Business Development Process at Shakuro

What is business development?

Different businesses follow different objectives in various industries. As for the digital production, business development aims towards the bigger caliber of clients engaged, better technologies utilized, and more prominent minds working on projects. The scope of business development process thus has to cover the entire operation units of a company in order to provide harmonious and versatile improvement.

Here are the core concepts of business development process we are following at Shakuro to be the best we can:

Business Idea Evaluation

One of the key features of any endeavor is its soul – the idea. Figuring out whether the juice is worth the squeeze, the feel for a potential benefit, experience, and sometimes pure belief is what idea evaluation is. The methodology behind it is a solid entity though, as artistry along cannot guarantee success and has to be backed up by technical and actual data. If the idea is the soul of an effort, then business concept is its body.

Business ideas might come through different medium – board meetings, latest trends, scientific discoveries, marketing goals, or pure brainstorming.
Regardless of the origin, an idea has to pass validation procedure before it shapes into a potential business concept.

Business idea validation steps

• Establish a Jury. Basically, a crew of people whose competence allows them to investigate and assess ideas and thoughts and decide whether they get a green light to the following stage. Our jury consists of the CEO, old-time PMs, design guru, and a marketing genius.

• Formulate a Statement. Any product has to have a clear value for the community in order to reach audience. Often times the viability of an idea depends on the message it sends out and the grasp of the public it gets. Having a precise statement of what you offer and why it matters is the vital part of idea evaluation. Our example is a whiteboard wall that contains all the smallest details of an idea construction, and ultimately, incubates the statement.

• Model a Life Cycle.  In order to be perceived as a complete entity, an idea has to project a thorough approach. That is being clear at what it takes to start, how to run it and what the end results are. Putting an idea into a scenario-like sequence of stages aids its perception in the paradigm of the entire business. We run multiple scenarios for any idea before we figure out if the encouraging outlooks beat the gloomy-doomy scenarios.

• Purify the Scenarios. Those of the pathways that have shown viability have to be reassessed again. This time, consider the real-life circumstance, like budget, human and technical resources, terms, economic and sometimes political situation, and project them on the idea of a business concept that you are about to implement. Our usual practice for this stage is making sure the new things do not interfere with the core operations, break the chain supply of resources, but fit into the existing model with obvious growth opportunities.

Business Idea Approval

Yes-or-no decision and perhaps, the point of no return… Well, not that dramatic, but the return might cost you time and effort, not to mention the disappointment. So as a crucial concept for your business development process, the Yes-or-No decision has to be treated like one. Every single piece of doubt and apprehension has to be addressed responsibly before the green light is given and the actual work begins.

This is where the Jury shines. There might be a division of thoughts, sometimes equal, but this is not a problem – it is a blessing, as only an honest and passionate discussion can reveal the hidden pitfalls and misconceptions about the idea or a concept.

Another thing to keep in mind at this stage is the reality of it. Unlike the previous scenario iteration games, this is where your team’s commitment has to manifest itself. The effort must not be underestimated, as do the problems and the risks. The financial responsibility has to be clear and just as are the potential perks.

The three possible outcomes at this stage are the following:

• Green Light. The idea/business concept gets a pass to implementation.
• Yellow Light. The idea/business concept gets postponed for the future due to various reasons.
• Red Light. You stop right there and never get back to it.

In our history of growing as a digital agency providing web and mobile design and development, we’ve dealt with multiple bold startups, some of them skyrocketed the market, some failed miserably, and some rose from the ashes. One thing that successful projects had in common is their impact on our business development.
As our CEO, Kostya Stepanov once stated:

“To be a successful digital agency we rely on the success of our clients.”

Business Development Execution Ethics

Once the growth and development opportunities have been evaluated, pathways chosen, and ask forces assigned, it’s time for an implementation team to swing into action towards the desired goal. In our case, with every successful project we raise the bar of quality of not only the product itself, but the process of delivering it inside and outside the office.

With every user experience feature that we build, we look to improve our “seller experience”.
There is a firm belief that you can only increment your best service or product if you keep evolving as a production team both technically and personally.

Business Development Vision

As we mentioned above, business development opportunities might come from different places and be initiated by different team members, or even hired business development professionals. Through the meticulous and at times, painful process of idea evaluation, you build your development strategies and evolve.

Business owners often encourage employees to be vocal about their ideas of improvement, as their specific knowledge is precious material for overall business performance.

It’s not easy to define business development in a nutshell, as this process is abstract. We believe it’s more about the approach you take towards it, your dedication to constant improvement, and the efforts you make in reaching the end result.

Keeping in mind forward motion, caution of stagnation, and the advantages of accommodating changes are the inevitable progress markers and guaranteed business development chances.

With every next project our team successfully accomplishes, we learn more about ourselves than any metrics or analysis data could ever bring. This is the true meaning of project.