December - Recharge And Reflect

Program Update

This past November, we finished our 3rd cohort. Congratulations to the graduating class. We look forward to working with them and applying what they learn to grow their tech services companies. Our 4th cohort, a24-1, will start in January next year. In the meantime, we will be working on introspection and looking at how we can serve our portfolio companies better.?

Winter Holiday Homework

We recommend you take some time to rest, spend time with family, and introspect your business and where you want to take it. As you think about your business's identity, we recommend some readings. First, this HBR article on?value discipline?will help you understand how important it is to create a consistent story for your company.?This?article applies these same learnings specifically to professional services companies.?

When growing a tech services company you We recommend focusing on an emerging technology when building a tech services company. This focus, by definition, would make you a gray hair or rocket science practice. Our recent blog posts have focused on enabling you with the tools to build a gray hair or a rocket science practice.

• We guide you on creating an assessment for a gray hair or rocket science practice?here. The assessment is necessary because you need more customer education than a well-understood commodity business.
• We talk about value-based pricing?here?and?here. Value-based pricing is essential to gain high margins in a gray hair or rocket science practice.
• We talk about how to create a premium delivery?here?to create a consistent experience with the high gross margin business you are making.

What's Next

Your positioning strategy needs to be coupled with execution and financial planning. Over the next few weeks, we will discuss execution and financial planning in the context of delivering premium emerging tech services.?

Post Bootcamp Events

Unlike most accelerators, we are building a long-term relationship with our portfolio companies. We are focused on services companies and don't expect most of our portfolio companies to take on significant investment. In VC-backed companies, the investors bring execution maturity and provide the funding to hire experienced leaders. Bootstrapped services companies don't have that luxury, so we provide our portfolio companies with continuing support in execution and oversight. We are experimenting with adding periodic lectures to our managed advisory. We will be sharing some highlights, but for the most part, these will be closed-door events.

Please follow us on LinkedIn to make sure you don't miss out on the events.