooolio Online Pvt. Ltd, which is their attempt at being the ‘Home of Innovation’. Cooolio is an online development house, building both in-house as well as external properties using highly innovative ideas and strategies. The areas of focus on Cooolio operations are gaming, E-commerce, travel and entertainment. “At this point the Cooolio venture is self-funded; however, as we continue to grow, we will look at help from investors,” says Gappan. Some of the major external services of Cooolio are development of BI Tools/Dashboards, Company Websites, Mobile Application, ERP Solutions, e-commerce Sites etc.A few obstacles the company has faced during its two year spell have been the fluctuating dollar value and the market uncertainty with clients unable to secure required budgets. Besides, the rising cost of doing business in India also seems a concern.
“So far we believe that less that 10% of this network has been tapped. As we move forward, we look to sign on more people from our already established relationships.” forecasts Gappan. Stratburg, in the future, would be expanding to modeling/data analytics and Ad operations.
Website : http://stratburg.com/
-Siddharth Krishnaswamy
