Three years serving as a senior manager at VIISA – one of Vietnam’s longest-established accelerators, Phuc Nguyen realised the gap between local SMEs, which account for about 98 per cent of the total enterprises in Vietnam, and the resources and knowledge they need to grow to a sustainable scale.
Access to private consulting services might be one solution, but it is hindered by expensive consulting fees. Current accelerator programmes are also only available to selective technology firms that are also required to give up some shares in exchange for dedicated support and funding.
As VIISA turned over a new leaf by halting its accelerator programme in 2021 to fully focus on venture investments, in April 2022, Nguyen teamed up with Barrett Le, a multi-award product user experience (UX) expert, to co-found a new organisation purpose-built for Vietnamese entrepreneurs.
Their new venture, named Emakase, received the mentoring support of Alexander Jansen, an expert provided by the Swiss Entrepreneurship Programme to assist VIISA in early 2020 and follow the inspiration from Japanese cuisine’s “Omakase” concept, in which customers leave it up to the chef to select and serve special dishes.
New age business consulting
“Unlike other incubators and accelerators, Emakase does not serve startups that are ‘too early’. Instead, it targets teams that have already entered the market and generated some forms of traction, or middle-market companies whose annual revenues are no more than US$75 million,” said Nguyen. “We provide business support like an accelerator but do not fund the business or take equity.”
The preliminary report, or Emakase’s comprehensive diagnosis through a 360-degree interview with the client company’s founders and stakeholders, will state the problems as well as compatible solutions to strengthen or scale up the firm.
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When the client signs on to use any proposed solutions or services, “chefs” from Emakase will convene a consulting board meeting and construct a master plan to implement the strategy within a set time frame and a suitable level of impact.
“After receiving our initial feedback through the preliminary reports, client companies need to be very honest with themselves to decide whether or not they should pay for services that we suggest to provide for them,” Nguyen added. “This requires them to have higher ‘self-awareness’ than many early-stage startups that often participate in typical accelerator programmes.”
With seven partners specialising in fields such as people management, marketing, finance, management, creativity, and innovation, Emakase is structuring its “menu” in three “flexible and customisable” lists of services: fundraising consulting, management consulting, and innovation consulting.
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The fees, at least for Emakase’s current seven projects with clients, are “much more affordable” than that of large consulting organisations or deal advisory firms, according to Nguyen, though he said that his firm still needs a tweak to the pricing to better value its services.
“We will ensure the deliverables, but not the client’s sure-fire result as they are still the owner of their firms and should have the highest responsibility for their successes or failures,” Nguyen added.
Accelerator-as-a-service model
Emakase also spots a new trend buoyed by the pandemic-induced digital transformation: Vietnamese corporations seek to boost their innovation capacities to adapt to changing behaviours of customers. As a result, the consulting house forms its “accelerator-as-a-service” model, which offers corporations, government and non-government bodies tailored and full-fledged innovation programmes.
Other ecosystem players echoed this sentiment, with Zone Startups Vietnam’s plan to offer a “basket” of startups’ technology solutions to big corporations and ThinkZone’s fund-raising from six local conglomerates for its US$60 million Fund II to finance high-growth startups.
Adding to the mix, Emakase looks to connect these ecosystem resources and even become a ‘sub-vendor’ for other ecosystem players to jointly serve corporations’ needs.
“Any collaborations should be grounded on commercial purposes as it will clarify the positioning and value of each player toward third-party companies,” said VIISA CFO Hieu Vo, considering Nguyen’s new venture as a useful supplement to bridge the service gap in the ecosystem.
Following the “consult-build-operate-transfer” process, Emakase offers programmes ranging from hackathons, incubation, and acceleration, to professional competency enhancement and business competency training, for various ecosystem stakeholders. It also especially emphasises firms’ integrity and transparency and says no to “under-the-table lobby” when providing services.
“With the government’s strong support for innovation, I believe there is fertile land for ‘upright’ innovation consulting businesses,” Nguyen said. “If consulting firms do anything wrong or ineffective, they will quickly face blowback because this space is growing fast, and the outcomes of innovation efforts are soon to be seen.”
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Image credit: Emakase
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