Conicio Advisory sharpens customer-first approach

Following years of working in a corporate environment, Bardia Khalilifar took a bold step to branch out in his own consultancy gig, Conicio Advisory.

Speaking about the actual process of starting out as a team of one, Khalilifar said it was a “daunting and scary, but at the same time, exciting” experience for the entrepreneur.

“It’s about opening up gates yourself to look at other possibilities of how you can utilise your skill sets and your experience to help others as well,” he added.

The idea for Conicio was born following Khalilifar’s experience with large corporates, working for various technology companies for just under 20 years, which include the likes of Cisco, Dicker Data, FirstWave Cloud Technology and HPE.

During this time, he found these big players operated in a “very transactional” manner when it came to customers.

“Despite them being vendors and manufacturing great technology and solutions, it just felt like it struggled to be about the customer, it was more about the actual vendor itself,” Khalilifar said to ARN.

He continued, claiming he started the advisory because he wanted to look at the customer angle, to provide them with the appropriate information to scale and grow internally and externally.

“In summary, the reason that I’ve decided to start Conicio was because it’s making it more about the customer, making it more about the partner but also becoming more innovative as well and what sort of partnerships that we can tap into to help these businesses from all different industries to scale and grow in their own environment,” he said.

The main aim of Conicio, according to Khalilifar, is about providing market intelligence and insights.

“The objective of all that is to influence the technology market itself in the customer’s environment and it could be very agnostic across all technology types. So, it could be from cloud all the way to machine learning/artificial intelligence, it could be software development, or even CRMs [customer relationship management] as well,” he said.

“The idea is to incorporate that technology platform in a customer’s environment, but at the same time, providing market intelligence and insights as an advisor to help customers with the decision-making capabilities to understand what is it that the market is seeing today, how they can overcome those challenges and how they can become innovative as well.”

The entrepreneur also said that as part of the process, he writes the market intelligence and insights himself, providing this information to customers.

After the initial stages of growth, Conicio’s offerings include, on the advisory side, fractional chief sales and partner officers and board advisory. Meanwhile, the consulting services offering cover sales, go-to-market and partnerships.

Currently, the business has one other consultant on board who specialises on software-as-a-service and software businesses. Meanwhile, Khalilifar’s focus is on larger clients, providing chief sales and partner officer roles and driving business growth for Conicio’s clients to capitalise on their intended target markets.

Khalilifar said the plan is to cater to just Australia for now, with plans to expand across the Tasman to New Zealand in the longer term, followed later by Asia Pacific and other parts of the world.