How to grow a consulting firm in India?

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In running their operations, small businesses regardless of location or industry face the same questions as any big corporation.

For any SME, growth can make or break a business. Those that make it are tomorrow’s successful stars in business and NovoJuris wants to be one of them. Sharda Balaji is the founder of NovoJuris, a legal consulting company based in Bangalore, India. NovoJuris mainly focuses on clients in the technology sector. By providing accessible services at affordable prices, the company has earned good reputation as the go-to legal counsel for entrepreneurs in India.

In order to scale, a company which initially starts itself base-lining on the founder and founder’s knowledge, has to realign itself. To do so, a wide range of issues need to be addressed. In particular this holds true for professional services and consulting companies, where scale is also limited to the fact that it is hard to reproduce knowledge. Growth, in many cases, is only possible by hiring additional staff. More people imply higher organizational complexity.

Startups run very much like a football team where people know each other and jump in whenever they are required. Up until the team size grows there really is no need for clearly defined organizational structures and processes. NovoJuris is now at an inflection point of rapid growth: what has made NovoJuris a successful business up until now needs to be revamped so that there are internal organizational processes and structures, to enable them for their continued success.

Our assignment as part of the SAP Social Sabbatical program is to help NovoJuris in finding ways to enable future growth. For example, we (a team of three SAP colleagues – Frauke von Grebe, Nace Sapundjev and myself) are currently looking into ways of moving from spreadsheets to a more database-centralized approach of running the business. We also look into current positioning and if that actually depicts tomorrow’s growth. We come to realize that even though NovoJuris is only a small business currently, they face the same questions as any big company: How to ensure a high level of quality and consistency while staying flexible in order to address special customer requirements? How to attract and retain the best talent? How to analyze the customer base and assess the potential for new service offerings?

Any small business regardless of industry or region would face similar growth-related challenges at some point. NovoJuris is doing a great job at capturing the issue and is proactively working towards a solution before growing pains arise. The foundation for success is a keen customer base, which they enjoy working with. We are delighted to work with Sharda and her enthusiastic team, always open to discuss and listen to our ideas. This makes our work extremely motivating and pleasant. We hope we can make some contribution to their future success and are confident that we will witness the sustained growth of this small Indian law firm.