Jaideep Shergill & Sunil Gautam set up strategy consulting firm, Pitchfork Partners

Former MSLGROUP India CEO, Jaideep Shergill  and MSLGROUP Emeritus, Sunil Gautam have launched, ‘Pitchfork Partners’ , a high level strategic consulting firm this week.

According to Jaideep, the firm will concentrate on strategic advice, which will include, but not be limited to, marketing and communications. The firm’s offerings rest on three major planks: strategic consulting, consulting services for start-ups – concentrating on companies in the PR, digital and marketing space to begin with – and aggregation and dis-intermediary services.

While Pitchfork has no plan at the moment to invest in PR, digital and marketing start-ups, they would help them to look for funds.

According to Jaideep, Pitchfork’s structural model will be similar to McKinsey, driven by an ecosystem of senior management partners, but does not intend to compete with the services offered by such companies.

Jaideep said that Pitchfork would like to come in a little earlier in a company’s business cycle to help them identify what they need to do and then find the appropriate partners to implement the work, enabling Pitchfork to generate revenues for other agencies or organisations. This could entail working with a CFO, a chief talent officer, a marketing head or a board member.

The bulk of Pitchfork’s clients will work on a project basis, unlike the traditional large PR agency model which runs mainly on retainers.

Through Pitchfork, Jaideep and Sunil hope to solve the issue of stagnant retainers and commoditisation of communications services. As it is envisaged, Pitchfork will offer the kind of pure play business strategic advice that clients often want but are unable to or are reluctant to pay for as part of a PR consultancy – unless it involves a crisis communication mandate.

As for the name, Pitchfork, Jaideep has said that the idea is to be the irreverent, devil’s advocate for companies.