The pipeline so far

Many people have been asking what's up with our new consulting firm so I thought I'd blog what's happening. Specially some good friends have been blogging aloud about it ;-)

Actually this is my first weekend after going independent. My last day at Deloitte was on 7th September.

No, we still haven't finalised on a name for the firm. A few suggestions we recieved from the community were really good, so we are in the process of selecting a name.

Next week I start off business development in earnest.

Two blogging related gigs are in the offing, one with a FMCG company (who want to use blogging as a tool for promoting and nurturing the talent pool - you could call it Employer Brand Management !) in New Delhi and another Recruitment Consultancy in Hyderabad.

A dot com in Delhi also had expressed a desire to understand how Web 2.0 and user generated content could help them (Rashmi has a great post on the perils of user generated content, specially in India!).

An IT services company in India is looking for help in employer branding management and internal communication issues (yes, they have blogging in mind as one of the tools)

An IT product company and another Consulting company have also expressed desire in utilizing our expertise in diagnosis, development and design of learning intervention. These are in the areas of behavioral training.

There have been a few enquiries for us from a HR consulting firm and from a HRO firm to be functional experts for some large engagements that might come up. None of these have progressed from the initial contact they made, so we really don't know if something will come out of them.

One of the large IT companies in the ERP space also approached us for some KM consulting, but again no follow up after the initial first phone conversation.

We were even approached by a VC for some funding. Our response was that what we envisage a fairly low investment business and currently we have the wherewithal to set up without heavy monetary investments. However, when we do scale up, we'll be very happy to connect with them :-) [by the way, Rob has an awesome post on understanding what VCs and Angel Investors look for in entrepreneurs]

So that's the update as of now folks. In addition, there are quite a few 1-4 hour talks on social networking/web 2.0/blogging that organizations of various kinds want to hold for awareness of the middle management layer.

Quite a lot to keep us busy for the next few months.