Apohan Corporate Consultants Pvt Ltd

A Fintech start-up dealing with counselling, screening, enablement & delivery of strategic transactions for 63 million MSMEs through an economic and scalable technology platform.

We have contacted more than 1200 SMEs and around 950 are serious prospects. We have 192 active leads with a revenue potential of 58 Mn USD. We have secured 6 transaction contracts with revenue of 1.1 Mn USD. Our MVP is in process and expects to roll it out by April 2022.

Our focus is on MSMEs and in India only those are more than 20 million MSMEs in India. Even if we target simply 10 percent of them as our addressable market then will have 2millions as addressable market. If we target just 1% as our clients out of this addressable market we will have 20,000 numbers. Its a huge market to address.

The new generation of ambitious SMEs needs to undertake strategic transactions (such as equity funding or JV) to realize their dreams. SMEs can’t afford & lack the management capability of carrying out complex transactions. There is a lack of counselling, structuring, documentation, network, communication & representation. Despite huge demand, strategic transactions can be said to be virtually absent in SMEs because of the absence of a large-scale, efficient, economic & reliable service infrastructure in the strategic transaction space for SMEs. Apohan’s platform is made to fill in this gap.

Apohan technology platform is designed to carry out origination, aggregation, screening & closure of strategic transactions. The process flow of the offline transaction results in an unacceptable rate of deal failures in the SME space. Our platform would bring strategic transactions to the doorstep of every deserving SME. It will increase the success rate, reduce the cycle time by around 60%, reduce the transaction costs and will break the long broker chains.

As of now, there are about 6000 consultancy firms in metropolitan cities including Delhi (25.7 percent) followed by, Mumbai (25.5 percent), Chennai (12.1 percent) and Kolkata (9.1 percent).
Due to constantly increasing demand, the industry is estimated to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 30 percent to become a Rs 27,000 crores industry by 2020, as per the reports of The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham).
The type of services we provide has very limited players in India. Most of them are from USA. Hence, they target the top companies in India. Our target market is the companies who do not afford the services from those premium strategic consultants.
Also, the consultants in this discipline provide compliance and professional consulting, so they cannot be considered as competitors, as their services are different. They could be tier 2 service providers to Apohan.

Apohan is not a mere consulting company but also it believes in its recommendations & action plans.
Hence success fees & profit sharing would be the key elements in the long-term engagements.
Unlike most other M&A service providers, Apohan has in-house or outsourced expertise of all related professionals under a single roof be it chartered accountants, company secretaries, business lawyers, MBAs in strategy, MBAs in finance, MBAs in marketing, investment advisors, investment bankers, engineers fr om various disciplines, technocrats, valuation experts, resolution experts under IBC, deal brokers, sector experts, etc.
Apohan is not a broker but carries out a wide variety of scope of work in M&A engagement. Apohan is connected to a wide variety of investors with a wide variety of preferences for investment ticket sizes, sectors, time Horizons, risk appetites, locations, expectation of rates of return, terms of engagement, etc.
We are very choosy when we select a business for equity funding services as otherwise investors will not make an investment wasting everyone’s resources. We help the businesses where the management has a record of financial integrity; the company has sound competence in its technology, products, services, markets & competition & the trends in them; where there is a priced demand for the products that can create sustainable and handsome profits, wh ere there is marketing capability & marketing infrastructure in place.

In consulting the cost of human resource is calculated on a daily basis, and these resources are expensive, however it gets reduced if the engagement is long-term.
Based on this, the revenue model we carry is bifurcated into various types of remuneration patterns. The assignment with any client starts with
1. Advance fixed fees - Average $2,000/- per mandate
2. Periodic Monthly Engagement Fees - Average $5,000/- per mandate for 6 month period
3. Milestone based fees.
4. Success fees - Average $60,000/- Each successful mandate
This makes the foundation of revenue generation, to keep the revenue cycle moving. We club the foundation with success fees based on the nature of assignment.
This investment of $1Million will take Apohan to clock revenue of $2Million in year one and also a projected revenue of average $400,000 per month from year two with monthly burn of $150,000. Apohan will be self-sufficient from year two and accruals will be invested in business for expansion. Additional $150,000 from initial investments will be used for capex for immediate future. Post this from business accruals we target to reach revenue of $20 millions in the fifth year.

Apohan realizes counselling charges, screening charges, enablement charges & success charges at various stages. It's a B2B model.

20% Product/services Development / Capex
10% Marketing/Sales
50% Operations including salaries
5% Existing Debt
15% Other

We can offer upto 26% of stake but it will depend on the deal structure, what investors are brininging on table, contribution in business, value addition etc. Unless we get toknow each other it will be difficult to work out a clear offerings. There are lot of things which are necessary to know before any offer. Being a M&A consultants and experienced professionals, we can assure a good win win offering for investors with value and benefits.

Major risk for our business is debt funding as most of the SMEs are not much aware about equity funding and even if they are aware, they very hesitant to offload stake.
Another risk is from competitors, there are small time players and brokers who only focus on their commission and hence agrees to work only on success fees. They did not spend much time in finding suitable partner, their only focus is getting funds only.
Large players too play risks as a brand, but as our focus is SMEs we see this as an opportunity.
Some technology players are also competition as they promise the services at lost through networking.

Being experienced corporate professionals and from M&A backgroung with nore than 240 deals, we have capabilities of incubator and we are suppport COEP Pune incubator.

Not participated in comprtitions as were buidling up services.