Written for Bizongo in 2023, applying for Associate Director, Strategic Initiatives. Publishing it now because the market calls in it can finally be checked.
Bizongo sold packaging and supply chain technology. I thought it was sitting on a much wider business than it was running, so instead of a cover letter I wrote down which industries I would go after and what I would do in the first ninety days.
I did not get the role. The document is still worth reading, mostly because three years have passed and you can now check the calls against what happened.
The six verticals I named
Healthcare and medical devices was the one I was most confident about. Diagnostic kits and devices need packaging that is validated, traceable and compliant, which means the buyer cannot switch on price alone. That is a better place to sit than commodity packaging.
Consumer electronics came next, on the simple logic that phones, tablets and laptops were growing fast in India and each unit ships in a box someone has to design.
Automotive I argued for on a different basis. The obvious opportunity is packaging for parts. The less obvious one is branding and marketing collateral, because automotive companies spend heavily on dealer-facing material and nobody was bundling that with the supply relationship.
Construction and building materials was about durability and cost rather than design. Chemicals and hazardous materials was about compliance, which is the highest-margin constraint in packaging because getting it wrong is a legal problem rather than an aesthetic one. Agriculture was the weakest of the six and I would drop it if I wrote this again: fragmented buyers, thin margins, and a long education cycle.
The thread across all of them was the same. Go where the packaging specification is dictated by regulation or physical risk, not by procurement preference, because that is where a supplier stops being interchangeable.
The ninety-day plan
The first thirty days were deliberately unglamorous. Meet leadership, read the SWOT rather than write a new one, go through the product and market lines, and sit with cross-functional teams to hear what they think is blocked. Then get properly into the financials and the metrics, because strategic initiatives that are not tied to a number are just opinions with a deck.
Days thirty to sixty were where the work actually starts: market sizing, customer segmentation, competitive benchmarking, and business cases with financial models behind them. Then project plans, risk and dependency tracking, and a regular update to stakeholders.
The last thirty days moved from doing the work to improving how the work gets done. Process improvements in strategic planning itself, guidance to senior leadership, and a measurement system so initiatives could be judged after launch rather than only pitched before it.
That last item is the one most strategy functions skip. Everyone builds the business case. Very few go back a quarter later and check it.
What I got right and wrong
The vertical logic held up. Regulated and risk-driven categories are still where packaging suppliers hold pricing power, and the healthcare call was the right one.
What I underweighted was working capital. Bizongo's business ran on financing the gap between buying and getting paid, and adding six verticals multiplies that exposure rather than diversifying it. A plan that adds categories without a view on receivables is a growth plan pretending to be a strategy plan. I would write that section very differently now.
I also wrote the whole thing from the outside, using public information and inference. Some of it would not have survived a week of internal data. That is the trade with unsolicited work: it demonstrates how you think, and it cannot demonstrate that you are right.
Why I still write these
A CV tells someone what you have done. This tells them how you would decide, and it filters in a useful direction, because a company that finds a document like this presumptuous is telling you something about how it treats new people with opinions.