Turning your MVNO into a growth machine

The MVNO roller coaster

Most MVNOs that we meet experience four distinct stages in their first five years: 

1. Launch frenzy
2. Growth & scaling
3. A reality check
4. Capital raising (or maybe an exit)

As a data and AI business specialising in telco and MVNOs, We have observed these phases from every angle – and that’s what we are sharing in this blog series. While significant effort goes into planning the launch, proactive planning for subsequent stages is crucial. Deep understanding, confident assessment of future events, data, and data literacy are essential for navigating these transitions effectively and adapting to change.

In this second article ‘Get data ready for the ’Turning your MVNO into a Growth Machine’ we will cover the following topics:

• • Foundational capability considerations
  • The evolution of your team
  • Best use cases for leveraging AI
  • What’s next – the reality check
  • Capital raising & exit considerations

Foundational capability considerations

When you are growing, you’ll surround yourself with advisors and new experts to drive growth.  With this will come challenge to your decisions to date along with a preference in tools and suppliers. The things that you want to make sure that you don’t need to replace are core network connectivity, MVNE / BSS and your CDP – assuming you chose quality tools that are helping not hindering your growth.

In addition to this there are five additional capabilities that need to be in place and high functioning to support your growth phase:

1. Marketing automation – this again??

This should have been part of your launch, but it might be time to level up your marketing automation capability. You’ll now need to be supporting full omni channel experiences and be communicating with a wider range of customers who will all have different communication preferences.

It’s tempting to over think this and be wowed by amazing features but my advice is to make sure that you can operate this yourself (otherwise you’re in for massive increases in OPEX). Choose easy to use journey builders and staff or a vendor that knows telco-based CVM that will operate this as a managed service closely with you.

There is no shortage of products to choose from but keep an eye on those with deep telco expertise and with pragmatism in implementation.

2. Marketing Mix Modelling – this is where you super power your marketing dollars

Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is your secret weapon during this phase. Without having a highly specialised data scientist (or 3!) in house the right kind of MMM product will allow you to statistically analyse your online and offline marketing channels to reveal their true impact on sales and conversions in hours – not months.

This might seem unnecessary but imagine if your CMO could confidently tell you and your CFO:

• • I can optimise spending and maximize ROI (ROMI) by channel, by product or by geography
  • I can adapt and thrive – in real time and quickly adjust to market shifts and customer needs
  • I can cut waste, increase efficiency and reallocate budgets (and focus)

This is the kind of capability that the most well-known brands in market use and they are available specialised for MVNOs (our version is called Spend Impact)

Without an MMM your marketing team will be leveraging gut and MTA tools from Meta, X etc….which is  a self-fulfilling prophecy and a sure way to spend more $$ without confidence that you’ll see more impact.

3. Targeting for value AND volume

Closely linked to MMM is segmentation. If your marketing team is working with Meta, X etc they will be very familiar with look-a-like audiences. The concept is that you use a subset of customers and pop that into a digital marketing platform to find more customers that are similar.

CDP’s do a huge amount to help but applying predictive analytics to this use case is a great growth hack. If you can apply analytics to understand from your entire base then you’re not just acquiring more customers but you’re also acquiring the best value customers too. Imagine if your look-a-like audience also told you which customers had:

• • The ability to cross sell, buy / pay more or refer friends or family

• • The likelihood of longer tenure 
  • Favourable characteristics that indicate consistency with your brand and servicing module
  • The capability to weed out the rotational churners

Imagine how much more effective your marketing and your operations would be!

4. Predictive analytics – especially to make sure you avoid base leakage and churn

You will have adhoc analytical needs at this point. You might have a great spreadsheet jockey but there is absolutely no comparison between analysing past behaviour and the prediction of what your customer will do next. This is the role of a data scientist. Unfortunately, great data scientists are really expensive and they can’t make magic happen alone – you’ll also need a data engineer, domain expertise and an engineer (you may not need an engineer if you took my advice on the CDP!). I strongly recommend partnering with genuine AI expertise and domain expertise – we’d love to help 😀😀😀!

5. Contact centre – the beating heart needs to be a well-oiled machine

Your contact centre will be an important part of your operations as you grow. It’s also the place that poor systems, poor data and bad decisions all manifest as operational headaches and OPEX wastage. Leadership, reporting and core capability around routing, measurement and escalation are necessary but more important is ensuring that the decisions you have taken so far cause smooth operations and not headaches.

The evolution of your team

Let’s face it with AI you no longer need huge teams. But the team that you do have are now essential in setting direction, leveraging data, communicating and supporting all the aspects of scaling your business.

Data savviness is essential, you want data-literate executives working from high quality data so that you have operational efficiency and strategic agility at the same time.

Success in the AI-driven landscape demands a specific set of skills. These include:

• • Deep domain expertise e.g. in marketing, finance etc
  • Communication and leadership – especially with partners and vendors such as your supporting operator
  • Effective leadership to plan, deliver and measure initiatives and especially AI adoption within their domain
  • Flexibility and willingness to leverage AI for operational efficiency and improvement
  • Proactive desire to see projects move through to operationalisation with measurement and experimentation built in
  • The ability to be both hands-on in and strategic – understanding the data fundamentals so that thorough decisions can be made
    

Best use cases for leveraging AI

At this point AI should be your best friend in two ways – operational efficiency and value creation.

AI can be used for operational efficiency by deploying:

• • Chat bots for contact management to ensure you have genuine feeling conversations without the operational overhead
  • LLMs for knowledge management to prepare your content, FAQs, operational documentation, process information
  • LLMs for scaling bespoke digital creatives and campaigns to personalise marketing 
  • Agentic workflows for configuration of offers and campaigns as well as low tech workflows
  • SEO and content optimisation

Value creation is where you will get more bang for your AI ‘buck’. This means leveraging AI to enhance decision making using deep learning to enrich data and develop deep and interconnected insights into your audience that can be turned into actionable operational and growth strategies.  Key use cases are:

• • Churn
  • Fraud management
  • Personalisation
  • Upsell & cross sell
  • NBO & NBA

The value creation that comes from these use cases will support your growth and scaling ambitions and deliver a greater return over time from your AI investments. 

What’s next – the reality check

At some point whilst you are growing there will be a moment when the reality sets in:

‘Growth isn’t happening fast enough’

‘Operating an MVNO is harder than it looks – I’m not even sure I like this!’

‘All I do is raise money’

‘I’m at the whim of my key vendors and they aren’t making it easy’

They are all moments that you will remember – your ability to see these coming and react appropriately (with enough time) is what really matters. As you enter any reality check, you will fare better for inevitable time suck, uncertainty and frustrations with the right team and the right data at your fingertips.

Capital raising & exit consideration

As you look forward to capital raising you need to be telling a story with your data. The financial metrics of your business are essential but the storytelling in relation to your growth and market will provide the colour around this. For example: 

• Targetable and addressable audience: What story can you tell about brand awareness and the reach that you have into your base. This feeds into ‘TAM’ and can provide confidence in reaching and then converting this audience
• Subscriber base: Investors will be looking at your base in terms of volume and value. If you can tell a real story about upsell, cross-sell, ARPU growth and revenue or subscribers to cost or staff as a ratio you’ll be enriching your story about the value of your base – rather than the vanity metric of size.
• Marketing efficiency: Cost efficiency will be key – being able to explain the growth levers for your marketing and speak with confidence around ROAS so that you can easily explain the relationship between marketing and conversion allows you to optimise your plan for cost efficiency or growth.
• LTV: This metric differentiates high quality from rotationally churning bases. It is one of the best base metrics because it will tell you about the quality of your base and the sustainability of your product, pricing and marketing approach.

As soon as you start capital raising you’ll need a great pitch backed up by data that tells the story of your investability. Measuring and actively monitoring these kinds of metrics will make sure that you are ‘capital raising ready.’

I hope that this summary of our learnings about the growth stage for MVNOs has been helpful. We’ll be publishing a final article in this series called ‘The reality check and exit considerations’ covering the following topics in a few weeks time.

• • Foundational capability considerations
  • Knowing when you’re doing good work not busy work
  • Best use cases for leveraging AI
  • What’s next – exit planning (or getting ready for the long haul)
  • Exit considerations

 You’re welcome to get in touch with me for more information or to chat about your launch – we would be delighted to help you!