Melbourne firm partners with major telco to boost Mexican start-ups

Melbourne-based Business Planning HQ will host an event for start-ups in Mexico later this month, after signing an agreement with multinational telco provider Telefónica.

Business Planning HQ was founded by Marcus Tarrant, who has worked with the likes of Innovation Capital, Uniseed, Melbourne Ventures, Stoneridge Ventures and Offspring Ventures.

It specialises in the rapid delivery of business planning documents.

After a three-month technology evaluation across Australia, Spain, Mexico and the United States, Business Planning HQ has signed an agreement with Spanish telco Telefónica.

Telefónica is the number one Spanish multinational by market capitalisation, and one of the largest private telecommunications companies in the world.

As part of the agreement, Business Planning HQ will host a one-day event in Mexico on September 27. The event will be hosted at a venue dubbed “The Wayra Space”.

Wayra is the start-up accelerator arm of Telefónica. With 12 academies across South America and Europe, it has accelerated more than 170 digital and mobile technologies.

Every year, Wayra Mexico is responsible for the acceleration of 10 high-profile start-ups.

The Business Planning HQ event will be hosted by San Francisco-based representative David Brown, although document process and servers will be provided from its Melbourne base.

“I attended a conference in Silicon Valley called Demo and we exhibited our technology at that conference and we met the director of Wayra Mexico and that was the start of the process,” Tarrant told StartupSmart.

“Since then, we’ve been doing testing and evaluation, and we’ve been up to [Telefónica’s] head office in Spain and back down to Mexico.”

Tarrant is hoping this event will leader to a rollout across the Wayra network, followed by global expansion.

“Wayra is quite a large organisation,” Tarrant says.

“There are 12 different programs around the world, from London to Ireland to Germany to Spain and across South America, so this is really an initial pilot into a standardised platform.”

“From there, we want to expand into other accelerator platforms, accelerator networks and things like that.”

The company’s ability to deliver for Telefónica in Mexico is the result of two years of continued development and refinement of the Business Planning HQ toolkit.

The toolkit enables one facilitator to consult up to 50 companies at once, with each one receiving a completed business plan, pitch pack and investor overview by the end of the one-day program.

The technology can also overcome language barriers, even within a compressed timeframe.

The Business Planning HQ technology and event format was pioneered in Australia before being taken to Silicon Valley.

“Following a trial at the Plug and Play incubator in Silicon Valley earlier this year, there has been significant interest from across the world in running these events,” Tarrant says.

A similar event was recently held for the ANZ Innovyz START program in Adelaide. Credit Key was one of 10 start-ups to participate in the program.

According to Credit Key chief executive Brett Burford, the Business Planning HQ approach was “motivating yet challenging”.

“It certainly pushed me to consider aspects of my company that I had previously not done. I have not come across a more productive way to get a business plan done,” Burford said in a statement.