Naresh Bhat is the Co-Founder & Director of Global Sales at SpurTree Technologies, a new age consulting firm focused on enterprise mobility, big data and social insights. Naresh has over 15 years of diverse IT experiences, from Project & Account Management to Marketing to Pre-Sales before embarking on a sales journey for the past 8 years. He is an alumnus of MIT Manipal, where he graduated as a Computer Science engineer.
Spurtree Technologies, (www.spurtreetech.com) was started by three people – Keval Prabhu. Naresh Bhat, Subhod CM. The first entrepreneurial journey for the three of them worked in their favour since these three (classmates and ex-colleagues) came in from diverse background (sales, delivery, operations ) of over 10 years which is very rare to find in most startups. All the backend operations of setting the office, infrastructure, statutory, accounts, HR, admin were handled by Subhod which helped Naresh to sell and Keval to deliver which happens even today.
Naresh recollects the days when they had to start with nothing in hand being a services firm, he had built great relationships with people he had met in multiple seminars, conferences etc. as well as people he had worked with while being employed. Reaching out to them with the message that SpurTree was his baby and out to change the way software services would be delivered convinced his prospects to give business to the young set of entrepreneurs.
Anecdotally, he went to his ex head of sales & boss who he had met who had founded a company in the US a week after they began. Since they knew each other, the question that came was not if they could do it, but what can they do and how would they deliver. Within a few weeks, the engagement was a 5 member team. Naresh says that it is helpful to build powerful relationships in the employment days as that is one of the best sources of leads that a startup can go after in the initial days, especially as a services organization with no track record. Additionally, if your first customer happens to be someone who you knew in the past, using the first customer as a reference becomes very easy as there was a proven track record in the past. His ex boss/clieint began giving references to the next few customers within one week of them beginning work.
Naresh’s advice to startups is to find the right founding team and everything else will fall in place. In his words “If I were to do it all over again, I’d still do it with the exact same combination of people. While it was purely incidental, as I look back, having a founding team where each one comes from a different background is invaluable. I was and am the hustler, Keval is the tech and delivery and Subhod is everything else”
Now Spurtree Technologies is a 100 plus member firm within 4 years and having serviced over 150 unique customers all over the world. Still changing the world, one customer at a time!
