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Month: June 2021

Why Startup Consulting Needs to Change

Posted on by Meg Fornataro

The need for startup consulting has never been greater.

Between the size of today’s venture funds, the need to handle all the milestones between rounds, and the regular work that leads to customers, revenue, traction, and growth, today’s startups need help. But the way in which founders seek out advisory services is ripe for change.

Startups no longer want legions of consultants from analyst firms, investment banks, and marketing agencies to provide them with advice. Instead, they want products and technologies that keep them ahead of the competition. And they’re looking for startup consultants that act as an extension of their operating teams.

The Current State of Consulting for Startups

Much of today’s startup consulting feeds off the current atmosphere, where the focus is on raising capital and chasing the outliers. But great companies should be self-sustaining and scalable, have staying power and preserve optionality — something you lose sight of when only striving for unicorn status.

Founders of tech companies have a lot on their plates. The brand building, message and positioning, and sales scaling may not come as natural, and therefore becomes a challenge for long-term sustainability. Finding ways to make the founder role more manageable is a vital ingredient for a startup’s success.

The independent institutions that startups seek out for help are siloed market spaces that are not purpose-built for startups with lower budgets. Their focus is on getting the most dollars out of your business each month or year as possible. Alternatively, venture firms are focused on deploying as much capital into the business as possible, for more equity.

These approaches are not conducive to helping founders with corporate strategy, brand building and go-to-market (GTM) strategy, much less to doing so affordably. When startups see frugality as a means to survival, the question then becomes, how can you more practically scale the startup with the right resources and infrastructure?

Startups’ Consulting Needs

There’s opportunity for operators to achieve more alignment by reducing the number of siloed, independent contractors working with the business and instead working with integrated startup consulting firms.

There are typically three areas where founders need the most assistance:

Market and Product

34% of businesses that fail do so because they lack product market fit. That’s why it’s so important to invest in proper research to understand what the market needs. Market research and competitive intelligence services are essential for understanding opportunity and providing data-driven direction on roadmap planning, pricing, and packaging.

Business Growth and GTM

Making and executing on business decisions is the key to startup growth. It’s also one of the hardest things to do successfully. It’s important for startups to have guidance on all aspects of foundational business growth, including financial long-term modeling, sales strategy, hiring plans, and more. Budget and key performance indicators need to be aligned.

Marketing and Communications

Many startups think that to drive customer acquisition they need to buy Google or LinkedIn ads. But effective marketing and communications is all about building your owned channels — blog, social media, newsletter, etc. — first. It’s there where you can refine your messaging and positioning statements and put your unique point-of-view out into the market. Once brand awareness and momentum starts to increase, then you can go through earned and/or paid channels.

Ready for Recalibration

Startup consulting is ready for a recalibration to build pragmatic, scalable companies. It’s tempting to see rapid growth as the only goal, and consultants as the key to scaling up quickly. For any founder, though, the real goal is to build a company with staying power.

Startup advisory services need an aligned incentives model of investing, in conjunction with effective market and competitive intelligence, and the right resources and infrastructure to support scalability.

To learn more about York IE’s approach to startup consulting, visit our advisory services page.

York IE Hires New Data Engineer: Elisa Chen

Posted on by Elisa Chen

I’m excited to join the York IE team as a data engineer to improve the volume and quality of our data on private companies and markets.

My goal is to consolidate our data so that it is as comprehensive, accurate, and useful to our users as possible. I love problem-solving and working with data, so I look forward to leveraging my previous experience and fresh insights as a recent graduate. In addition, by working with cloud-based big data processing programs such as Amazon Web Services and Apache Spark, I will be able to broaden my data mining skill set.

York IE is an investment firm that’s all about reshaping the way startups are built, scaled, and monetized. The company is built to help other companies succeed using data and our accessible team of startup advisors. Specifically, I’m eager to work on Fuel, our market and competitive intelligence platform that will help our broader team make better investment decisions and support our advisory clients.

I love working at a company where I can learn in-depth from my mentors while also having the freedom to innovate. One of my previous internships was at a small startup named Brands Express, and it was my favorite internship, so I’m glad York IE is a similar environment with an inclusive culture, work-life balance, and kind, hardworking employees.

Thank you to everyone who has made my first week here a joy: Joe, Nick, Kalrav, Alice, and Mike Veilleux! I look forward to having fun and learning more from this diverse group of experts.

Inside Ecommerce SaaS and the Online Payment Facilitator Market

Posted on by Alex Clark

Ecommerce SaaS and the growing online payments market enabled internet retailers to adapt to changing shopping habits during the pandemic.

Since the 1990s, most forms of commerce have shifted online. Notably among them is retail, where U.S. ecommerce sales have grown from $5.5  billion in Q1 of 2000 to $215 billion in Q1 of 2021 — around 13.5% of all retail sales. According to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Commerce, ecommerce as a percentage of total retail sales has increased steadily since 2012, but this number spiked significantly after the first quarter of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Yet, even before lockdowns began and physical stores closed, an industry was growing that would enable the sudden but overall smooth shift to ecommerce: the online payment facilitator market.

The History of Ecommerce

Rooted in the advent of electronic fund transfers in the late 1800s, the ability to complete a transaction without physical currency is completely normal these days. Credit, the idea of making a purchase without paying right away, is a very old idea, but it expanded beyond unique tabs with individual businesses in the mid-20th century. Consumers started purchasing all sorts of goods with cards, and they could do so almost anywhere (see the history of Diners Club).

Core to this revolution was authorization and completion — the eventual, actual exchange of money. When a consumer makes a purchase on credit, their information is sent to what is called an acquiring bank that acts on behalf of the business. The acquiring bank checks the information with the cardholder’s issuing bank to make sure the cardholder meets certain standards, such as having available credit. Assuming that goes well, the issuing bank provides funds to the acquiring bank, which then sends that money to the merchant or business owner. It is then up to the consumer to pay back those funds to the issuing bank. In essence, although the modern credit system adds a lot of complexity to basic transactions, the consumer will still, in a roundabout way, pay cash.

For ecommerce to take hold, the processes enabling brick-and-mortar stores to use modern credit cards had to transfer online. At an actual store, the consumer swipes, inserts, or taps their credit card (or phone) to a terminal to transfer the credit card’s data. This data is sent to the acquiring bank through a card association network, such as VisaNet or Banknet, for authentication. Online, the same process has to happen. However, there is no terminal for customers to insert their card, nor a direct connection to a card network. To solve this problem, multiple ecommerce SaaS solutions enabling online payment facilitation were created.

Stripe and the Online Payments Market

A popular example is Stripe, which gives online retailers the ability to create a payment gateway — the online equivalent of a credit card terminal. It securely sends credit card information to the acquiring bank, and thus through the card network to issuing banks for approval, making the payment process fully executable online. The SaaS component is so beneficial because it gives every business the ability to integrate ecommerce into their website without managing the real infrastructure of online payments. Without easily deployable online payments infrastructure in place, ecommerce would not have been able to grow at the rate it did during the pandemic.

Although Stripe has become well known today, the company has been grinding out its online payment facilitator solution since 2009. In the first 5 years, it grew to a more than $1 billion valuation, and in the next five to a $36 billion valuation. After the pandemic hit and Stripe received a $600 million funding round, its valuation skyrocketed to $95 billion. In total, Stripe has raised more than $2.2 billion, according to the York IE Fuel platform.

The Ecommerce SaaS Convergence

As ecommerce grew, so did the opportunity for the payment facilitator market, and SaaS helped speed up the process. However, it took years of innovation and risk from founders — and investors — to build the ecommerce SaaS technology needed to respond so quickly to an environmental shock such as the pandemic.

The Stripe example shows the value of SaaS in enabling industries to grow out of new markets. Discovering these long-term trends and their supporting businesses is easier said than done, but that is the goal of every early-stage investor.

Introducing the York IE Summer Internship Class of 2021

Posted on by York IE

York IE is a fast-moving and ambitious company, and that means we have real, important work for our interns to do. That’s why we’re so excited to introduce the fast-moving and ambitious college students who make up our 2021 class of summer interns.

Alex Clark

Bentley University

At school I am studying finance and accounting, but with the investments team at York IE I continue to gain expertise on SaaS, how it relates to different markets and the early-stage investing process.

There certainly isn’t a manual for startup investing, but there is a process, and there are steps. Chief among them is learning, and the investments team always promotes the value of researching new fields and refreshing current understandings. This is where I will spend the bulk of my time this summer: ensuring our team is up to date and informed while looking at prospective investments.

Outside of York IE I enjoy all things outdoors. Hiking, fishing, hunting, boating or anything of the sort is when I am happiest, and I plan on spending plenty of time on (and in) Lake Sunapee, as I have done for my entire life.

Alex Clark
Jack

Jack Hamlin

Northeastern University

I am currently pursuing my MBA at Northeastern University with concentrations in business analytics and corporate innovation and venturing. I’m excited to join York IE as a part of a six-month corporate residency. Through my past educational and work experiences, I have become passionate about growing brands in businesses with innovative go-to-market strategies and energized by the intersection of creative, strategic and analytical problem-solving.

I am a member of the advisory services team, working on expanding and developing our modules to support the next generation of entrepreneurs. What excites me the most about my position at York IE is having the opportunity to work with businesses in different stages of growth and help tackle challenges at each step of the business life-cycle timeline. I look forward to reinforcing our collective mission of becoming a strategic partner to our clients.

I am so excited to join a team of such talented and driven individuals and incredibly thankful for this opportunity. Outside of York IE, I am a huge Boston sports fan and avid skier and enjoy spending time on Cape Cod with friends and family.

Caroline Hoffer

Providence College

Having had a rewarding internship experience with York IE last summer, I am beyond excited to be back with the team again. As a rising senior at Providence College, my passion for marketing and content creation has only grown through various courses and projects I have completed. I have been able to utilize what I have learned in the classroom and apply it to my work at York IE.

The opportunity to work alongside the advisory services team has provided me with an incredible experience at York IE, as I expand my knowledge of content strategy and all things related to startups and B2B companies. Within my first few weeks back, it’s already evident that this summer will be completely different than my previous year due to York IE’s ever-growing portfolio and team. There is always something new to learn and look forward to. I am excited to have the opportunity to improve my marketing skills and knowledge as well as grow professionally as a member of the York IE team!
Outside of my internship, I plan on enjoying some fun beach days this summer with family and friends. I’m also excited to cheer on the World Series-bound Boston Red Sox and hopefully catch a few games at Fenway!

caroline-hoffer
Ben Warren

Ben Warren

Louisiana State University

I’m a junior studying public relations, and what I’m most excited about at York IE this summer is to work on the content creation side of things, writing blog posts and press releases. I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer, so stay on the lookout! Although I haven’t been at York IE for long, I have already learned a massive amount about being a PR professional, and I’ve loved every second of my time here.

Outside of York IE, I’m looking forward to a summer full of playing and watching golf. I’m down to an 8 handicap and have been playing the best golf of my life, so I don’t plan on wasting any of the summer weather. Besides golf, I’m excited to get back to Baton Rouge and get my junior year underway as life crawls back to normal.

Cole Wheeler

Wake Forest University

I’m a software engineering intern here at York IE. This summer I’m excited to learn what it takes to create and develop a competitive intelligence platform like Fuel that is really useful to gain a lot of information for businesses to help them thrive.
After being involved with the platform for only a few weeks, I can already see how Fuel is incredibly beneficial for all businesses. The team at York IE has developed a great roadmap for the platform to integrate instrumental components, and it’ll be great to see its progress. I’m just ready to take the knowledge I’ve gained from school and apply it to a professional setting rather than a school lab. The experience and hands-on learning I will gain from working here at York IE is invaluable.
Outside of work I’m looking forward to staying active and getting outside, whether it be playing some organized basketball, hiking or just going on the boat for the day.
To learn about future York IE internship opportunities, email us!

Cole Wheeler

York IE Launches Collaborative Market and Competitive Intelligence for Teams

Posted on by York IE

New feature helps startups align on growth strategy

(Manchester, N.H., June 22, 2021) — York IE™, a vertically integrated strategic growth and investment firm, today launched the teams feature for Fuel, its market and competitive intelligence platform.

As a startup grows, it can become challenging to keep everyone aligned behind the same market strategy and competitive landscape. Fuel’s new teams feature enables startup employees to collaboratively research companies and markets and then share their findings with colleagues.

Fuel delivers watchlist and news updates directly into Slack.
Fuel delivers watchlist and news updates directly into Slack.

“Startups need to base their growth strategies on market and competitive intelligence,” said Kyle York, CEO, York IE. “Fuel is part of hundreds of entrepreneurs’ daily workflows, and it will be even more valuable to their teams. This new feature helps ensure that everyone is marching toward the same goals.”

Fuel helps accelerate strategic growth and adds value to everyday workflows by allowing individuals and teams to come together. With teams, users can:

  • share common spaces to collaborate within Fuel, without having to manage sharing on an individual basis;
  • find advanced profiles on companies and markets, which include detailed funding and technology data, and organize them into unlimited shared watchlists; and
  • integrate watchlists and Fuel News content with Slack to seamlessly keep team members up to date where they are working most.

“As an entrepreneur, you need to know your competitors and your market cold,” said Mike Veilleux, CTO, York IE. “But that alone isn’t sufficient. Your company needs to be aligned with your learnings.”

Fuel watchlists are ideal for tracking:

  • Competitors
  • Comparators
  • Key customers
  • Strategic partners
  • Acquisition targets
  • Sales prospects
  • Local networks
  • Investors
  • Investment portfolios

Launched in May, Fuel is a SaaS platform that provides digestible data and insights so busy entrepreneurs, operators, investors and teams can enhance their strategic growth. With the most accurate and connected private company profiles, plus news and original research, Fuel best enables the startup community to track and find insights about a market, its trends and its influencers.

“With Fuel, everything I’m looking for is right there under one roof, which makes it easy to integrate into my daily workflow,” said Heather Margolis, founder and CEO, Spark Your Channel.

As part of Fuel, York IE also launched Fuel News, a site dedicated to highlighting the best owned content from early-stage B2B SaaS and other fast-growth companies.

To bring market and competitive intelligence to your teams, click here.

ABOUT
York IE™ is a vertically integrated strategic growth and investment firm helping reshape the way companies are built, scaled and monetized. Through Fuel™, its SaaS platform for market and competitive intelligence, hands-on advisory services and selective early stage B2B SaaS investments, York IE supports ambitious entrepreneurs, operators and investors on their quest to scale startups and disrupt markets. Play the long game at york.ie.

MEDIA CONTACT
Kate Campbell, Vice President, Advisory Services, York IE
kate@york.ie

How to Achieve Strategic Alignment with Market Research

Posted on by Mike Veilleux

The goal of your market and competitive intelligence efforts should be to achieve strategic alignment throughout your company.

We’ve all seen it before. Your team, consultants or even analyst firms are brought in to perform some market research to kickoff the next phase of growth at your company. A document is produced. You review, meet, make a couple decisions and then go back to work.

To truly get your broader team aligned with these decisions and your new vision, it requires a different approach that makes market research part of your daily life.

In this post we’ll cover how to achieve strategic alignment by using market research data and why it’s so important.

3 Steps to Achieving Alignment

Making market research part of your team’s daily workflow and culture will help to achieve strategic alignment over time. It will also help keep you closer to evolutions and disruptions in your market.

Here are three ways to market research part of your team’s daily life:

Accessibility

A lot of your company may not have the time to fully understand the ins and outs of a larger piece of market research. By giving them small bits of information every day, instead of dropping a large report on them every few months, it makes it easier for them to follow along.

Create a shared list of competitors, partners and even key customers. Making sure your employees know who is who will pay dividends in their daily motions.

I’ve also used visual market maps that group comparators into bubbles that are easy to visualize. This was the first slide I’d bring up any time I’d encounter a sales rep trying to sell against a non-competitor, or an engineer suggesting a feature that wasn’t in our vision.

Continuous

Our teams at Dyn, Oracle and now York IE have always used Slack channels for market news. Team members post articles from competitors or other companies in similar industries, sometimes with a quick note about what they find interesting, so we all can stay in the know.

I’ve always been amazed at how active these market news channels are. You’ll see various team members with interests and skills related to various articles speak up, share thoughts, agree/disagree, etc. And best of all, they’ll use these market insights in their daily work.

Digestible

Smaller, more memorable anecdotes about the market tend to be more successful at aligning teams. When I led product management for Dyn’s email delivery, for example, I’d toss out industry acquisitions and funding announcements to get the sales reps and engineers excited about their involvement.

There are still times when bigger, more strategic research is needed, but daily market research is just as important.

Help Employees Embrace Market Research

At York IE, we developed our Fuel platform to help companies do market research differently and to make strategic alignment easier to achieve. We do so by making market research more accessible, continuous and digestible — and at a lower cost — than traditional methods.

People like market and competitive intelligence and want to embrace it more in their jobs. To truly achieve strategic alignment, companies should make it easier for them!

Sign up for Fuel and start making market research part of your daily workflow.

Henry Ristuccia Joins York IE as Investment Partner and Advisor

Posted on by York IE

(Manchester, N.H., June 21, 2021) — York IE, a vertically integrated strategic growth and investment firm, announced today that Henry J. Ristuccia, previously a 25-year partner at Deloitte, will join the team as an investment partner and governance, risk and compliance advisor within the York IE portfolio.

Ristuccia spent 32 years at Deloitte before recently retiring. Throughout his professional career, Ristuccia has always focused on risk management, serving some of the firm’s most important and complex clients.

Henry Ristuccia
Henry Ristuccia

“Effective governance, risk management and compliance is critical as companies continue to scale, attract investment and set a strategy for the future,” Ristuccia said. “Yet understanding everything that goes into that can be daunting for many entrepreneurs. I am happy to share my experience and help the companies within the York IE portfolio find a practical balance of corporate governance, risk management and strategic decisioning.”

Ristuccia joined Deloitte in 1989 and was a senior partner for 25 years until June, when he retired from the firm to focus on helping nonprofits, tech startups and the next generation of businesspeople. Currently, he serves on the advisory boards of multiple tech startups, as well as on the boards of a major university and nonprofit organizations. He has also taken on direct mentorship of young professionals and entrepreneurs.

As an investment partner, Ristuccia joins York IE’s core investment syndicate, which is the firm’s primary investment vehicle. It is made up of a diverse group of high-net-worth individuals, successful tech entrepreneurs, family offices and strategic partners. He joins as an investment partner as part of a consortium of other Deloitte retired leaders and friends.

On top of joining our core investment syndicate, Ristuccia will serve as a governance, risk and compliance advisor for York IE as well as the companies inside of our portfolio.

He joins other publicly listed York IE advisors, including Dr. Julie Gurner, executive performance expert and founder of executive performance coaching business Gurner Consulting; Pam Hamlin, president of York Creative Collective and former global CEO of Arnold Worldwide; and Kara Banosian, chief marketing officer at Stavvy; in addition to more than 30 other well-known investment partners and advisors.

Competitive vs. Comparative Intelligence and Why Your Startup Needs Both

Posted on by Ben Warren

A startup’s use of competitive and comparator intelligence can make all the difference in its success or failure. That’s why it’s so important to understand the differences in competitive vs. comparative research.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing information about companies in your market that are targeting the same potential customers.

The first step for any company when it comes to competitive intelligence is getting your team aligned on who exactly those competitors are, and then prioritizing what information to collect. Deciding who your biggest competitors are can be as easy as evaluating the market and seeing which companies people are choosing over you. Then, figure out which companies you can quickly gain ground on will help you prioritize your research. Some common types of data researched for competitive intelligence are:

  • market share
  • pricing
  • location
  • proximity to customer base
  • customer reviews
  • company culture

Anything that you think will give you a competitive advantage is worth taking into consideration.

What is Comparator Intelligence?

Comparators are companies that may not be directly competitive to you but are like you in other ways. For example, they may solve a similar problem as your company, but for customers in a different industry, or use similar pricing and packaging strategies. With comparators, there may be an opportunity to learn from each other or even work together and develop a partnership.

Looking outside of your market gives you a wider range of information and a larger sample size of which strategies work and don’t work. Researching comparators, much like researching competitors, can give you and your startup an upper hand on other companies in your market. While researching competitors helps you focus efforts to bolster your competitive advantage in your market, doing research on similar companies that you wouldn’t consider competitors can help inspire fresh ideas.

Another added bonus of researching and analyzing comparators is that you can identify companies to potentially partner with, and others who are possibly willing to share knowledge and provide guidance to your startup.

Knowing what the companies in and around your market are doing is a key to becoming a successful startup. With competitive and comparative intelligence and a team that is fully committed to its research, you can ensure everyone in your company is on the same page and working toward the same clear and measurable goals.

To make competitive and comparative intelligence part of your workflow, sign up for Fuel.

York IE Hires New Marketing Specialist: Mackenzie O’Brien

Posted on by Mackenzie O'Brien

Throughout the past two years I had witnessed from afar the momentum building behind a disruptive local company: York IE. Without much background knowledge on what the company even did, I was following them on Facebook. From the outside looking in, there was a clear drive behind their vision.

Fast forward to this spring: I had my first call with CEO Kyle York, which then led to a series of introductions to members across the team. Each call increased my interest more and more, but honestly, after hanging up from my first real Zoom meeting with Kate Campell, vice president of advisory services, I was sold!

One of York IE’s big draws for me is the constant element of change and growth. Much of my college experience had the same theme, which I grew to enjoy. Within two weeks of graduating from the University of Miami, I was home and eager to start. I am hitting the ground running and cannot wait to apply my fresh knowledge and the experience I have gained already to my work with this awesome team and its various clients.

After working as a graphic design assistant and junior account coordinator in a B2C agency setting prior to joining York IE, I was quick to find that working directly with clients had become a passion of mine. A large part of marketing that does not always get its moment in the spotlight is the essential component of truly understanding your client’s vision. It is an exciting and fulfilling role to help startups define and refine their story to help them stand out right from the jump!

After living all over, from New Jersey to Baltimore to Miami, nothing compares to my home state of New Hampshire. It is great to be back and have the opportunity to contribute to and grow with such an amazing group of professionals and thought leaders at York IE.

Startup Scaling Is All Relative

Posted on by Mike Vailas

Startup scaling is a choice, and how big you want to get is completely up to you.

If you want to maintain control over your company, then there are certain directions to take when raising money — or when deciding if you should raise money at all. Entrepreneurs have the unique opportunity to chase fame like the Richard Bransons or Steve Jobs of the world, or they can build sustainable businesses that provide for them and stay within their communities.

Three things you should ask yourself when thinking about startup scaling:

  • Do you want to scale?
  • How fast do you want to scale?
  • How do you define your success?

On the Entrepreneurs United podcast, York IE CEO Kyle York discussed the principles of scaling for entrepreneurs and shared this story to illustrate his point that startup scaling is relative:

“When I was in college and my brother was 27, I was 22, we used to go to the bars, and I would always make him buy my drinks because I was in college and had no money. He had a job. He had a car and a house. But he told me, ‘Yeah, it’s all relative, Kyle. I have more money than you, but I have a mortgage, a car payment, and insurance.’ So I’ve always really thought of life, wealth, success, scale — they’re all relative.”

Watch the full episode for more entrepreneurial insight and to learn about what we’re up to at York IE: