Your Next Move - Recognizing a Gaping Need in the Marketplace

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

In this episode, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom chats with Anupam Satyasheel, the founder of Occams Advisory. Ranked No. 1,804 on the 2024 Inc. 5000, the company has made the list eight times in the past nine years. Occams is a financial advisory firm bringing Fortune 500-level expertise to smaller businesses and partnering with clients through their business life-cycle. Anupam tells Diana how the idea came to him to start the company, which included building deeper know-how in the tax credit space and starting a book club.

I'm Sarah Lynch and you are listening to Your Next Move, Audio Edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. For this season, we gathered an array of conversations with entrepreneurs who made last year's Inc. 5000 list. They joined us in our Your Next Move booth at the Inc. 5000 to share lessons learned and anecdotes from building their businesses. In this episode, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom interviewed Anupam Sachchashil. He is the founder of Occam's advisory. They're ranked number 1804 on the

2024 Inc. 5000 list, and it's their eighth time on the Inc. 5,000 list in the past nine years. They are a financial advisory firm bringing Fortune 5,000 level expertise to smaller businesses and partnering with clients through their business life cycle. Anupam started the conversation by telling Diana how the company got its start. We have in Businesses 2012, which makes us about 12 years old. Before I started the business I was an investment banker on Wall Street. I saw some very exciting times from 2005 till 2012.

Absolutely, there was the financial crisis amid there. Yes. So when I started, everything was bullish, go, go, go. And very quickly, you know what it became. And then the recovery was kind of setting in when I had enough excitement. I said, let me go do something else. So what does your company do? Yeah, coming to it. So with regard to our business advisories focus, we have tried to build an integrated service model for middle market companies. So typically, the MSME space, micro, small, medium enterprises, if they need something,

they keep going to a variety of places for accounting, business services, financial advisory. And we have tried to build all of them in one place. So our approach is the clients, various aspects of business can be catered to in a unified manner versus like go to attorney for something, go to an accountant for something else and go to a different service. And that's our model. So we try to use the word one-stop shop sometimes, but that does not resonate so well. So we call it integrated service model. Got it. I guess it's integrated service model

sounds a little higher end than one-stop shop, I think. When did you realize that this would be the next thing for you and why this? Because coming from Wall Street, why this? I used to work with very large clients in Wall Street. That typically is what you see there. But I have worked for small companies before and my father ran a small business and I always felt that they don't have the same competitive advantage that large companies have. They have

access to very high quality service. So overall, that's the combination of where it came from. Now I don't have a fancy story that one day lightning struck me and I got this idea. It was a gaping need in the marketplace and we thought that probably we can make something out of it based on our track record. So far it seems that we are making something of it. Absolutely. Hitting the ink 5,000 eight times sure sounds like you are. What was your father's business?

He went through a couple of things, but it was mostly in an industrial town in India. Tata is a big name now. The chief person recently passed away, but this is third generation of the leaders. He had metal scrap business, so essentially used to buy it from large factories and sell it to smaller places, make some margin. That was in the 70s. Very different world. Yeah, absolutely.

And would he have benefited from, say, like an integrated services company like yours? I guess in those times, everyone did everything themselves. Like they knew where their money was, they knew where their tax compliance wasn't even known at that time in India. So I think the world had changed a lot in the last 50, 60 years. But I would guess that if his business was existing today, he would have benefited. But in the 70s, no one cared about these things. It wasn't a huge need.

Yeah, the income tax department was known to just go after ultra wealthy people because they had some taxable income. I'm not even sure if tax rules were the same at that time. I'm pretty sure they were not. So who was your first company? What was the first client? My first client actually was my employer, my previous employer. So in 2000, 2004, I used to work for a technology company.

They actually had brought me to US from India. And I said, I'm starting a business. Do you have some work for a technology company. They actually had brought me to US from India. And I said, I'm starting a business. Do you have some work for me? And they said, actually, we have many things. And that's where, truthfully speaking, the idea of integrate came into my mind. Because on some days I'm solving the ops problem, on a different day I'm looking at their tax efficiency.

I was like, yeah, this should be in one place. And we have seen that. So starting with payment processing to insurance guidance, to raising capital, selling a business, being efficient with taxes, all of them through a group of companies within outcomes, we have been able to do it pretty well. Right. Do the people you work with, like your employees, are they jacks of all trades like you, or are they sort of more focused on one service, and then you have other people who are more focused on tax compliance and cybersecurity, or whatever it ends up being?

They're all experts. OK. I joke about my skill set as a mile wide and inch deep. But they are experts. So they could be a CPA, could be a tax attorney, technology experts, marketing guys. So they have all kinds of a skill set. But of course, the leaders need to be

a little more diversified. Totally. But four of my partners, they all have different skillset within the business line. What's your job entail these days? Like, what do you mainly do? The subject is your next move, right? I keep thinking of what is coming to the horizon,

what should we actually focus on, what's gonna be important in the coming days. So tax credits, for example, have been very popular thanks to the pandemic. Absolutely. And once people get addicted to the free money, they keep looking for it. Well, yeah.

Yes. It'll be unsmart, keep looking for it. Well, yeah. Yes. It'll be unsmart not to write to anybody. So we have been building deeper and deeper expertise within a tax credit space because about $100 billion, give or take, are available to small medium businesses in tax credit every year and about 70% of it is not taken every year. That's wild. It's wasted money, right? Absolutely.

So it tends to be smaller businesses are just unaware that these things exist? Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Like when we talk to them, they were like, I know that exists. How can I get it? Yeah. We're like, we'll help you get that money.

And it's a good partnership. It's always an easy door opener because people are happy to... Happy to have free money. Yes. Yes. And give a share of that to you versus dip into their pockets to pay you for anything. Oh, right. So, I would imagine part of the selling points for your company are we have the knowledge

base that we can help you access different programs or help you access different tools that will help you become exponentially better. Do you do that with all of the different segments that you work with? Our fees are not like efficiency savings driven always, but it's always about getting them something for us getting something. So for instance, somebody wants to raise capital and $20 million. We'll say, okay, our fee is going to be 2.5% and then there's some retainer involved. So those are the most lucrative models that we have.

But in general life, we always pay something when the, my favorite way of saying this is then when the value exceeds the price, the deal happens. Nice. So whenever the client says, hey, my value is 500,000, they ask 250k, I'll take the deal. So, that's typically what our approach is. When we come back, Diana speaks to Anupam about how his company has achieved consistent growth and made the INK 5000 list again and again. But first, a quick break.

So what do you obviously landed on Think 5000 for eight of the nine past years, to what do you attribute this growth? And consistent growth, too. We have been learning. As an organization, we put immense focus on people who are willing to unlearn, relearn, and repeat the process over and over. So learning, I would say, is the most important thing. I was a single person starting the company,

and then the leaders who have joined, the management, the staff, we try to bring the culture of learning to them, that okay, you have to learn something new, you can't just be the person you were a year ago and be worth more in the marketplace. So how do you do that? Is there like continuing education for staffers?

Yes, so we have several initiatives. We allocate 3% of people's compensation for their learning budget, and they can choose whatever they want to do. They can do a program, certifications, whatever they want to. And it should be relevant to their work. If it's not relevant, they want to do something else. In many cases, we agree to

it. But essentially, they spend that money and they get reimbursed. It's as simple as that. Then we have book club. So every quarter, there is a book we choose and people get to read it. And there's actually a very fancy way that they conclude. So they make either a video or a news tape or a podcast on the book, and then there's a reward for the best book club summary, and it carries $500 of cash prize. So people are really working hard to make this $500. What's the best book club presentation you've seen? Last month, actually.

Yeah. We had the book being read was The Smartest Guys in the Room. You might have heard of it then, Ron's story. And one of our finance guys and one of my partners, David and Rajat, they made that summary. They were supposed to make a newsreel. So it's actually, it's like, you know, they start off as anchors and they're reading that,

let's talk about this is what happened, this is how the company went up. And they had a commercial break in which they talked about Occam's as no stories, no made up numbers, we provide genuine service. That commercial did it for everybody. It was the commercial. I love it.

They came back and clue it. It was pretty good. It seemed like they were actually on television and reading a story. Amazing. What are some other books that you've read in the book club? Good to Great, Jim Collins. Of course, I was actually going to say, Good to Great. You read my mind. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Influence.

We are currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a phenomenal book, Measure What Matters. Okay, yeah. So typically books which are relevant to- KPIs, love it. Yeah, yeah. But we also try to bring in some story kind of thing like what not to do, yeah. So typically books which are relevant to... APIs, love it. Yeah, yeah. But we also try to bring in some story kind of thing like what not to do, the end-to-end story or there was...

Barbarians at the Gate. That is in the list, hasn't happened yet. We had the Spider Network, the Libor fixing book and... Oh, Libor, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the book on the people who are trying to fix it. Oh, great. I love this list. I want to read all these books. There you go. So we have a list. Can I join the book club? Please do.

And I'm pretty sure you'll win some prizes. I would hope. I think I got some podcasting skills at this point. So obviously, you've been growing like gangbusters. But what was the mistake that you made early on that you learned from? And how did you learn from it? We took the idea of being a one-stop shop a bit too far. Some of the service lines we were in that we are not in anymore are contract staffing, digital marketing, and I can lead generation.

One thing to say I'll do in things in an integrated way, but today we say business solutions, professional services, financial services, it's a stream of what we're doing. It's continuous. But if you start doing like, you know, provide office cleaning service and office supplies, I mean, now it's getting ridiculous, you can see. Yeah, yeah. So we can't win. You're like, we can't do everything.

Correct. So, but those mistakes taught us a lot of things of where not to be because contract staffing is incredibly competitive. And not that we can't win in those places, we win in many of those places, but there are things which we just are naturally good at. This is our skill set and the things which we had to bring in people for and they didn't have the same relationship values or long-term plans and but design contract stuffing is gig to gig so how do you have a long-term focus so those are the mistakes we made and like we got into

PNC insurance which is again dog-gate dog business realize that there's not enough money in it actually we lost a whole bunch of money in it how do you determine something is valuable for you to get into is it like do do you measure what matters? Nice, nice good catch. So we do measure what matters. So we actually read that book and we embrace the whole care framework. But back to the point here, it's ultimately has to be we try to be a premium player not a commodity player because there are many services you can go online just buy like P&Z insurance. The value add is hard to establish. Like, yes, I'll understand your needs better. I'll give you the best coverage. But eventually, there's no real

magic to it. Insurance carriers are very powerful. They know what they're doing and they always find ways not to pay when things go really crazy. I asked somebody in Florida right now, we have Florida office. Oh, you do. What happened? In Tampa? when things go really crazy. Ask somebody in Florida right now, we have Florida office. And most of- What happened, in Tampa? Sarasota, we were right in the eye of Melton. My partner, he lost 70% of, maybe 80% of household items

because everything got flooded. And everybody's saying, no, not my problem. I'm not gonna cover it, act of God. So again, not a good story in this instance. But in general, we felt that it's hard, difficult, to add value in those instances. So we stopped being there. Right.

Do what you do best and trade for the rest kind of thing, right? Right. So we like tax credits, going back to that example, is such a nice, clear thing. You didn't know you can qualify for cost segregation or an R&D credit. You already have technology products. You're building things and you're paying taxes, but hey, you can get a tax credit.

Yeah, R&D credit. Yeah, do it. It's a purposeful tax credit. Like winning the lottery. Exactly. So then that's easier to establish value there. Totally. So you said you kind of learned.

You were going through the education statement, and then you have the book club. Anything else to sort of prompt continuous growth? Again, it's a cultural thing. So we have a lot of engagement we try to bring into people. Now, what does it do for us is, like when we have leadership meetings every Tuesday, about 25% of people in the company come together on that call. So we ask questions as to why do you do what you do? Like every time there's a question, which is your favorite book or who's your role model? People are being asked to think about what they do. It's not like mindlessly they show up somewhere.

And that mindfulness, the core of the standards we said, the values we follow, like we have the six letters, may like ownership clarity Commitments the we make values and we repeat them The culture is such where if you come to the work you are expected to have a certain level of standards The S is for standards. No, M is for mindfulness. So we well, I love that the name of the company is an acronym It was not but we actually we actually made six values out of that. Is it Occam's Razor?

Is that? Yeah, that's where it came from. The name comes from Occam's Razor. So we made those six values because it's easier to relate to the name of the company. But truth be told, they essentially are seven habits. There's this repositioned, like, you know, he says be proactive and we said have extreme ownership.

Extreme ownership. I love it. There's a book by the name of Extreme Ownership. And that also was in the book club. It was in the book club. I love it. Okay. That was great. Thank you very much. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producers are Blake Odom and Avery Miles. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres.

Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.