Some tax exemption criteria for start-up ‘Seed Funding’ weird: Srividya Kannan
Founder, Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ms. Srividya Kannan’s article published in SME TImes. The article was also carried in the online version.
There are several challenges as a start-up. The most significant one is that in the B2B space, till the time one really wins a few customers and demonstrates customer references, getting good projects is a challenge. So it is really a chicken and egg situation – references only come when projects are won, and for projects to be won, the customer wants references, Founder, Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd., Srividya Kannan told SME Times in an Interview.
While appreciating the Government’s Startup program, she said, “I think the Start-up program is a good direction by the Government. However we do need to re-look at some of the finer requirements to ensure that it is not cumbersome. The definitions of who is eligible to be called a “Start-up” itself is a bit ambiguous. Also some of the requirements relating to seed funding to be eligible for tax incentives is weird and perhaps need to be re-looked at.”
Excerpts from the interview…
You are specialist in enterprise information management and enterprise mobility. Please tell more about your group – Avaali Solutions.
Srividya Kannan: Avaali is a consulting and professional services organization focused on supporting upper mid to large enterprises to create and execute their Digital roadmap. We are headquartered in Bangalore, India. We believe that Digital is going to be the biggest enabler of revenue to enterprises. We support our customers to maximize value from digital and help them translate this value in the form of innovative customer experience, highly engaging customers, internal process efficiencies, reduced costs and delivering your organization’s stated objective. We’ve worked with over 45+ large enterprises to leverage digital technologies to transform their internal business processes as well as customer facing processes in really powerful ways. Our customers are market leaders in their respective industries and are able to leverage these technologies to run their business more efficiently than before, generating better topline for their organization as well as manage their expenses in differentiated ways. We evaluate our success based on the extent to which our solutions have brought about the desired business outcomes to our customers. We’re an agile organization, completely focused on delivering results for our customers and partners.
What makes ‘Avaali Solutions’ apart from others/ what is the USP of yours?
Srividya Kannan: Our only focus is to enable enterprises to transform their business with digital. We don’t do anything else. Also within the digital space, we have extremely strong skill sets in Enterprise Information Management – essentially all forms of unstructured content within enterprises that slows down processes, increases cost and process cycle time and also makes it difficult to govern and ensure compliance. We’ve worked with several enterprises to fully automate business process leading to significant improvement in productivity and bringing down costs.
Given our specialization and strong skill-sets in this domain, we believe that we’re able to offer better value than others, who may have this only as one part of their overall portfolio of offerings. Our customers tell us that our solutions help them to meet their desired business outcome and as a result, accelerate their process cycle time.
Being a start-up, what were the challenges you had gone through?
Srividya Kannan: There are several challenges as a start-up. The most significant one is that in the B2B space, till the time one really wins a few customers and demonstrates customer references, getting good projects is a challenge. So it is really a chicken and egg situation – references only come when projects are won, and for projects to be won, the customer wants references. Again, good talent only comes on board and stays with a company when they are able to work on good projects. Hence the first 18 months or so requires a lot of investment both in messaging to customers and the ecosystem as well as in terms of pumping in with real dollars, till the business stabilizes.
And how you counter those challenges?
Srividya Kannan: Given that we’re in a very niche space, it is important to keep communicating the clear value that these solutions bring to customers. We started doing this early and made our pitches in a way that the customer is able to clearly understand why they need to invest in solutions like this and why now. We also started a Digital Enterprise Digest – a publication called Illuminar which helped us to showcase thought leadership in this space. We have been blessed with a very good team who not only understands the customer pain points but are also able to stitch a solution in the most effective manner. We were always prepared to invest first before seeking returns, so there was never a conflict in this regard.
We realize that customer trust is only built by walking the talk – hence to this date and also going forward, our teams always ensure that what we promise is what we definitely deliver. I think this is the only way to maintain consistency in terms of customer trust.
Which issues are still challenges for you?
Srividya Kannan: The same set of challenges as earlier continue – only this time the scale has gone up significantly. Earlier it was the order of single digits, now it is double or even triple digits in terms of volume, revenues, people, investments etc. We need to constantly keep our ears to the ground and continuously innovate in order to be where we are.
Would you like to say something to the government to facilitate this sector?
Srividya Kannan: I think the Startup program is a good direction by the Government. However we do need to re-look at some of the finer requirements to ensure that it is not cumbersome. The definitions of who is eligible to be called a “Start-up” itself is a bit ambiguous. Also some of the requirements relating to seed funding to be eligible for tax incentives is weird and perhaps need to be re-looked at.
What are your future plans?
Srividya Kannan: We have a very ambitious plan. We’re building a strong and comprehensive solution offering for shared services. In addition to process automation, we’re also adding a few more innovative solution offerings including robotic process automation. In addition, we’re going to invest investing further in building our consulting strengths with a focus to augment the customer’s business via digital. Our goal is to help our customers re-imagine their business models and capture new opportunities with digital.