**M. B.**

CEO, International Entertainment Company

Online entertainment is a saturated and highly competitive market, requiring sharp vision and solid financial investments – what was your drive to start the business beginning of 2021?

Entrepreneurship is a game of vision, risk, and agility. The journey of a business goes together with premature decisions and timely decisions, sharp reactions and late reactions, smart tactics, and belated measures. There are no warranties for success or a secured, paved path of stressless growth. Each achievement is earned. And all these particularities are part of the exciting development journey of a startup company.

The drive of the founders was to bet on speed, quality, innovation, and unyielding focus in a business domain where the behavior is quite settled and predictable.

What do you mean exactly by innovation?

After a thorough competitive analysis we confirmed our initial hypothesis – the market was still missing a personalized, wow! service and relationships. Our niche positioning laid on the foundations of transparency, flash-speed communication, better conditions for collaboration, and genuine human approach. From day one our operations work in an automated, human-centric way for end-customers, affiliates, and partners.

Isn´t it a contradiction to talk about “human-centric” and “automated” at the same time?

Quite the opposite. If automation is used for traceability, execution of “bulk” and repetitive tasks, process efficiency, business analytics, etc., then the communication and all services are accelerated in a way that when a human meets human, the interaction is meaningful, genuine, relaxed, supportive, based on accurate data. We provide 100% pure online entertainment due to all the details and processes, perfectly orchestrated “behind the scenes”.

How did CoMantis fit into your strategy and what was the reason to engage with the company?

The first year, year and a half, is critical for a business like ours. You either make it or break it. Therefore, we had it very clear that the key to our success required 100% focus on our core business.

CoMantis was hired to cover the whole affiliate and partnership revenue stream of our business that represents more than 50% of the yearly revenue. The agreed delivery model was Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) under a sales operation mode – a project with full transfer of all the contacts, deals, know-how, processes, and best practices after one year of operation. During the whole period, the CoMantis´ consultants were fully branded as part of our team, including official representation at key international forums in our industry.

Could you elaborate more on how did the relationship start and evolve?

CoMantis fully embraced our highly demanding requirements, aggressive deadlines, and ambitious goals for results. They have a unique model – based on preliminary talks and preparation (fully covered by them as investment), the team was operational on day 1 of our engagement. Moreover, they offered us a unique and extremely well-working model of sales-as-a-service that covers 52 weeks per year, 5 days a week, 10 hours per day no matter the global or local holidays. That is a continuous engagement service that helped us cover our target time zones.

During the initial 3 months the focus was on exponential, rapid growth. Same during the second quarter, adding gradually account management activities and training of an internal team that was hired 4-5 months after the start with CoMantis. The last two quarters were mostly focused on account management and push for expansion of each established relationship, keeping a lower growth percentage of newly onboarded affiliates and partners.

Did you have control over CoMantis´ performance?

We use HubSpot to track every single contact, email, call, meeting, note, contract, invoice, … Everything is logged in real-time by following a methodology that is adapted to our business. The work processes were evolving over the months, based on close collaboration between the teams. For the past 3 months, there have not been any process changes as we have already established the proper, working patterns.

As a CEO, I was fully in control of what is being done by whom daily. Also, we defined the reports that make real sense to us and standardized their monthly use.

How would you describe your collaboration with CoMantis?

Aligned in ambition and excellence with our own way of being. Beyond the agreed key performing indicators (KPIs) and measurable outcomes, the contribution of the team went way beyond the tangible measures. We experienced genuine care towards our business. Honesty in walking the extra mile in the strive for our success. And needless to say - overachieving all agreed KPIs – net revenue, number of end customers, number of affiliates and partners, etc. If I use as comparison the known model of team development proposed by Bruce Tuckman of Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing, I will add also Growing. This is the kind of collaboration and experience we had with CoMantis.

How does 2023 look for you?

We are actively looking for an investor to further boost our growth and quickly conquer new markets that require a higher initial investment. We already have the winning, proven methodology. Fresh external funds and VIP connections will help us to accelerate the pace at which we could scale.

Thank you for your kind words!

Note: Due to confidentiality imperatives, the client requires to keep the brand and name anonymous.

*Forming–Storming–Norming–Performing model by Bruce Tuckman

Storm, Norm, Perform* and… Grow - When Ambition and Excellence Drive Business Expansion