Clients rarely experience a business in isolation. A company opening a new office may need a designed and fitted-out space, temporary premises or vehicles while work is under way, and support in preparing its people and processes. Specialist businesses that can connect their services around such needs have an obvious appeal, yet connection carries costs of its own. Whether a connected model creates value depends less on how many businesses share a name than on how well their work is coordinated and their incentives aligned.
A joined-up offer is only as strong as its handovers
Adner (2017) emphasises that many value propositions depend on several partners' activities fitting together, so a delay or mismatch at one point can undermine the whole. For connected businesses, the weak spots are usually the handovers: the moment a design passes to a builder, a project passes to an operator, or a client's request moves from one team to another. Two businesses can share a brand, an office or a client list and still fail to deliver a joined-up result if their timelines, standards and information do not match.
Connection is also worth pursuing only where services genuinely reinforce one another. Jacobides, Cennamo and Gawer (2018) highlight complementarities, where services are worth more together than apart. Where that effect is weak, bundling simply adds complexity. For anyone assessing a group of related businesses, the useful question is practical: what does the client gain from the connection that they could not easily assemble themselves?
The hidden price of coordination
Every interface between businesses brings coordination costs: agreeing scope, aligning schedules, reconciling documents and resolving disagreements. These costs are easy to underestimate because they are spread across many people and rarely appear as a single line in a budget. A joint offering that looks profitable on paper can lose its margin once the time spent coordinating is counted.
Incentives add a second layer of difficulty. Each business unit is usually measured on its own revenue, margin and client satisfaction. If a joint offering asks one unit to discount its work, absorb more risk or step back from a client relationship, cooperation can weaken quietly, not through open conflict but through slower responses and lower priority. Because ecosystems coordinate without full hierarchical control (Jacobides, Cennamo and Gawer, 2018), the way rewards and risks are shared matters more than any declaration of unity.
How Pusaka's units connect around client needs
Pusaka Group brings together businesses with distinct roles. Pusaka Project Partner acts as a project integrator, coordinating planning, procurement, resources and implementation oversight. Artha Karya Studio provides architectural and interior design, construction, renovation and fit-out. Sewaguna offers property, vehicle and corporate rental solutions, while Pandu Adya Consulting provides human resources solutions, certification and compliance support, and monitoring and evaluation.
These services can complement one another, for example when a client needs a workspace designed and fitted out while also arranging flexible access to space or vehicles. The principle behind the connection is that each unit keeps its own accountability and its own client proposition. Collaboration is offered where it makes the client's task simpler, never as a condition of working with any single unit.
Piloting a cross-unit offering before scaling it
The most reliable way to find out whether a connection creates value is to test it on a limited scale before building it into a standard offer. A well-designed pilot is specific about the client need, the units involved and what success looks like:
- Start from one recurring client need that genuinely requires more than one specialism, rather than from a list of available services.
- Name a single point of accountability for the client, so that coordination happens behind the scenes instead of being passed to the customer.
- Agree how revenue, cost and risk are shared before work begins, so that no unit is quietly subsidising the arrangement.
- Measure margin after coordination costs, together with the client's experience, rather than total sales alone.
- Scale only after evidence of value, and be prepared to stop an offering that adds complexity without benefit.
Connection becomes an advantage when it is earned one offering at a time. For clients and partners, the signal worth looking for is not the number of businesses in a group, but whether a joint offering comes with clear accountability, fair terms between the parties involved and evidence that the combination performs better than its separate parts.
