Small Business Consulting · Simpleworks
For startup founders and small business owners who need more than a coach — a consultant who understands your business, stays until the plan is moving, and tells you the truth.
39+
Years of
experience
6
Industries
served
₹1–50Cr
Revenue range
we work in
Understanding the Difference
Most founders use these three terms interchangeably. They are not the same — and choosing the wrong one costs time your business doesn’t have.
Option 1
A coach works on you — your mindset, habits, leadership behaviour, and personal effectiveness. Coaching is valuable. But if your business has a structural problem — wrong market, broken pricing, weak execution — coaching won't fix it. You'll be a better-thinking founder with the same broken business.
Right when: the problem is personal, not structural
Option 2
A mentor shares experience — what worked for them, what they would do in your position. Mentors are valuable for perspective. But a mentor is not accountable for your business. They advise and step back. You implement alone, with whatever you could extract from the conversation.
Right when: you need perspective, not implementation
Simpleworks
Simpleworks Business Mentor works on the business — not you, and not from a distance. Simpleworks diagnoses the real problem, builds the plan with you, and stays until the plan is moving. The engagement ends when the business has changed — not when an hour is up or a session is complete.
Right when: the business itself needs to change
What We Do
Every small business Simpleworks works with is at a turning point. The work is always specific to the business — but it almost always falls into one of these four areas.
01 — Clarity
Many small businesses grow in the wrong direction — serving the wrong customers, pricing incorrectly, spread across too many offers. The first job is diagnosis: understanding what the business is actually doing versus what it should be doing, and making the hard decisions that clarify the path forward.
02 — Growth
Growth for a small business is not a marketing campaign. It is a clear answer to three questions: who exactly is the customer, why would they choose you over the alternative, and how do you reach them efficiently. Simpleworks works through these with founders who are ready to be specific.
03 — Structure
Most small business founders are the bottleneck in their own company. Every decision, every client call, every important email runs through them. Simpleworks builds the structure — roles, accountability, decision rights — that allows the business to operate independently of the founder's constant attention.
04 — Execution
A plan that stays in a document is not a plan — it is a good intention. Simpleworks builds the execution rhythm that turns strategy into weekly action: clear priorities, clear owners, and a review cadence that keeps the business accountable to its own decisions.
Who We Work With
Simpleworks works with startup founders and small business owners typically between ₹50 lakh and ₹20 crore in revenue — at the stage where the business has proven it can work, but hasn’t yet proven it can scale.
The product works. Customers are paying. But growth is inconsistent, the team is pulling in different directions, and the founder can't describe their business in one clear sentence. The business needs a strategic reset — not more features, not more marketing spend.
Revenue was growing steadily, then plateaued. The founder has tried new products, new channels, new hires — nothing has moved the number sustainably. The problem is usually deeper than any of these fixes: positioning, pricing, or a customer base that has drifted from the original vision.
Running a small business is often a lonely exercise. The team looks to the founder for answers. The board wants results. Advisors give broad opinions. The founder needs someone who will sit with the actual problem — not just the version of it that's easy to describe in fifteen minutes.
A large opportunity has arrived, or a large threat. A potential partnership, a new competitor, a market shift, a funding conversation. The decision made in the next 90 days will shape the next three years. The founder needs clear thinking quickly — not eventually.
If any of these sound like your business, the right next step is a conversation — not a proposal.
The first call is free →Why Simpleworks
Most consultants are built for large organisations. Simpleworks is built for businesses where the founder is still in every conversation and the team is still figuring out what it means to work together.
Large consulting firms are expensive, junior-staffed, and optimised for organisations with dedicated strategy functions. Business coaches are valuable for personal development but don’t work on the business itself. Mentors offer perspective but no accountability.
Simpleworks sits in a different position. We work on the business directly — strategy, go-to-market, execution — led personally by Prem Menon, with 39 years of experience across Consumer Durables, Automotive, Telecom, and SaaS. The engagement is scoped for what the business actually needs, not what fits a standard package.
“A small business founder doesn’t need a report. They need someone in the room who has seen this problem before, is not afraid to say what they really think, and will stay until it’s resolved.”— Prem Menon, Founder, Simpleworks Consulting
The first call is free and takes 30 minutes. We will tell you honestly whether Simpleworks can help — and if not, where to look instead.
No junior team. No hand-offs. When you engage Simpleworks you work directly with Prem — in person where possible, structured online sessions where not.
Engagements are defined by the problem, not by a standard package. A three-week strategy sprint looks different from a six-month execution engagement — and is priced accordingly.
No thick documents. No frameworks that need a consultant to interpret. The output is a decision made, a direction agreed, and a first week of action defined before the meeting ends.
Simpleworks works in person across South India and through structured online sessions for founders elsewhere. The preference is always to be in the room — especially for diagnosis.
Our Work
Small business consulting at Simpleworks is not a menu. Strategy, growth, and execution connect to each other — and a change in one always affects the other two.
01
Clarity on what the business is, who it serves, and why it wins. For small businesses and startups, strategy is not a long-term exercise — it is an urgent one. The wrong direction compounds faster at this stage than at any other.
02
The right customers, reached through the right channels, with the right message. For startups and small businesses, GTM is the difference between a product that sells and one that doesn't — regardless of how good the product is.
03
Simple goal-setting and accountability structures that a small team can actually use. Three to five objectives. Clear key results. A weekly rhythm. Enough structure to create momentum — not so much that it becomes a system nobody maintains.
From the Blog
These articles cover the questions most small business founders are working through — and how Simpleworks thinks about them.
The Difference Between Business Coach and Mentor Isn’t Skill — It’s Stage
Mentors give answers while coaches ask questions — most MSME founders hire the wrong one because they misdiagnose whether they're stuck on missing information or on execution.
Read article →GrowthWhy Indian MSMEs Should Hire an Independent Consultant — Not a Big Firm
Big consulting firms are structurally mismatched to founder-led Indian MSMEs. An independent consultant is accountable by name and incentivized to solve the problem and move on.
Read article →StrategyWhy 90% of Indian MSMEs Have No Real Strategy — And the 3-Step Fix
Most small business founders have a plan, not a strategy. Here's the difference — and how to fix it without offsites or 40-page documents.
Read article →GrowthWho Is Your Customer, Really?
A first-principles guide to finding, sharpening, and going to market with your Ideal Customer Profile.
Read article →ConsultingMSME Consulting: Why a Focused Firm Delivers More
Why a consultant who does one thing well is almost always more useful than one who promises to do everything.
Read article →LeadershipWhat to Expect in a First Consulting Engagement
Most founders judge a first engagement by how fast a big plan lands in their inbox. The right test is whether the process — diagnosis, real interviews, an interim checkpoint — holds up before you've spent a Rupee on the outcome.
Read article →Coming soon
How to Pick a Business Mentor for Your Startup in India
Common Questions
Everything you need to know before we speak.
A mentor shares experience and perspective — what they would do, what worked for them. A consultant works on the business directly — diagnosing problems, building plans, and staying until the plan is moving. Simpleworks is a consulting practice, not a mentoring arrangement. The difference matters because a mentor is not accountable for the outcome. A consultant is.
We work with small businesses and startups typically between ₹50 lakh and ₹20 crore in annual revenue. The business has usually found its first customers and proven the model works — but is struggling to scale, clarify direction, or execute consistently. If you are pre-revenue, we are likely not the right fit yet.
Yes — but with a caveat. Early-stage startups benefit most from consulting when they have enough customer feedback to know what is and isn't working. If you are still testing the core assumption of your business, the right engagement is a short diagnostic — not a full consulting programme.
Three things: Prem Menon leads every engagement personally — no junior consultants, no hand-offs. Engagements are scoped to the specific problem — not packaged into standard formats. And Simpleworks stays until the plan is moving — not until an agreed number of sessions is complete.
It depends on the problem. A strategic clarity sprint runs two to four weeks. A go-to-market engagement typically runs six to ten weeks. A longer execution engagement — including OKR design — runs three to six months. We define the scope and timeline at the start so there are no open-ended commitments on either side.
A 30-minute conversation. Free, with no agenda except understanding your situation. You describe what you are dealing with — Prem asks a few direct questions and tells you honestly whether Simpleworks can help and what that engagement would look like in practice.
Tell us what your business is dealing with. We will tell you honestly whether we can help — and what that would look like in practice.
Response within one business day · Based in Bengaluru · Working across India