The View from the Office. 

I met up with Sudhir Roc-Sennett, the founder of Lumen Thought, a consulting firm, for lunch at the Bryant Park Cafe. We both had salads.

The last time we’d seen each other was about 30 years ago over lunch at The Flame, a legendary dinner on the West Side near Columbus Circle. 

It was a previous life for both of us. I was managing Latin America coverage for Bloomberg News and Sudhir was an analyst at Paribas. He eventually rose to Head of Americas Research.

We talked about those early, heady days for emerging markets when low interest rates and a flood of money boosted stock prices. He left his role as a consumer analyst in 2000.

Sudhir pivoted to be an entrepreneur making frozen Indian food that was sold wholesale to supermarkets and food service companies.

It was tough sledding and by 2010 he concluded “the real world’s too hard when your money’s not big enough to count.” He returned to banking at Societe Generale, focusing on equity and OTC derivatives.

He ran the client portfolio manager team and worked on ESG with portfolio manager Rajiv Jain, who later left to start GQG Partners. Vontobel was booming: the firm had $8 billion of assets when Sudhir joined and $50 billion six years later. Among other things, Sudhir wrote a blog focused on sustainability.

Sudhir left Vontobel in 2022 to start a firm that creates white-labeled thought leadership for asset managers. It provided institutional sales teams content to connect with clients.

Sudhir said studies have shown 80% of B2B buyers make decisions based on thought leadership and that they read surprisingly few sources. 

He said content creates the equivalent of  “beer coupons” i.e. excuses for sales reps to make contact with clients offering them something useful  and one of the challenges that many face is they lack the right kind of material that will engage customers. 

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon. A number of big Wall Street firms want to leverage research departments for reports sales reps can send to clients. But the style and format of those reports isn’t always what clients want to receive. 

Increasingly, clients are looking for shorter, more accessible research. 

That’s the opportunity Sudhir wants to tap. 

You can reach Sudhir via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.