Ycorp® is a UK start up private label digital service backed by Octopus Ventures. Ycorp’s vision is to digitally enable any brand to become a mobile provider by leveraging eSIM wholesale connectivity provided by Three UK.
The knowledge and experience of the Graystone strategy team is evident in every masterclass, but importantly the level of interaction between the course attendees and course leaders is high. I know the team really look forward to the monthly sessions and I have seen a real impact in terms of team, skills, knowledge and confidence.
CEO of Ycorp, Mike Greaves
The Business Challenge
Ycorp has built a team of digital, technical and marketing experts to deliver its growth ambitions. True to its ‘people first’ values, Ycorp wanted to significantly invest in skills capability so everyone could be successful.
Not all the team had a background in mobile or telecoms, in fact Ycorp actively wanted to embrace talent from multiple industries to ensure a broad perspective and to draw on digital best practice globally.
However, the leadership team at Ycorp also recognised that having a solid grounding in the relatively technical and commercial world of the MVNO ecosystem was essential to ensure success.
Ycorp contacted Graystone Strategy’s to help, recognising its extensive operational, technical and commercial experience serving the MVNx environment.
The Solution
Initially Graystone Strategy developed a bespoke 2-day training workshop for all the Ycorp team members. This included all the key elements of launching an MVNO, such as the scale of Global and UK market, the MVNO value chain and different technical models, the range of wholesale charging models, key customer and MVNO segments, how to develop a differentiated proposition, critical clauses in the MNO commercial contract and more.
Following the successful delivery of that workshop, the leadership team at Ycorp could see that additional continuous professional development of the team would be valuable. Its growing team would then keep pace with the fast-moving telecoms market.
Working with the CEO, COO and CPO (Chief People Officer), the Graystone Strategy team developed a year-long programme of monthly bite sized professional development masterclasses.
These masterclasses focused on key topics, including technical set up, commercial models and contracts, making and receiving pitches and customer proposition development. Each masterclass finished with a “thought challenge” for the team to discuss and debate within the Ycorp context. The Ycorp team really enjoyed these to help understand the content and context.
This was complimented with bimonthly MVNO Market News reports that highlighted the latest stories and development in the MVNO market globally, offering expert opinion and analysis of those stories. All the sessions were highly interactive allowing questions and challenges from the participants.
Outcomes
The monthly interactions with Graystone Strategy are extremely well attended and the Ycorp team really enjoy the investment that Ycorp has made into their development, the opportunity to consider and discuss changes to the MVNO market and the humour and personality of the course leaders James Gray and Erick O’Connor.
Mike Greaves, CEO of Ycorp says, “The knowledge and experience of the Graystone strategy team is evident in every masterclass, but importantly the level of interaction between the course attendees and course leaders is high. I know the team really look forward to the monthly sessions and I have seen a real impact in terms of team, skills, knowledge and confidence.”