Serving With Excellence in Every Way

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Nalini Saxena, founder of Elicit Consulting, located in New York, NY, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Elicit Consulting offers advisory, strategic consulting, and speaking services.

Advisory comes in two forms: executive and entrepreneurial. Executive advisory is like leadership development and operational management on steroids. I find myself training ambitious leaders in strategic design and critical thinking, facilitating their decision analysis concerning business, finance, and talent, and delivering executive coaching to address their professional lives' qualitative and quantitative demands. Entrepreneurial advisory is similar but tailored for business owners and generally involves different business-building features based on where the entrepreneurial client is in their journey.

Strategic consulting generally involves complex problem-solving that addresses a targeted need identified by a private business, non-profit, or government client. Most often, this begins with a phase of research and exploration, is followed by deep analysis, and then concludes with recommendations and an implementation plan. The subject area could be anything — we’ve covered fertility medicine, various consumer-packaged goods industries, real estate construction, development, management, high-tech startups, private equity, venture capital portfolios, medical practices, family offices, etc.

Sometimes, a client requests strategic consulting to address a transition in:

Succession planning
Valuation for a sale or merger/acquisition
Product launch
Entering into new geography, innovative or competitive headwinds
Organizational culture evolution

Speaking engagements constitute the third service offering, from keynotes to workshops to training and facilitation. These are delivered to organizations, universities, and conferences on various topics.

What sets Elicit apart is our principals and consultants' depth and breadth of experience. How personable and caring we are, and how dedicated we are to serving our clients and community with excellence in every way we can.

Tell us about yourself

My mission is to explode outward the boundaries of what is perceivable as achievable for organizations, entrepreneurs, and leaders in such a way that enlivens purpose drives performance, inspires engagement, and connects to global citizenship. To this end, I work with governments, NGOs, private sector businesses, entrepreneurs, change-making teams, and individual leaders.

I love to do complex problem-solving, strategic direction and design, operational execution, leadership development, and high-stakes crisis resolution. What got me started working on my business is the drive to use original thinking rather than templated assumptions to solve complex problems.

When a city needs to regain control over a public health crisis and resulting economic implosion, when a private sector company needs to reinvent itself against headwinds of innovation and competition, when an entrepreneurial org needs to determine its business or financial and talent strategy or succession-planning strategy, or when a high-value leader aspires to make a greater impact while finding greater fulfillment and building a legacy, I like receiving the call to serve.

My life's work is guided by principles such as ethics and integrity. I hold myself to a high standard and strive to create results and deliver service with excellence. I’m a strategist, advisor, critical thinker, consultant, public speaker, trainer, facilitator, coach, and partner.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the NYC tourism ecosystem and, in particular, the hotel industry, whose economic contribution to the city and the state are unparalleled and which is a powerful and important employer of full-time and part-time workers in the city.

Our team at Elicit Consulting was moved to help our fellow business owners and their employees. We assisted in advocacy efforts by, among other things, conducting extensive research to create reports detailing the decimation of the industry due to fears and effects of the pandemic.
The research involved surveys and interviews of business owners, data analysis and policy analysis, and concrete recommendations for elected officials to consider to keep the bottom from falling out underneath this very important sector that affects millions of workers in the city.

The 2020 research provided “the first post-pandemic industry assessment” about the state of the devastation of the NYC hotel market per Crain’s New York Business. Hotel owners and GMs themselves reported this presented data. It explored policy lessons from global markets experiencing a faster COVID recovery.

The 2020-2021 research analyzed how the assessed values of NYC hotel properties were stagnating cash flow. It laid out a detailed calculation to recommend a >24% cut in the assessed value calculation — on January 15th, the city announced new information about the policy. We continue to hope that we can help advocate for the business owners and employees of the hotel industry as the economic devastation of COVID persists.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

While the creative freedom of being a business owner is a tremendous asset, there certainly are challenges. As a small business that delivers services, there’s a dependence on a consistent flow of interesting problems from interesting prospective clients and sustaining and continually enhancing the infrastructure to support the high-quality work that we wish to deliver.

That means a lot of administration, management, recruiting, and talent leadership while continuing to find time to invest in my own continuous learning, which is extremely important to me. All of this comes down to time and energy management, prioritization, systems and standards, technology optimization, and overall personal management since entrepreneurs and business owners often experience blurred lines between our work and our personal lives since our life’s work is often our business.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

We’ve done plenty of interesting problem-solving for fantastic clients that we love, and we’ve been privileged to give back at times to our community. But economic conditions do affect our space and clients’ ability to pay. And a rollercoaster of cash flow – often called “feast or famine” – is a challenge that many new entrepreneurs and business owners find themselves having to contend with. This sometimes comes as a surprise, so my first tip would be to always anticipate the cash flow rollercoaster, always be judicious with expense management, and eventually with an eye on margin management.

It’s really important to understand that as business owners in particular, we represent our brands 24/7, no matter what setting we are in, whether we are “on the job” or not. As such, it is really important to take time and care to introspect and consider the purpose of entrepreneurship and identify what brand it is that we want to have and stand for. From there, it’s important to determine how to demonstrate that brand in action and make sure that we’re honoring it, always.

Finally, my suggestion is to embrace humility and commit to learning – entrepreneurship is a wonderful experience to exercise independence and to make an impact creatively, and at the same time, I believe that privilege comes with a certain responsibility to make sure that we’re delivering the best services to our clients. I strongly feel that being a lifelong learner is an opportunity and a mandate as a business owner, as our clients experience changes with time, and so do their challenges, and so do the inputs to the solutions we explore to serve them.

Solopreneurship, entrepreneurship, and business ownership come with both excitement and challenges, and it’s really important to make sure that there’s a designated cheerleading team on your side whenever you need it. It’s OK to ask for help, and it’s essential to have people you can count on to pick you up when you’re feeling exhausted, discouraged, or otherwise blue! Remember that you belong to a community that you give to that you are OK to draw from, too!

Where can people find you and your business?

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nalinisaxena/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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