Category: Case Study

Context

During the early 1990s, A Large-IT-Co was one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging technology services outsourcing industry. Despite a head start, the organization had seen only marginal growth since inception and remained quite small – $2 Mn. topline by the 10^th year of existence. It’s against this backdrop, that the founders approached Phaneesh in order to accelerate the organization’s growth.

Approach

Phaneesh joined the Large-IT-Co in their Sales & Marketing function and was instrumental in transforming the go-to-market of the Large-IT-Co along the following areas:

• Identified trends in the market and defined core sales themes / campaigns on an ongoing basis to drive the top-line growth for the Large-IT-Co
• Pioneered the disruptive Global Delivery Model (GDM) and institutionalized it across all service offerings of the company
• Completely overhauled the sales process by introducing a Consultative and Relationship-based Selling Approach at the Large-IT-Co – a paradigm, which was later adopted by the industry at large
• Oversaw the expansion of the Large-IT-Co sales across various geographies and helped build the Large-IT-Co’s brand as an industry bell-weather

Outcomes

Over the course of his tenure at the Large-IT-Co, Phaneesh was elevated to the Board and became the Worldwide Head of Sales & Marketing, Communication and Product Solutions Group. During this ~10-year stint:

• The Large-IT-Co’s revenues jumped 300-fold to $750 Mn
• Competitive pricing and GDM-led efficiencies helped the Large-IT-Co realize industry-leading operating margins of 35%
• The Large-IT-Co’s enterprise value jumped almost 2000 times to $13.5 Bn

Context

In early 2000s, despite reasonable scale and operations, A Mid-IT-Co was a distressed technology staffing organization, with a negligible project portfolio and (-) 20% operating margins. Given the stressed financials and in light of accelerating commoditization of the GDM model, the Mid-IT-Co founding team requested Phaneesh to lead the turnaround of the business.

Approach

Phaneesh took over as the CEO of the Mid-IT-Co and undertook the following transformations:

• Changed the business portfolio of the Mid-IT-Co by systematically cannibalizing staffing / sub-contracting portion of the business with project-based work, which was in turn delivered using the global delivery model at higher margins
• Rebranded and repositioned the Mid-IT-Co in the industry, defined a new portfolio of go-to-market offerings and completely re-structured the organization by bringing all the key markets & offerings under the Mid-IT-Co global brand
• Anticipated the commoditization of technology services and created a strong differentiation for the Mid-IT-Co as well as disruption in the industry by introducing ‘Delivery of converged technology and operations using business outcomes’

Outcomes

Over 11-years, Phaneesh transformed the Mid-IT-Co from a virtually unknown entity to one of the top 10 Indian IT players and one of the most valued enterprises in the global technology services industry:

• Delivered exponential growth in top-line, to clock revenues in excess of $1.2 Bn
• Turned around operating margins to a healthy +25%
• Realized a 70x increase in enterprise value to $4.8 Bn