A company looking to grow in Türkiye usually finds two doors in front of it: a consultancy that writes reports, or an agency that runs campaigns. There is a third door, but in Turkish it has no settled name yet. This piece defines that door — the business building studio.
One clarification before anything else: this is not an answer to "how do I become a business development manager". Here, business development is not a job title but the discipline of growing a company's revenue and its structure. If you came for the career question, turning back now will save you time.
What is a business building studio?
A business building studio is a structure that takes on a company's growth or transformation problem under one roof, from diagnosis through to measurement, holding strategy, engineering and creative inside the same team. It differs from consulting by not handing over a report and withdrawing, and from an agency by building the business model itself rather than a campaign. Its output is not a deck but a working system: positioning, product, channel, infrastructure and measurement are built together, and the same team carries responsibility for the result. The verb at the centre of the idea is building, not advising.
Three things set that definition apart. First, scope: the studio contracts on the problem rather than on a single discipline — if the trouble sits in pricing it goes to pricing, if it sits in the storefront it goes there, if it sits on the production line it goes to the floor. Second, ownership: the output belongs to the team that built it as much as to the client, and "we recommended it, they didn't implement it" is not an accepted defence in this model. Third, duration: the work is measured by the date the system starts running, not by a campaign calendar.
What is business development from a company's point of view?
Business development is the work of widening how a company produces revenue: a new market, a new channel, a new product line, a new price architecture or a new customer segment. Where it parts from sales is clear — sales closes more from the funnel that exists, business development builds or rebuilds the funnel itself. Where it parts from marketing is just as clear: marketing pulls demand in, business development designs the structure that demand lands on.
The term carries two separate meanings and that is where the confusion starts. On one side there is the job title inside companies, which in practice usually means sales and partnership work. On the other there is a discipline: redesigning where a company earns its money. This piece is about the second one, because what a studio signs a contract on is a discipline, not a job title.
Business model development is the heaviest end of this discipline: it reopens the question of who the company sells to, what it sells, at what price and through which channel. Most companies only ask that in a crisis, when the right moment is the first quarter margin starts thinning. If one channel carries revenue on its own, if one product makes more than half of it, or if price competition eats a few points of margin every year, there is work waiting on the business model side.
What separates selling a campaign from building a business?
A campaign stirs demand inside a fixed window; business building constructs the structure that produces that demand. The difference is not the size of the budget but what remains once the budget stops — when a campaign ends the chart falls back to where it started, and where a structure was built it does not.
Business building is the discipline of assembling a company's revenue engine piece by piece: positioning, product architecture, channel structure, conversion infrastructure and a measurement frame. Advertising is the fuel for that engine, not the engine itself. A company with fuel and no engine grows while it spends and halts the moment it stops — and relives that fact in the same budget argument every year.
Buying the campaign first is not an irrational reflex: it starts fast, measures easily and clears internal approval quickly. The cost shows up later. A brand that buys campaigns three years running argues for a bigger budget in the fourth just to hold the same sales, because it has purchased its demand from zero every single year.
Ad agency, management consultancy, studio: which one solves what?
The three models exist for different problems, and all three have their place. An agency moves demand, a consultancy sharpens the decision, a studio builds both and gets them running. The distinction is not one of quality but of scope and ownership.
- The classic ad agency — scope: campaign, media, creative. It is strongest where product and positioning are settled and visibility is the only missing piece. It is weakest when the problem sits beneath the campaign: if price architecture, checkout flow or product mix is broken, more advertising will not move the result.
- Management consulting — scope: analysis, scenarios, decision. It is strongest on large decisions where several paths must be compared with numbers: investment, acquisition, entering a new market. It is weakest at execution — even a correct report waits on the shelf when the client has no bench to carry it out.
- The business building studio — scope: the problem and the result. It is strongest where strategy and execution capacity are missing at the same time. It is weakest on narrow jobs: where only media buying or only a market study is needed, a studio is both expensive and slow.
Putting all three to the same task produces the wrong outcome. Ordering a single ad set from a studio is as mistaken as expecting a business model from an agency. The right question is not "which one is better" but "which layer is missing right now".
How does the studio model work in practice?
There are four stages and all four stay with the same team: diagnosis, roadmap, execution, measurement. Splitting the stages across different suppliers breaks the model itself, because its value comes precisely from removing the handover points.
- Diagnosis. Revenue, margin, channel split, conversion rate and operational data are read together. The aim is not to find the problem but to find which layer holds it: the demand layer, the conversion layer, or the product and price layer.
- Roadmap. The findings turn into a sequenced, costed plan: what gets done, in what order, against which measure. Order matters — pouring media onto a storefront that was never built properly is the most expensive mistake in this work.
- Execution. The plan gets built under the same roof: positioning written, interface built, content produced, channels opened, system taken live. What the client receives at this stage is a working structure, not a document.
- Measurement. The measures defined at the start get read on a schedule and the plan is corrected against them. A build nobody measures is not a build, it is a guess.
Why should strategy, engineering and creative sit at the same table?
When strategy, engineering and creative sit in separate companies, growth problems hide along the boundaries between disciplines and nobody owns those boundaries. A film can explain the category perfectly, but if the storefront loses the cart there is no sale; a storefront can run flawlessly, but if the category was never explained to the consumer there is no traffic.
The hidden cost of the multi-supplier model is coordination. The agency defends the creative, the software firm defends the delivery date, the consultant defends the report — and the client becomes referee between three defences. One roof does not abolish that refereeing; it moves who owns it, so that decision and result stay at the same table. There is a price for that too: one roof means dependence on a single point, which is why a studio is chosen on references and past work rather than on a pitch.
In practice, one table means one rule: the revenue, technical and perception sides of a decision get discussed in the same meeting. The person who will build the interface is in the room while the positioning line is written; the person who will run the channel is in the room while the interface is built. That does not add meetings — it removes handovers.
Which company should go to which model?
Three questions settle it: is the strategy clear, does the execution capacity exist, does the problem sit inside a single discipline. If you answer yes to all three you do not need a studio — buying the one missing layer is enough, and cheaper.
A company with clear strategy, a strong execution team and only a visibility gap should work with an agency. A corporate standing in front of a large investment decision, with its own implementation bench, should work with a consultancy. Where a single technical job is needed — one module, one integration — the right address is a software firm. The studio exists for the company that falls between those three: incomplete strategy, thin execution bench, and a problem that will not fit inside one discipline.
Let me write out the two cases where you should not come to a studio. If your cash flow cannot carry a three-month build, make the shortest cash-generating move first; that is not studio work. If it is unclear who decides inside the company, no structure brought in from outside will close that gap — the work stops at the first disagreement and the invoice has already been paid.
Let me explain why I built this model
I have spent close to a decade on the advertising, branding and growth side, and along the way co-founded an AI SaaS company. Both sides showed me the same thing in different languages: the brief that arrived was almost always a campaign brief, and the problem was almost never in the campaign.
A brand would arrive saying "our advertising isn't working"; we would measure, and the advertising was working while the product page was not. A manufacturer would say "we need a website"; the real gap was that forty years of technical knowledge existed nowhere in writing. Every time, doing the right work meant stepping outside the contract. At some point I accepted the obvious: the problem was not in the teams, it was in the scope of the contract.
That is why we set INDOLES up on a contract about the problem rather than a contract about a campaign. This is not a boast; I listed the model's limits above one by one and they all hold. But when a company's growth problem spreads across three disciplines at once, I have not found a cheaper route than seating those three disciplines at one table. Who we are and how we work is written out on its own page.
How does INDOLES apply the studio model?
Two cases mark the two ends of this model: building a category from nothing, and making existing knowledge visible. In neither did the work finish inside a single discipline — and had it finished there, neither result would have come.
OdorGo came to us with nothing but the product. Odor elimination was a category with zero consumer awareness in Türkiye, and with no search volume to capture, performance marketing alone could not work. We explained the category first, then built the demand: positioning, four commercials, conversion-led e-commerce and multichannel distribution were parts of one plan. Revenue reached ₺10M in eight months, the films were viewed more than 10 million times, and the product reached MacroCenter, Migros and Happy Center shelves. One team carried it from product positioning to the shelf agreement — that is business building in concrete form.
SIM Printing Suppliers has manufactured for the press industry since 1983, yet forty years of technical knowledge had no written form anywhere. The work had two layers: rebuilding the site as a five-language application, and writing the content that answers the questions an export buyer actually asks. Because the technical rebuild and the content programme ran inside the same team, organic traffic grew 15× in six months. An agency could have written the content and a software firm could have built the site; the party that built both at once produced the result.
What test can you run today?
There is a diagnosis you can run before choosing any model, and it takes fifteen minutes without asking anyone. Take the largest marketing or technology spend of your last twelve months and assume it drops to zero today.
Now count what is left. A written positioning line, a shelf or channel agreement, a working conversion flow, a durable knowledge asset, a measurement routine in place — how many of those are still standing? If the count is close to zero, what you bought was a campaign, not business building. That is not bad news but a diagnosis: once you know the missing layer, the next budget goes to the right place.
The thesis is simple: the category name is new, the work is old. When a company's growth problem spreads across three disciplines, the party that keeps those disciplines at one table produces the result, and the party that keeps them apart bills for coordination. What that distinction looks like service by service — which job falls under which heading — is written out on the business development services page.