Cheenu Seshadri is the founder and managing partner of Three Horizon Advisors, Inc. (3HA), a boutique strategy consulting firm focused on the telecom and technology sectors. Seshadri’s business helps founder-led and growth-stage companies with commercial diligence, new product development, market-entry, operations strategy, corporate turnarounds, and strategic planning. We sat down with Seshadri to learn more about how he started his business.
Seshadri started his career at a blue-chip global strategic consulting firm working with management teams to improve revenue growth and profitability at Fortune-500 companies. His background includes working as Director and Partner at Altman Vilandrie & Co., Chief Strategy Officer, and later COO at MTS, VP of Strategy and Planning for Motorola’s global Mobility business, and Case Team Leader for Bain & Co.
Seshadri says throughout his career he’s always been drawn to working with entrepreneurs. “Through my time working with large companies, I learned that decisions take a lot of time and often involve bureaucracy and red tape. Large companies are usually unable to move with speed, but the exact opposite is true with startups and growth-stage companies. With these companies, action is how they measure their success and I’m able to help them make well-informed and data-enabled decisions.”
However, Seshadri says he never thought he would be a business owner. “This is the farthest from what I envisioned, but my partner, Rashmi, is the exact opposite and was the catalyst for starting the firm. We saw an opportunity to capitalize on the disruption happening to the management consulting business model where a bundled offering from large consulting firms is being broken down.”
Despite an economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Seshadri says the company is seeing continued growth, in part, due to having a strong strategy in place ahead of time. “Something we consistently work on with our clients is strategic cost reduction and cost transformation. Business owners need to reduce cost in a strategic manner while still having enough assets in place to build on once the pandemic is over.”
“We’ve been able to pivot to where the market demand is and it’s kept us busy over the last three months.”
Business owners know running a company comes with risk, that’s why Seshadri says he’s happy he found CoverWallet.
“Once we made the decision to launch 3HA and set up an S-Corp, we knew we’d be working with larger businesses, some of whom are publicly traded corporations. Our external counsel suggested we get E&O insurance since we’d be advising management teams on critical business issues. Additionally, some of our contracts require us to maintain adequate professional liability insurance. CoverWallet helped us build the policy with the coverages that worked best for our business and the ability to customize it was very intuitive. It was all done online, and we were all set in under 30 minutes from start to finish!”
You can learn more about Three Horizon Advisors, Inc. on their website.