The Scale Up Power Hour is intended to support entrepreneurs in further improving their pitch and business plan. This session combines KPMG's extensive knowledge in finance and operations with Blis Digital's expertise in building storylines that attract investors.
Panel of Experts
The first afternoon started with Twindo's pitch. The company was given 20 minutes to explain the value of their solution and why investors should get in. After that, a panel consisting of experts Christian Boer (founder of Blis Digital), Ton van Dijk (Creative Product Lead at Blis Digital) and Menno Taal (Finance & Operations Expert at KPMG) took the time to dissect the pitch and formulate questions. These questions served as a basis for a deep dive of an hour in which Twindo's proposition, positioning and business plan were heavily questioned. With the ultimate goal to make the company even more attractive to customers and investors.
About KPMG Emerging Giants
KPMG Emerging Giants is a KPMG initiative that focuses on fast-growing companies with a high potential to become leading players in their sector, such as healthcare, fintech or other innovative sectors. These companies are often at an early stage of development but have strong growth prospects based on innovative business models. KPMG provides these companies with advice and support in areas such as financing, scaling up and international expansion.
Ton van Dijk previously worked at KPMG and knows the program: “Such a scale-up comes at a phase where they're starting to have real 'big business problems'. How do I manage my working capital properly? How do I make sure I organize my taxes properly now that I'm going to do business internationally?” Taxes, finance, legal: KPMG has a lot of expertise there and is therefore good at helping those companies with it. The Emerging Giants initiative builds a strong relationship with startups, so that when these companies grow and need professional services, KPMG is top of mind.
The combination with Blis
The collaboration between Blis and KPMG brings together all the expertise a scale-up needs to address a wide range of challenges. From finance to product strategy. Here at Blis Digital, we're used to creative methods like design thinking to be used to find unique solutions. We understand the technology, but we like to work in multidisciplinary teams, so we are also used to explaining technical solutions to non-technical target groups.
Plus: we its tech entrepreneurs. So we've experienced all the emotions and frustrations associated with building and bringing a digital product to market first-hand.
What Twindo does: better energy production by helping people in the field
Twindo describes itself as a tool for digital reporting and project implementation in renewable energy. Initially mainly for the construction and maintenance of windmills, but soon also in solar energy.
Twindo's SaaS solution helps mobile service and construction teams improve renewable energy production by focusing on the people who do the heavy lifting. The software improves how they register their work and the data they generate. This makes it possible to thoroughly analyse the actual state of installations and the productivity of teams.
Most project management tools work “top down” and therefore focus on office employees. But that doesn't help the people who have the most impact on building, operating and maintaining renewable energy. Twindo also helps people in the office, but we mainly focus on the technical employee in the field. If they actively use Twindo, the quality of their inspections, repairs and reports increases significantly.
Twindo then analyses that data to find optimizations, by team and by asset (e.g. a windmill). This can cause energy production to increase by 1%. This is a completely different approach than predictive maintenance, a much-discussed technique that uses sensor data to predict maintenance. Twindo relies on human input when determining the technical condition of an installation ('human generated findings'), which provide a much better and more complete picture.
Further sharpen
Twindo has a unique vision and an effective tool that is already used in practice by enthusiastic customers. The company is growing rapidly and is already bringing in investments. Nevertheless, during the Scale Up Power Hour, they wanted to talk about further refining their story.
In collaboration, discussions and structured exercises, we were able to make many suggestions and recommendations to further refine and fine-tune the pitch and business plan. By looking for new perspectives and expressing the 'pain' in the market even better, Twindo can now approach the market even more sharply. And that market is huge, because sustainability and green energy will only become even more important in the coming period.
“Extremely inspiring”
Jules Shertser, CEO of Twindo, found it a worthwhile experience: “We spent an afternoon discussing our pitch and business plan with Christian, founder of the grand Blis Digital, product manager Ton, and the amazing KPMG Emerging Giants team. We first presented our pitch about our product and company. Then, like a fly on the wall, we were able to observe how the teams “gossiped” about the pitch — what worked, what came out less well and which points weren't as clear as hoped.
This was a great exercise, well done by the teams. When you work closely and rapidly together in close-knit teams on fast-paced, complex projects, it's valuable to get neutral, expert feedback on your assumptions and strategy. We've gained super useful insights that we'll use in our daily pitches and positioning. Many thanks to the team — I recommend this experience for early stage, product lead companies.”
But of course, such an afternoon is also great for the expert: “It was incredibly inspiring and fun for us to do,” says Ton. “And that's also why we're doing it for now. We are tech entrepreneurs and we love helping other tech entrepreneurs move forward. We'll see what comes out in business in the future.”
Are you working on a tech scale-up and want to have in-depth discussions with experts from KPMG Emerging Giants and Blis Digital during the Scale Up Power Hour? Then send your business plan with a brief explanation to Ton van Dijk (T.vandijk@blisdigital.com).
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