Niraj Bora has brought his excellent credentials and professional accomplishments with private equity funds and big corporates to the world of startups, with Surmount Business Advisors Private Limited, a company he set up in 2013.
Mr. Niraj Bora, please elaborate on your journey as the Founder and MD of Surmount Business Advisors Pvt. Ltd.
We started with the intention to provide out of the box solutions to business problems and we have come a long way wherein we partner the business with equity and work with them in a very long term.
We started with few sectors initially but expanded our focus in various segments/sectors in startup space and have done quite a lot in last few years. Various sectors also have taught us a great deal of business issues and how to resolving them. We focussed initially on financial consulting but moved to various business side consulting work in the meantime.
Tell us about Surmount Business Advisors’ strategies for expansion and growth. What were some of the difficulties you encountered when you initially started?
We look for companies with high growth market and try to work with them in delivering their growth potential. Choice of businesses to work with is critical since they are the ones that also help with our growth by default. High growing companies require continuous updations with market dynamics, and keeping up with all sorts of changes in the sector with adoption of tech and continuously changing customer preferences. We try to keep ourselves updated and accordingly ad value to the growth of the businesses.
From a growth perspective, we have moved a lot from consulting to investing in new age companies. So now, we are also into structured equity investing, which we do from our other group company. The model works in between an incubation and say, early stage VC fund. We onboard companies with high potential and help them in building great businesses.
What is the specialty of Surmount Business Advisors, and what do you do to engage your customers?
As mentioned earlier, our speciality is business consulting, and we do publish blogs and articles on our website to engage our customers from various sectors. We try to give market trends and future insights on various sectors from time to time. Many of our startups (potential partners) engage with us basis these and they understand our thought process and expertise from these engagements and articles.
We are in process of starting a video blog as well, to give startups insights about generic issues in growth, how to tackle them, funding related guidance, etc. Hopefully, it will benefit some of them.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of operating as a financial advisor? Please share your views on it.
As a financial consultant, the topmost advantage is that we come across lots of business insights across various business sectors, startups, various business models, etc that taken years to understand and evaluate. Generally, we have people coming to us with various business problems, and in the process of figuring out things, we learn a lot ourselves. In this internet age where the speed of changing market dynamics is higher than ever, we get to keep ourselves updated about the latest tech, more efficient ways to create value everyday.
As for the disadvantages, we believe we scratch the surface and solve the strategy level problems, as against the implementation problems. So, in a way we are a jack of all but a master of none, since we do not operate any single business for years, but we rather involve ourselves with multiple business to help them in their growth. So implementation and group level problems are something that we don’t face directly.
What are Surmount Business Advisors’ offerings?
We provide strategic advisory, business advisory that includes wide array of advisory including marketing, pricing, market acquisition plans, budgeting and forecasts, etc. We believe our offerings are not exhaustive in any manner and we assist with any functional problem at any level with our businesses.
What is your take on promoting Surmount Business Advisors in the international market?
We are currently only operating in India, and expansion beyond india is maybe a few year’s pipeline.
This article is drafted by Prittle Prattle News in the form of an Interview.
