Is A Consulting Partnership Right For You

What are the steps involved in transitioning from a successful corporate executive role – having helped scale a startup to IPO – to launching your own thriving consulting firm? Neel Singh, co-founder of the commercialization firm Tropoly, did just that. A long-time listener of the Consulting Success podcast since his executive days, Neel shares how the show provided valuable insights and encouragement as he planned his leap into entrepreneurship. He found inspiration hearing the diverse paths consultants take: “I came across your podcast, and I found it valuable because… there are so many different journeys and so many different ways that people have pursued this path.” Today, Neel details his journey from corporate leader to co-founding Tropoly and discusses the crucial steps he took before leaving his executive position, particularly the power of intentional networking years in advance. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Neel’s initial focus as a consultant 

• His strategic decision to join forces with partners 

• The evolution of Tropoly’s positioning from brand transformation to a commercialization firm 

• The lead generation strategies—like partnerships and networking—that are proving most effective for them right now

• Actionable advice on building a consulting business, forming strong partnerships, and navigating the transition from employee to owner.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Neel Singh, a Vancouver entrepreneur, leverages 20+ years in marketing, strategy & tech to advise leaders. As a fractional executive & advisor, he co-founded Tropoly, a commercialization firm guiding organizations through market entry, revenue growth & scaling. He was instrumental in BBTV’s (RHEI) hyper-growth & IPO as Head of Marketing/CX. Today, he helps CEOs build marketing departments, define KPIs & scale ops, advising in tech, finance & energy. Advisor to YELL Canada, Neel champions multipotentiality over hyper-specialization in today’s changing world.

Connect with Neel Singh

Discover more about Tropoly

00:00 – From Podcast Fan to Business Owner

Hey Neel, welcome.

Hey, Michael.

Yeah, great to have you here. So, we’ll start off, my team mentioned that you’re a longtime listener of the Consulting Success podcast—I think since 2018 is what they said—and that it played a role in giving you some, maybe, inspiration or different ways of thinking about things as you made a transition from executive to actually taking the leap to becoming a business owner. Is that correct?

Yeah, it is. You know, I think I found you by searching “consulting podcasts,” and at the time, 2018, I was an executive at a local media tech company. I’ve always been entrepreneurial; even before that position, I was consulting, I was a freelancer, and I knew I was going to get back into the consulting field, so I needed some inspiration. You know, I did a lot of online searching, came across your podcast, and I found it valuable because your guests are very concise in their journeys, but also because there are so many different journeys and so many different ways that people have pursued this path. So for me, I was like, “Okay, this is very encouraging, you know?” And yeah, I’ve been a listener, and I really do enjoy your podcast.

01:23 – Leaving Corporate to Start Consulting

Well, I appreciate it, man. And it’s, I guess, coming full circle, right? Because here you are today, and we’re going to get into your story of how you made that transition. Ultimately, today you’re running a business called Tropoly, where it’s you and the partners, so I want to talk about that setup. But let’s go back to that time of you being an executive and the transition. Tell us a little bit more about how you made that transition. When you decided to start the business, initially as a consultant, how did you go about doing that? What did that look like? What spurred it? Just walk us through the steps that you took to actually launch the business.

Sure. You know, I’ll take you a little bit further back. So, before I joined that particular company, I was a freelancer, and I was more into design branding. I was doing some marketing coaching, some marketing consulting, and I came across this company—actually, they came across me—and, you know, they asked me if I could rebrand one of their products. When I met with the CEO, she basically offered me a job. I was like, “I don’t know if I want to work for somebody; I’m doing pretty good on my own.” But it was a small startup, I think about 10 to 15 people. It was in… there was a tech team, an R&D team; it was in digital video. So I dove in, and we went through a pretty amazing journey of hypergrowth. 

That was back in 2012, and I stayed with them up until we went public in 2020, and then I jumped out in 2021. So, during that time, you know, it allowed me to be entrepreneurial within an organization. I built a very robust marketing team; it was about 40 people. It spanned across digital, creative, customer experience. We worked very closely with the sales teams. Also, during that time, we worked with some, you know, big brand names, we had Series A fundraising, we had some M&As, and we went public. So there was a lot of experience unpacked during that journey. But I always knew I didn’t want to be a public company executive. It’s just… even during my tenure, I was building departments, I was handing them off to other executives. I was never attached to anything except to making the company successful. 

Towards the end of my tenure, I started talking with the CEO. I gave her a heads-up: “I think I’m going to move on. What can I do to help?” After we went public during the pandemic, I spent about two or three months restructuring my department, making sure we had the right processes in place, the right handover, and the leaders. And then I jumped out.

Let me ask you a quick question here. Did you get to participate in the benefits or the upside of the company going public?

04:24 – Stock Options: Expectation vs Reality

So I was given stock options. Unfortunately, going public wasn’t necessarily a good thing for the stock at that time. So, you know, just to be transparent a little bit, I got a little bit, but not what you thought you’d get when you first get those stock options.

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Yeah, no, and I appreciate you sharing that, Neel. The reason I asked is because oftentimes consultants are in positions where they are offered stock or some form of equity in a business instead of receiving payment. There’s always a fine line, right? There can be significant upside in the right situations, but more often than not, you just get, you know, a piece of paper that isn’t worth as much as you hope it to be. I remember my early days in consulting, you know, working with this biofuel company and getting 500,000 shares. In my mind, I was like, “Well, if this just goes to a couple of dollars, like, you know, that’s a million dollars. Wow!” And, yeah, it wasn’t worth anything.

All right, I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, so you went through that journey, then you decided to launch your consulting business. Walk us through, what was the first thing that you did or the series of steps that you took to actually start getting clients? And what was the business in the early days? What did it look like?

06:47 – Networking That Converts to Clients

So, before I jumped out—actually, years before I jumped out—I started networking. I started reactivating my network. I’m here in Vancouver; I knew a lot of people in the business community. I started reaching out, and I gave myself a goal—I think this was 2018 or 2019, I can’t remember the exact year—but my goal was to meet one person per week for the entire year. So, 52 people. I beat that goal. The reason I did that was I knew I was going to jump out at some point, so I needed to start building my network again, but also just getting into the habit of networking. I was so ingrained in the company, you know, it was my life for a while, working, you know, 60–80 hours a week. Slowly, I wanted to make sure my horizons were open. I was looking at what’s out there, other industries, just talking to people. 

From that point, when I jumped out, you know, I had my networking in place. I started meeting people and started getting referrals. One of the people that was referring me a lot of business actually is now one of my partners. He was in a position where he was coming across a lot of companies that were getting funded in the US, privately funded, and they needed—they needed somebody to come in and reposition the brand and scale up their marketing. That was my first stream of clients and leads that came in. And yeah, it was primarily around brand strategy, positioning, and building out marketing programs.

08:22 – Planting Seeds Before You Need Them

So, just to make sure that we’re all catching what you’re saying here: You were very intentional in building your network before you even, quote, unquote, “needed” the network. But those seeds that you planted, that’s what helped you to get your first few clients when you went out on your own. Is that accurate?

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it’s very, very smart of you to do that. Totally. Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly why I want to highlight that. Just, I mean, it shows how savvy you were to think of that because very often people wait until they’ve launched their business and then start thinking, “Okay, like, now I have to try and build these relations and connect with people.” So, I mean, long story short, right, the sooner you start, the better with this kind of thing. So, for those who are listening right now, who are still employed, thinking about launching your own business, start networking like Neel did. For those of you who already have a business, you know, remember that what you’re seeing in your business today is not the result of what you did yesterday; it’s the result of what you did, you know, 30, 60, 90, 120 days ago or longer. So start planting those seeds today, and it will bear fruit for you going forward. 

Okay, so you launched that business. You’re a solo consultant. Let’s fast forward now in the story because you’ve consolidated with other partners under this new brand called Tropoly. Talk us through how that came about. Why did you decide to merge or join forces instead of just remaining, you know, or building your own business without other partners?

10:06 – Forming the Tropoly Partnership

Yeah. So, even when I jumped out and I was getting those early projects, I had another individual that worked closely with me who was more on the creative side, you know? So I did most of the strategic work and the positioning work, and he did a lot of the synthesizing of that, and we worked really well together. He’s from my network; I’d known him for already like a decade at that point. So, you know, it kind of came full circle with him. As we progressed, the other gentleman, who was referring all the business, you know, we decided to work closer together, and we joined forces and launched Tropoly about two years ago. The reason why is the types of… First, we wanted to make it official. It makes it easier to work with clients if you’re unified behind a brand. Everything was under my name first, and I was subcontracting, but I wanted to show I had very competent partners and we were able to take on larger-scale projects. So we did, and we joined forces, we started taking on projects, and just recently, we repositioned again. The reason for that is the way we’re working now is far more integrated. We’re ex-executives, we’ve been entrepreneurs, and so now we feel like we can provide more value if we work closer with the founder or the CEO and steer the ship a little bit more integrated, more from within.

And when you say that you’ve repositioned again, what does that mean? Like, kind of more tactically, or just paint that picture? Like, what did you actually do? Is it a new logo? Is it a new tagline? Is it something completely different? Oftentimes people don’t really understand what that looks like, so bring it into clarity for us.

11:56 – Rebranding as a Commercialization Firm

Yeah, when we launched Tropoly originally, we called ourselves like a brand transformation firm, you know, working with organizations and repositioning them or rebranding them, getting them to market. What we realized is we’d work on a project, and there was very little to do after the project was done. You know, the clients positioned us in a box; they thought of us as only like kind of like a branding or a marketing firm, and then they’d move on. We took a hard look at ourselves and thought, we all have at least 20 years of experience. You know, we should be doing work that’s a little bit more strategic, a little bit more involved, a little bit more grown-up for us. You know, we don’t want to be an agency—and this is not to offend anybody that’s running an agency—it’s just we get more out of it if we’re able to help the business actually scale, you know? So, when we repositioned, yes, we did update the logo. We kept the name, we updated the logo, but we defined ourselves as a commercialization firm as opposed to a brand strategy firm. The reason for that is because it allows us to connect the dots between getting a client to market, positioning them, and scaling them. This isn’t just for startups; it’s mostly for mid-cap companies who are looking for what we call “change events.” They’re heading towards a fundraise or an M&A, launching a new product, going into a new market. We align ourselves with those initiatives now.

13:30 – Evolving the Offer for Long-Term Growth

And so, is the brand strategy that you were doing before still part of that commercialization? It’s just now you’ve added on additional spokes to the wheel, if you will, or how do you describe that?

It’s in there if it’s needed, you know, and we have those capabilities. And part of this repositioning, we’ve added a fourth partner who was at the same media tech firm I was part of.

Right. Let me ask you a question on this, Neel. I mean, it sounds from an outsider’s view that you have created or developed a more comprehensive offering, right? It’s the commercialization; it’s not just the brand strategy. You’re saying we can really take you… we can work with you a lot more, right? More integrated, longer timeline, make a bigger impact across many different areas. Some of that might seem to some people like, well, there’s more complexity, there’s more… there’s more to it. How have you found that in terms of your messaging or how you go to market, how are you able to concisely communicate that, or how do you know what to talk about? Because if you are providing or focusing or offering, let’s say, services in multiple areas or multiple kinds of different stages or events, how do you know what to talk about when you’re reaching out to different people? Because it’s not as simple as saying, “We do brand strategy.” It’s not like saying we do A, B, C, D, E. How have you found that you’re effective in accomplishing that?

15:08 – Simplifying Complex Messaging

You know, it’s interesting you bring that up because we were labeled a “commercialization firm” by a partner. So, we’ve aligned ourselves with strategic partners that bring us business. And, you know, we showed them how we can help them with their clients, and they’re like, “Yeah, you’re a commercialization partner.” Then we went back to the drawing board. We’re like, “What does that mean?” You know? So, with our messaging, we do ensure we say it’s the marketing and sales, you know, portion of the commercialization. When we talk to potential clients, you know, it is quite consultative. We want to know what their challenge is. But typically it’s… they’re having a challenge getting to that next level. You know, so they’re at a certain stage, and now they’re looking to grow by launching a new product or getting into a new market. You know, so we take them from point A to point B, and we call that a commercialization path because we’ll build in the strategy and we’ll implement that strategy using our ability to market and sell. We not only implement the marketing and sales tactics, but we help build the operations behind it, the processes. We’ll even do organizational design, and we’ll scale those processes with the marketing and sales. I’m not sure if that made sense, but it’s a more comprehensive offering when we say go-to-market and then scaling.

16:46 – Why Fractional CMOs Make Sense

Yeah. So, have you had any pushback or any confusion from the people you reach out to? Because you are doing a lot more, like, does it connect with them right away? When you say, “We are commercialization experts; we help you to essentially scale and get to that next level with marketing and sales strategy plus other things.” Does that connect with them? Or I’m just wondering how have you worked through that or refined it to get to the point where when you reach out to people or have conversations, they just instantly get what you do, and you get their attention and interest?

Yeah. When we say commercialization, everyone seems to… they seem to understand it so far. But we do talk about building their marketing and sales capabilities for the long term, right? We’ve come across people that say, “My marketing’s broken,” or “We need a CMO,” or “We need a CRO.” Okay, why do you need that? Right? And it’s like, “Oh, we’re trying to get to this next level.” That’s where we typically jump in, right? So we go in, we bring those capabilities, that competency, and we help them scale.

Yeah. And in that situation, would they still go ahead and bring in a CMO or a CRO? (And for those wondering, CRO is Chief Revenue Officer, and CMO is Chief Marketing Officer.) Would they still make those hires, or are you in some ways replacing the need to hire those full-time roles?

18:20 – Scaling Without Full-Time Hires

So we would jump in as fractional CMOs or CROs. We have jumped in, but the goal is to eventually get a fully functioning team within the organization. We come in at a fraction of the cost, but we’re able to provide, you know, our executive and leadership experience and help them build a real marketing team or a real sales team, you know? Then, over time, we help them plan, and if it makes sense, then we would exit out and get in a real, you know, a full-time CMO. If it doesn’t make sense, then perhaps the team looks a little bit different for the long term.

So, if I’m the CEO of a mid-sized company and I’m looking to get to the next level, and I say to you, “You know, Neel, yeah, I think we really need a Chief Marketing Officer because, you know, we need someone who has that experience getting us to that next level. We know we want someone full-time, someone that can really be part of our culture. We need somebody full-time.” How do you respond to that? What have you found to be effective in showing them that, “Hey, there’s another way?” I know you said that you can be more cost-efficient, right? Or less than, let’s say, they’re going to hire a CMO, and maybe that’s $250,000 a year base plus a whole bunch of other stuff, you know, give or take. How do you respond to that?

So I can give you a real example. An ex-client of mine reached out to me, you know, over a year ago. He actually texted me. He said, “My current marketing person is not working out. Please find me a CMO ASAP.” So I called him, and I was like, “Why do you need a CMO?” He said, “Our marketing has never been working. The person’s not working.” I asked, “How many people do you have in your department?” He said, “Well, there’s the one person plus a junior.” And I said, “Well, you can’t have a CMO in that situation because a CMO is going to bring in probably five, six people, and they’re going to be a little bit less hands-on. Would you be open for me jumping in as a fractional CMO and helping you build the right people and the right team and getting your marketing off the ground?” You know, and then we worked it out, we did the math, we, you know… and I jumped in. Since then, you know, the CEO has been working very closely with myself and the marketing department because he wants to see under the hood how it’s actually operating, you know? We’ve hired people, we put new processes in place, we’ve got a few agencies, and you know, we have matured it, and we’re continuing to mature it. At some point, I will end up exiting, and there will be a full-time team there.

Okay, glad. So you’re still involved with them right now, or… He’s an ex-client, so I wasn’t sure if you’re still working with them today or not.

He was an ex-client at the time. Now he’s a client again.

Got you. Okay. A client from back in the day now is… Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. Um, there are people joining us that are likely thinking or have thought at one point or might think in the future about bringing on partners, um, and bringing on partners and kind of formalizing that relationship. There’s, you know, there are a lot of benefits to it. There are also a lot of potential dangers or things to be careful of. I’m wondering what you can share in your experience. What do you think went really well? What do you think in hindsight maybe didn’t go as well or things you all really paid attention to in terms of partnership agreements? Just walk us through any high-level advice that you might offer to somebody around vetting and deciding when it makes sense or when it doesn’t make sense to formalize a partnership.

22:14 – How to Vet and Align with Partners

Yeah, it’s like try before you buy, you know? You don’t want to get married before you date, right? So I would strongly suggest trying to run a few projects together. It gets to the point where you do have chemistry, where it does work. But I think once you formalize it, you do need to be very clear about your roles. You know, who is talking to the client at what stage, who should be working on the finances, you know, who should be doing some of the marketing. It’s hard to do that when it’s a smaller firm because there are just so many things to do, but I think you have to be clear on whether or not you can work together and whether or not you’re aligned. One of the things we did, we looked at ourselves as a firm today, and we wanted to see what kind of firm we want to be tomorrow—and by tomorrow, I mean five or ten years out. So I modeled out several scenarios. You know, do we want to be a $5 million firm, a $50 million firm, $100 million firm, a billion-dollar firm? We did all the math there. You know, if we charge on average $200-300 an hour, even if we don’t do an hourly rate, like, you know, but this is what we pay ourselves, what does that look like? You know, what do our teams look like? What does our organization look like? We got around the table and we discussed it, and we were kind of landing in that, you know, small enough where we’re nimble and somewhat boutique, but big enough where, you know, we’ve got a lot of brand awareness and we’re taking on serious projects. 

That was a very good exercise on how we want to progress together, you know? I think you need to do that with a partner because if you don’t have the same vision, things are going to show up along the way where you’re going to start disagreeing—and not in a good way, in a bad way—because you’re going to start forking in the road. So I think it’s important to have that conversation of where you want to end up.

24:21 – Equity, Vision, and Growth Planning

So, does everyone kind of have the same level of equity in the business, or is it different depending on when they came in or what the role is? Or how do you guys think about that from a compensation perspective or equity perspective?

Right now, it’s equal between the four of us. I don’t think we’re thinking of adding more partners at this stage. We feel between the four of us, our competencies are broad enough and deep enough, and they complement each other enough where it works well.

Have you guys talked about, like, what if one partner is not pulling the line as much, they’re not contributing as much, not creating as much value as the others? Is that a conversation that you’ve had in terms of how you would deal with a situation like that?

Yeah. You have to be direct. They’re your partners, and you have to be clear with each other and what you expect from each other. If someone’s not pulling their weight, I have no problem being candid and direct. They need to know that this is how we’re perceiving their efforts or how I’m perceiving their efforts, or the damage it’s causing. You know, and I expect that in return from my partners. That’s why they’re my partners, right? So I think it’s very important. You have to be able to have those conversations, and they should be fluff-free; they should be direct. No one should take it personally. If they joined you as a partner because they have the same ambition as you do.

So let’s come to the present time. What is working best for you guys as a firm right now to generate high-quality leads for your pipeline? What are you seeing working best right now?

26:04 – Best Lead Gen Strategies Right Now

Yeah. So we’re approaching it in three ways. One is partnerships. So we have been aligning ourselves with IR firms, PE firms, typically firms that are helping a company get capitalized or they have a vested interest in having that business grow. So they become referral channels for us. The second thing is we are networking like crazy. We’re going to every major event, or we’re traveling for events. We are making efforts to be on podcasts like this, speaking engagements. Then a third thing, which we need to put more effort into, is content. All of us on the team have the ability to write and design; it’s just, we are, you know, we have a content calendar. We need to do a better job of that. But that has been the top focus for us, you know, going forward and developing more of that. 

Now, I’ve tried things like mass cold outreach via email and LinkedIn. It didn’t work so well for me. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; maybe for a number of reasons, but I think mostly because it felt very impersonal to me. I feel that when we actually have a conversation with somebody, we’re able to communicate our value a lot better. The referral channels work, the networking channels work pretty well for us. At some point, we may want to scale and think about how to get, you know, a hunter, an SDR function, but at this point, those are the three that we’re focused on.

27:55 – Overcoming Long B2B Sales Cycles

What’s been the hardest thing—and you mentioned the business is now a couple of years old, four partners today—what’s been the biggest challenge for you guys in terms of growing the business to this point?

Yeah, and it’s interesting, the last couple of years with the pandemic and, you know, the way the market’s gone, I’ve seen both. So, when I jumped out of my executive position, my sales cycle was very short. I would have a meeting, and I would follow up with a proposal, and it would probably be signed and ready to go within about three weeks. Fast forward to 2022 and last year, that three weeks to a month has expanded out to like five or six months. So this B2B sales cycle had softened quite a bit. People are holding onto their budgets. A lot of the decision-making had been dispersed across multiple people. For a project we won last year, I think it took five or six meetings. It took a few months. We literally designed wireframes for the product that they wanted beforehand. That’s typically paid work afterwards. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it was just to illustrate the value, you know? That was probably one of our biggest challenges in the last couple of years.

Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting how you guys have gone about this. When you think about growth and reaching that next level, what do you feel is—I know you talk about content as one area to invest more time and energy in—but besides content, what else do you feel is like the path or the area that you all are going to be focused on to get to that next level?

29:48 – Boosting Visibility with Sponsorships

Yeah, I think, I think with the content piece, it’s really getting our… really being able to communicate our value better than just, you know, a website with some messaging. So, developing case studies that we can share. For outreach, I think continuing on the path or making ourselves more visible. So we’ve talked a lot about sponsorships: sponsorships at events, sponsorships through media. Reinvesting some of our revenues into those things. Again, it’s more visibility and more awareness.

Got you. Well, Neel, I know there’s a lot… you’re still early in the journey here, two years in, but I mean, you guys have- sounds like you’ve been doing some really great work. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and about Tropoly to follow along with your journey. And I guess we’ll look to maybe redo something like this, you know, fast forward another year or two and see where you guys are at. Where’s the best place for people to learn more about you and about your company?

30:56 – Connect with Tropoly and Neel Singh

Sure. For our firm, it’s https://www.tropoly.io/, so T-R-O-P-O-L-Y dot I-O. And just me on LinkedIn: Neel Singh, N-E-E-L S-I-N-G-H. You know, you can always reach out to me there.

We’ll make sure to link that up in the show notes as well. Neel, thanks so much for coming.

Important Links:

Neel Singh

Tropoly

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