We completed our ten years in 2023 since the inception of our entity. When we started this organization, our core vision and mission statement was to establish an ecosystem that incorporated innovation to build unique products (productastic), innovate and improvise processes (processilic), extract valuable information through data (datalicious), and offer interesting, relevant training methods and tools that revolves around the five core elements, passion, purpose, patience, perseverance combined with unidirectional focus. Though the progress has not been up to the pace that we wished, we certainly have made progress over the years without amassing debt while trying our best to serve our consumers, clients and/or customers. Over these ten years, we also got to become more and more self-reliant in this interconnected IoT world, where there were roadblocks on every front and still we have managed to find a way to navigate those challenges. During the course of this ten year road map, we made more than 150 applications of our own without much financial support from any external sources, building products in various spaces, entered/explored/expanded our product space in unknown and uncharted territories.
We hope and work towards expanding our efforts at a faster pace, now that we have acquired enough know-how during this journey, and hope the continued journey would be more fruitful, and meaningful.
Here is our original "Executive Summary
of our Consulting Unit" created prior to the official registration of
our .company. The focus has evolved since then, and has touched upon
many areas not confined to only the below mentioned areas.
VAL-U-PRO CONSULTING GROUP, LLC
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Unlike traditional consulting firms that tend to offer B2B services and products revolving around expertise, our services and products would involve a hybrid approach revolving around common masses, and also B2B offerings. The goal of this venture is to play a vital role in offering socially impactful, timely and relevant solutions in a global world, where Gini coefficients has been widening over the years, and the life of organizations reducing in its life span. For example, the average life of US S&P companies has come down from around 60+ years in the 1920’s to 15 years in the 21st century. Moreover, late baby boomers has switched approximately 11 or 12 jobs over their career span. These trends are expected to persist in the coming years. With such kind of information becoming readily available in the Google, Facebook world, common masses are also becoming more aware of these changes, and would call for more socially relevant products in the coming years. To support this claim, a published public opinion survey suggested more than 88% of the consumers prefer their organizations to support the society and environment while addressing business goals, and around 65% would leave their company if their organization negatively impacted the environment. In order to come up with effective socially impactful solutions both in terms of bottom-up masses approach and top-down organizational approach , it has never been essential in the history of humankind to interconnect various areas using the system of profound knowledge put forth by Deming in the mid20th century. Many times, decisions are generally made based on one or two variables namely, economics, finances or technology or data, but rarely all these variables are tied together aligning with behavioral aspect, and the longer-term impact of the decisions. Our company’s focus is to address targeted areas/needs from different perspectives to help both organizations and common masses.
What are our targeted areas?
Common masses: Since the great recession, one area that has been constantly discussed is the level of financial literacy amongst common masses in US and other world economies. Literature analysis suggests that the personal savings rate in US dropped from around 9% to close to 1.5% in the 2000’s. Similarly, the level of borrowing has gone up from 55% in 1960 to more than 120+ % in the 2000’s. The aftermath of the great recession showcased how even families with a total income of well above $100K have not built the necessary financial literacy to manage their finances, and went through tough times post financial crisis.
What is the solution then to increase financial awareness through a socially responsible offering? There are tools such as, Mint, LearnVest that provide options for consumers to manage their finances effectively. But, please note that many of these consumers are averse to numbers and finances in the first place, and may not be using those services. Moreover, financial literacy follows an inverse U trend with respect to age. The section of population who are averse to finances might also be averse to complex gadgets and apps, and need not be using the above-mentioned tools. Furthermore, app based malwares are expanding very fast in the recent years, and the section of population that are financially vulnerable would also become vulnerable to further loss through malware attacks.
Need for a unique product: A simple product that utilizes technology, but can become accessible to financially less-literate and technologically less-savvy masses is essential. We are working on developing one such product. Moreover, named behavioral economists’ research studies suggests that micropayments tend to limit spending behavior. Along these lines, we believe that our product offering would help on that front. With more than 117 million households in US where 80% of the households account for 10% of US wealth, inroads into even 10% of the households can result in a significant new product offering.
Crowd-sourcing of data and transforming to relevant solutions: Many times, whether it were to be technological offerings or product offerings, products tend to be an over-kill. In areas such as, Energy Management, and other common household needs, more can be achieved by modifying consumer behavior, as much as new products. As part of this process, we intend to offer knowledge-based offerings, both through web and apps using crowd-sourcing and product solutions. For example, residential customers account for ~20% of the GHG emissions in US. Just by managing energy utilization in households using existing solutions, we can cut down in energy consumption and GHG by 20-25%, if not more. Just like Zappos, we would like to offer one place for all relevant energy efficient products and solutions to achieve this target. The same approach can be applied in several other household related areas.
Consulting services: As pointed out above, never in the history, we need talented pool of candidates who have the ability to combine technology, data, behavioral analysis and business analysis to visualize immediate and longer term needs of organizations to help organizations innovate and meet the changing competitive landscape in a global flat world. Our goal is to identify such talents, offer relevant training, if necessary, and connect these talents with right organizations as our team members or one of their team members. This area is certainly over-crowded, but still there is a need for connecting organizations, who have the ability to identify such talents and help the organizational ecosystem to enhance their innovation capabilities. Having seen a diverse talent group in both academic and organizational set up, I am confident that I can play an instrumental role on that front.
Disruption in Housing Market: Though there is Trulia and Zillow, still housing market is reeling from the doldrums of great recession. One way to enhance housing market is to provide a holistic solution that promotes trust in the housing market. We are keen to build an ecosystem on that front by connecting buyers and sellers directly, but by including other major players such as, real estate agents, brokers and other service providers in the process. This approach can result in a healthier housing market, which can also help the overall economy in the long-run. Building this ecosystem and sustaining it through constant product innovations have the capability to build new generation of housing market.
Virtual Play machine: The last one in our list is to enhance consumer experience in product selections such as, cars, furniture to name a few right from their homes using virtual reality tools.
Our dreams are big, but with right partners, we believe that we can
make those dreams come true.