How Do OpenView Labs Work with Portfolio Companies?

Four years ago, in early 2008, as the world’s economies gyrated in the deepest crisis since the Great Depression, a group of OpenView’s team members packed up our boxes, cleaned out our desks and left the building on 303 Congress Street.

We went down the street and established ourselves in a half-finished office space on the 3rd floor of 332 Congress Street. In the middle of the chaos and uncertainty of the market, we were quietly starting something new, something we believed would make a big difference for our firm, our investors and our portfolio companies.  It was also an idea with scarcely any precedents nor even blueprints for us to start with. That was the start of OpenView Labs, the full-time strategic consulting and operational support team of OpenView.

Our Aspirations

Our aspirations then, as now, are to offer substantial assistance to OpenView’s portfolio companies’ management, helping them build great companies by gathering, creating, storing, and disseminating best practices across all functional areas.

While the vision remains our guiding principle and has permeated deeply into our priorities and culture, over the last 4 years our methods and organizations have continuously evolved to adapt to changing priorities in our portfolio companies, our own internal growth as a team, and the changing market conditions and trends. Through literally hundreds of consulting projects with every single portfolio company of our funds, we have learned a lot about the most important issues and opportunities they face, and how to best overcome those.

Through OpenView Labs, our portfolio companies have access to both our full-time consultants, who have expertise in recruitment, sales and marketing, market research and strategy development, as well as access to our network of Senior Advisors, who bring expertise in varied areas including Product Development, Product Management, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Professional Services, Legal and Contracting. Because OpenView Labs have evolved so much in the last few years, having grown into its own brand in many ways, it can be very confusing for anyone to understand our basic operating models and how we actually work with the portfolio companies.

Our portfolio companies work with OpenView Labs resources in 3 principal ways:

1. On full-fledged consulting (or recruiting) engagement with OpenView Labs Team:

The OpenView Labs consulting or recruiting project is the most prevalent form of engagement with the portfolio company. In this case, OpenView Labs act as a consulting firm that serves the portfolio companies exclusively (we do not offer our consulting services to non-portfolio companies).

Each project will be managed by a senior team member and might be staffed with one or more analyst with the appropriate skill set and experience. The OpenView project leader can play a number of roles depending on the requirements of the project, ranging from being an Interim Sales Manager to a Research Project Manager, or a head-hunter (in the case of a proactive recruitment effort). On the portfolio company’s side, we typically request that there is a project owner, who ideally will benefit directly from the outputs of the projects, and who has brought about the full support of the portfolio company’s management team. Likewise, the project is fully sponsored by OpenView’s senior management team, as represented by the Partner who in engaged with the portfolio company. Each project typically lasts between 6 – 10 weeks, and involves substantial interaction between the portfolio company’s functional team and the OpenView Labs project team.

While this framework lends itself to any management or operational consulting engagement, our experiences in the last 4 years have shaped our main areas of expertise to match with the most prevalent needs at the portfolio companies.

They are:

• Sales Team Incubation and Development (in particular Inside Sales Teams)
• Recruitment for Sales, Marketing and Product Management Roles
• Market Research (for Competitive Strategy, Messaging, Market Segmentation, Product Management)
• List Generation
• Strategy Planning
• Sales Operations
• Marketing Operations
• Marketing Campaign Development and Execution

To align our resources and organization to these core areas of support, OpenView Labs is organized into 3 consulting teams:

2. On  light-weight advisory engagement with OpenView Labs Team or with Senior Advisor

In this model, OpenView Labs’ team members principally act as advisors, functional or market experts with whom a portfolio company’s executive can share ideas, review operational plans and request for information or feedback. These touch points allow our team to be very flexible in engaging with the portfolio companies, ensuring that we can continue to add value even without a formal project-based engagement, as with our and our portfolio’s limited resources, a full consulting project is not always the most ideal approach. We also utilize these occasions to expose our counterparts at the portfolio companies with new best practices and industry knowledge we have recently gained, through the use of Practice Kits and Assessments (which will be covered in a later post).

This is also a very common way our portfolio companies gain access and support from our team of Senior Advisors. A quick check-in call or follow-up can always be arranged, sometimes within days after a request by the portfolio companies. All of these interactions are also supported by dedicated OpenView Labs team members, so that follow up calls and next steps are always clearly defined, in order to ensure that the engagement achieve maximum impact.

Because of our rapidly growing portfolio companies and our sole focus on the expansion stage, the OpenView Labs consultants become very familiar with a wide range of operational and strategic issues facing growing technology companies. Beyond the core areas of expertise described above, the team is able to consult inquiries on most areas of sales and marketing concerns and provide insights on many technology market segments. In the case we do not have first-hand knowledge of the issue, we will most likely be able to connect the portfolio company with the right expert in that area within our networks of functional experts.

3. On full fledged consulting engagement with Senior Advisor, supported by OpenView Labs Team

In certain cases, an advisory engagement with a Senior Adviser leads to a more substantial engagement, when both sides agree that there is a lot more to work on which warrants a full fledged project.  OpenView Labs will support this project to the extent of our expertise and capacity, but the company will then work directly with said Senior Advisor, especially if the project requires substantial involvement of the Senior Advisor, or similar individual with specialized knowledge and skills. However, OpenView Labs will never propose such a project or engagement without the full support and approval of the Portfolio company.

Besides the above mentioned regular engagements, the OpenView Labs team interacts with the portfolio companies on numerous other occasions:

– OpenView Labs organize the Quarterly Executive Forums, which are typically centered around a set of important functional issues, be it Operations, Sales, Marketing or Product Management. These are occasions for portfolio companies executives to interact with experts in the field, compare notes with their colleagues, and the Labs team’s role is to facilitate and support this engagement.

– When an opportunity arises, we connect portfolio companies executives together to discuss mutual issues and challenges, and disseminate these ideas through our multiple channels: through the OpenViewLabs.com website, our blogs, or directly to the interested portfolio companies executives.

– OpenView Labs maintain connections with over 10,000 executives at growing technology companies via our Newsletters, and many of our portfolio companies’ executives subscribe to the newsletter to catch our thoughts and the industry’s best ideas twice a week via email.

All of these are truly part of OpenView’s broader efforts to consistently bring value and support to our portfolio companies, far beyond what our capital investment means, and far beyond what the traditional VC model calls for. Indeed, every team member at OpenView, not just the OpenView Labs team, savors the opportunity to interact with and support our portfolio companies, especially in areas that we can make an impact.

But for more information on OpenView Labs’ unique engagement approaches, please:

Review over 100 consulting projects OpenView Labs have worked on with the portfolio companies in the last 5 years.

Read about our Toolkits and Methodologies.

Read our case studies for more information on specific consulting projects in the last 3 years.