Business Acceleration
Given the scarcity of venture capital in Canada, early stage companies can rarely afford the top caliber talent necessary to win customers faster, build better products and provide better customer experiences than their competitors.
Intrepid helps early stage companies bridge this human capital gap by providing access to highly accomplished and experienced software executives who can help early stage companies accelerate growth without struggling through a steep learning curve or making unnecessary, cash consuming miss-steps. Intrepid's business acceleration methodology combines industry best practices with strategic and operational guidance from seasoned operators, with entry-level pricing that even the most financially bootstrapped can afford.
Strategy
Many entrepreneurs and management teams struggle with the technical aspects of business planning such as undertaking detailed market research, performing comprehensive competitive analysis and determining a market’s size and growth potential. Each of these inputs is critical to formulating the best strategy and the correct execution tactics for a given company. Intrepid’s business acceleration team has deep expertise in software business strategy, with a proven track record of rapidly growing companies and engineering high value strategic exits.
Marketing
Qualified software marketing executives with extensive experience across all aspects of the marketing function are quite rare, at least in Canada. The lack of expert and experienced talent means that the typical marketing department is focused on execution, with market management, marketing strategy, messaging and positioning (i.e. the “guts” of marketing) receiving much less attention than what is considered best practice. Likewise, although many early stage companies have some product management skills in house, they often lack a set of rigorous and proven processes for managing product direction and achieving product release objectives on a timely and cost-effective basis.
Intrepid’s marketing experts help companies deploy best practices in the areas of market management, product management, product marketing and marketing communication, and where required, can provide outsourced Chief Marketing Officer, Product Management and Product Marketing services.
Sales & Alliances
The typical early stage company relies on the entrepreneur and the founding team to do the initial selling until the market opportunity is validated. Once this happens, it is crucial to access proven sales expertise to help define the correct sales methodology and tracking processes in order to successfully scale the sales function and drive revenue growth. The stakes at this juncture of a company’s development are high. Effective sales execution can mean the difference between market leadership versus laggard status, and directly impacts time to cash break-even, dilution to the founders and valuation at the exit.
Similarly, alliances can be critical to the growth of a smaller software company, but also a potential waste of scarce managerial and capital resources if not judiciously selected and diligently enabled. Having access to experts with the right relationships and a deep understanding of how companies like IBM, Deloitte, Accenture, and others can dramatically improve the likelihood of a successful channel relationship, and in the extreme, set-up a potential exit path. For companies seeking to launch an indirect sales channel or that do not require full time channel development resources, Intrepid provides outsourced Strategic Channel Management services.