The word adjacent can make a new business feel partly understood before the difficult questions have been asked. A venue-service enterprise sees many activities around the transaction it supports. It may know the customers, handle familiar information and recognise the broad rhythm of the work. Those connections can be valuable. They do not establish that the enterprise already possesses the capabilities or accepts the obligations of the activity beside it. Two decisions at Telqavzi helped me distinguish an adjacency worth testing from a change in business model that we were not prepared to make. The useful question was not simply whether the transactions looked similar, but what new responsibility the move would create.
Start with the work that does not transfer
In 2023 we considered timed-entry museum services. Our ticketing software was relevant, and the growth team wanted a proposition that could be taken quickly to a wider set of venues. Yet an evening performance and a museum visit differ in ways that matter to service design. Visitors can arrive across the day, remain for different periods and overlap with later admissions. A time slot records part of that relationship, not everything happening inside a building. We needed to understand what the venue expected from us and which responsibilities it retained before treating the familiar transaction as proof of a ready-made offer.
I supported a ₹62 lakh pilot across three venues. The commitment covered configuration, service preparation and examination of the different visit patterns. Nikhil argued that we should not let the sales category settle the operating design. I agreed. The venue operators retained responsibility for their premises, visitor management and safety decisions; our pilot was not an occupancy certification. The strategy work examined the commercial and organisational implications of the service, including support across the day and the limits of information supplied by ticketing. We deliberately left those boundaries visible rather than letting a successful software interaction imply a complete venue-management capability.
Two venues continued the trial and one declined the arrangement. That third response mattered. It prevented the case from becoming a story in which a shared label proved a uniform market. The result gave us a more specific basis for further development, but did not establish national demand, visitor-growth effects or a standard acquisition cost. I would rather carry a smaller and more accurate opportunity into the next decision than enlarge the conclusion until it matched the ambition with which the work began. A pilot earns its value partly by identifying where the proposed model does not fit, even when that makes the next commercial message less simple.
Participation changes the position we occupy
The following year we considered a different kind of adjacency: participation in an event-promoter arrangement. The proposed commitment was ₹7.6 crore, with a forty-percent share of specified event upside. Commercial colleagues saw an opportunity to earn beyond the service fee from activity we already helped support. That argument deserved examination. We had experience of ticketing and access services, and relationships in the ecosystem. But the proposal would also place us in a different economic position. A service provider's familiarity with an event does not mean it already carries the programme, venue and demand responsibilities associated with promotion.
The review cost ₹33 lakh and brought together strategy, finance, operations and professional advice. We examined what the company would need to own, decide and manage if it participated. Nikhil questioned the attention and operating responsibilities the arrangement would absorb. The commercial proponents favoured a limited experiment. I recommended declining the commitment because the proposed participation did not fit the business we were then prepared to operate. Leena and the authorised decision-makers accepted the recommendation. We kept the possibility of a conventional service relationship separate, without presenting an unsigned opportunity as compensation for the upside we had declined.
There is a danger in making this account sound like a general rule that service companies should never take principal risk. That is not my conclusion. An enterprise can choose to develop a different business model if it understands the commitments, capabilities and governance required. Our decision was specific to the proposal and our position at the time. We gave up the possibility of a return that might have been attractive. I cannot demonstrate a loss avoided because the participation did not occur. The value of the case is the explicit choice about what we were willing to become, not a claim that caution would always have produced the better outcome.
Keep the unfinished part of the opportunity visible
The museum pilot and promoter proposal should not be flattened into the same lesson. One involved developing a service in a related setting and learning where its operating pattern differed. The other involved taking a new economic position in the event itself. Their proximity to ticketing was real, but the strategic questions were different. Treating all adjacent opportunities as one category would have made it harder to see why a bounded pilot was useful in one case and a declined commitment was appropriate in the other. Strategy needs enough detail to distinguish those choices before it offers a broad statement about growth.
I also want the account to retain what remained unresolved. Two continuing museums did not prove a complete market. A declined promoter stake did not prove that participation would have failed. The next decision would need fresh evidence, not merely a stronger version of the conclusion we preferred. This is particularly important when an executive presents experience to a board or search partner. A credible record includes the boundary of the evidence and the authority held by others. I led the strategic recommendation; operational responsibilities, professional assessments and final enterprise commitments did not all become mine because the case appears on my website.
For directors, I think the useful contribution is to ask what transfers from the current enterprise and what must be created, acquired or governed differently. The answer should connect the attractive customer relationship to the actual work of the proposed business. It should make the cost of learning visible and preserve the option to stop without rewriting an incomplete result as a success. My own experience has made me more interested in the precise position an enterprise occupies within an opportunity. Similar transactions can sit inside very different responsibilities. A strategy becomes more credible when it explains that difference before asking the company to cross it.