When Hari got the call from the US firm, he couldn’t quite believe it.
He called himself an “India Sourcing Consultant”. Having worked in management positions in different firms for two decades, he felt it was time he quit the corporate rat race and tried something on his own – something that also gave him the freedom and the much-vaunted work-life balance.
In many of his corporate roles, Hari had worked with international firms and helped them gain a foothold in India. During this time, he had seen first-hand how difficult it was for a global firm to understand India and its multitude of opportunities and contradictions. His experience told him that there was a clear need for a professional guide for these firms while entering the Indian market.
Armed with this key insight, he set up his new, one-man consulting firm W2I – which stood for both World 2 India and Welcome to India.
Experience had taught him that a small entrepreneur should have a narrow focus; he hence chose the clean & renewable energy sector as the domain to focus on. It was a fast growing sector, and the last few years of his work had been in this sector.
W2I will help international clean energy companies keen on entering Indian to find business partners.
Full of hope and enthusiasm, he put up a web site, created blogs, and regularly started posting on LinkedIn. When he did not receive any enquiries for the first few weeks, he was not too concerned – after all, he knew that B2B markets take time to develop and mature.
When weeks extended to months, and the number of qualified enquiries stayed put at nil, he started wondering – surely, at least a couple of international firms would have reached out to him if there indeed was a need.
Urgent discussions followed – his wife Neela felt that he should try out a few different marketing strategies, his friend Mahesh felt he was targetting the wrong industry, and his former boss Ashish felt he should do direct, outbound marketing and start calling international firms instead of waiting for enquiries.
Hari however felt that his sister Rekha hit the nail on the head when she said, “My dead bro, who is going to employ a consultant when ChatGPT or Gemini can give them all the information about suitable prospective partners and their backgrounds?”
He found more than a grain of truth in it when he tested the large AI tools himself and found that they returned excellent results. For two days after this, he swung to and fro on his comfortable hammock in his garden murmuring to himself and to anyone else who ventured into the garden and would care to listen, “Brokers are gonna go out of business”
A week after the hammock enlightenment, Hari officially decided to pivot his business.
It was then that he got the call.
It was a US firm trying to enter the Indian market for its energy efficiency solutions. It was searching for the right Indian marketing partners and technical integration partners.
Hari listened to Bob Rick, the VP-Business Development of the company patiently, and finally asked, almost verbatim what Rekha had asked him three weeks earlier, “But why don’t you just use ChatGPT or Gemini?”
Bon said, “Yes, Mr Hari, my team used all the search engines and LLMs extensively. After this detailed exercise, we have a spreadsheet with 2850 firms, with all their web sites claiming they had all the expertise we are looking for.”