Simpleworks Consulting · Sample Report
Three flat years at a Hosur pipe maker.
What you described, what I think it adds up to, and the direction I would take.
Prepared for: Srikanth Rajagopal, Arunodaya Polymers Pvt Ltd, Hosur
Prepared by: Prem Menon, Simpleworks Consulting
Date: 6 October 2026
Basis: One half-day diagnostic session, 2 October 2026. You, Meghna, Devanathan, and Farida by call.
About this document
This is a sample of what Simpleworks produces after a half-day diagnostic session. The company, the people and the figures are illustrative. The method and the standard of work are real.
The session is an interview. I ask, you answer, and the answers are the evidence. So everything below is built on what the four of you said in the room — not on an audit, a site visit or a data review, none of which happened.
Note the shape of it. It plays back what I heard, says what I think it adds up to, and recommends a direction. That is what a morning can honestly produce. It is not a plan, and anyone offering you a plan off one conversation is selling you something else.
Section 1
What you told me
Five things came out of the morning. I am putting them back to you in the order that matters, rather than the order they came up, because the order is most of the point.
You have grown by addition, and it has stopped paying
Three states. Then builders direct, alongside the distributors. Then two more categories. Then, by your own count, something like 120 new distributor appointments in three years. Each one was a sound answer to the problem in front of you that month, and you described the reasoning behind several of them without hesitating.
Revenue has sat in the same band throughout. That is the business telling you addition has stopped working, and it was Meghna who said it first in the room, not me.
Distributor count went up. Distribution did not
Your own reckoning: roughly 200 names on the master, about sixty billing in a given quarter. Before the appointments started, you were at about the same number of active parties. Devanathan put five of his 22 people on the newest ones for most of last year and estimated they brought in around two crore between them.
He also said, without prompting, that most of those appointments happened because a competitor had signed somebody in that town.
The margin did not leak — you spent it
Six or seven points of gross margin gone in three years. Farida attributed about half to resin you chose not to pass through. The rest tracks with scheme and discount spend, which she described as having roughly doubled as a share of revenue.
Four people can approve a discount: you, Devanathan and the two regional managers. There is no floor, no band by volume, and nobody reviews afterwards what a scheme actually bought. Your description of quarter-end was that when the month is short, you call the big parties and give something, and that it has always worked.
The sales cycle lives in one man's head
There is no written customer definition, no call plan, no stage definitions. You confirmed that directly. What exists instead is Devanathan, who told the room he is personally in close to half of revenue, and who said he has stopped fighting it.
The monthly review produces updates, not decisions
Four hours and ten minutes in August. A pack that takes two people three days to build. Of fourteen actions carried over from April, Meghna's count was that eleven were still open. Nobody owns the minutes and no decision is written down.
Section 2
What it adds up to
Taken one at a time, each of those is a problem with an obvious fix — tighten discounts, push the distributors, write the sales process, shorten the meeting. You have tried versions of all four and none of them held. That is usually the sign that they are not four problems.
What you have is one problem showing up in four places: the company has never chosen where it plays.
Follow it through. A salesman with no defined customer calls on whoever answers the phone, so you get activity without pattern and a cycle that only works when the one man who can improvise attends. A distributor network appointed without a coverage design goes wide and stays shallow, because nobody ever defined what a good territory looks like. A discount has no floor because nobody can say which business the company does not want — if all revenue is equally good, any price that wins it is defensible. And a review meeting produces no decisions because there is no standard against which a decision could be made.
Three flat years is not underperformance against a plan. It is the arithmetic of a business that keeps adding fields without ever deciding to win one.
I should say plainly that this is a conclusion drawn from one conversation, and the four of you were unusually candid — which makes it more reliable than most such conversations, not less. But it rests on your account of your business. Section 5 says what would confirm or break it.
Section 3
The direction I would take
You asked me at the end what I would do if it were mine. Here it is.
Stop adding. Grow the next twenty crore by subtraction — a smaller field, held properly.
The logic is not sentiment about focus. It is that you cannot afford the other path. The addition company — three states, two channels, the full range, more feet on the ground — needs capital you have not raised and a layer of management you do not have, and it asks you to compete on price and availability against national brands with deeper pockets, in a market where you are already discounting to hold ground. It is a legitimate strategy. It is not available to you at ₹42 Cr with the balance sheet you described.
The subtraction company is available to you this year, and it costs almost nothing to start. Fewer states. One channel. A fraction of the range. Half the distributor names, each buying several times what they buy today. Your plant has the headroom for it already — that was one of the few genuinely good pieces of news in the morning.
What that means giving up
A direction with no exclusions is a wish. On what you described, these are the three candidates, and I would test them in this order.
| Candidate | Why, on what you said | Confirm by |
|---|---|---|
| The slowest SKUs | Devanathan named the fifteen or twenty that move without pausing. Nobody could say what the slowest hundred contribute. They cost you stock, price-list confusion and despatch errors. | A movement report. Two days. |
| Builders direct | You described it as thinner margin than distribution, and it puts your price in front of the contractors your own distributors serve. | Channel contribution after full cost. Three days. |
| The weakest state | Longest freight, worst ageing, no plant within reach — your words, about Kerala, twice. | State contribution after freight and provisions. |
And one exclusion I would make now without testing anything: appoint no new distributors for two quarters. You do not have a coverage problem. You have an activation problem in the names you already hold, and every new appointment pulls a salesman away from fixing it.
Section 4
Where to start
Two things in the first month. Both are independent of the direction question, which means neither is wasted whichever way you go.
| By | Action | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Oct | A written margin floor below which no scheme goes without your signature | Farida Contractor |
| 24 Oct | Discount approval cut from four people to two, with a volume band for each | Srikanth Rajagopal |
| 24 Oct | Freeze on new distributor appointments for two quarters, with a named exception route | Srikanth Rajagopal |
| 31 Oct | The four checks in Section 5 completed and circulated as one page | Farida Contractor |
If you do only the first two, the morning has paid for itself. On the numbers Farida described, a floor and two fewer approvers is the difference between buying volume deliberately and buying it by accident, and you are currently doing the second.
Then, in sequence
Do not run these in parallel. Each needs the one before it settled.
| Phase | What it settles | |
|---|---|---|
| One | Discount governance | A floor, two approvers, and a monthly total of what schemes cost against what they bought. |
| Two | Where to play | States, channel and range, written to one page the five of you sign. |
| Three | Distributor economics | Which names to revive, which to release, and what a productive one looks like in numbers. |
| Four | Operating rhythm | A monthly review that produces written decisions, and three numbers reviewed on a fixed date. |
Section 5
What would change my mind
Four checks. None needs me, and all four together are under a fortnight of your team's time. I would rather you spent that before you spent anything more with me.
| Check | Who | What it would change |
|---|---|---|
| What the last eight quarter-end schemes did to those parties' offtake in the quarter after | Farida | If they buy nothing beyond the month, this is a margin problem first and the direction can wait |
| Devanathan's name against last year's billing — his real share | Farida | If it is close to half, succession is the urgent problem, not strategy |
| Parties billing in the last 90 days, median offtake, top-20 share | Devanathan | Confirms or breaks the width-without-depth reading |
| Why four distributors who stopped buying, stopped | You, in person | The only question here that cannot be answered from a desk |
Do the last one yourself, and do not send Devanathan. A distributor will tell the owner things he will not tell the man who sold to him. Four conversations would tell you more than anything else on this page.
Two things I have left alone
- Meghna's scope came up three times and was described three different ways in three hours. The succession question behind it is not a consulting question and I will not treat it as one. It will surface the moment you make the choice in Section 3.
- Farida flagged a line in the scheme ledger as needing reclassification. I have not looked at it and I am not raising it as a finding. It is her work and she knows it needs doing.
If the schemes turn out to buy nothing, and you fix that and grow again without hearing from me, I will take this morning as having done its job.
Prem Menon
Founder and Principal Consultant, Simpleworks Consulting
Your business is not this one.
The half day tells you what your own morning adds up to. ₹15,000 online, ₹20,000 in person — credited in full against anything that follows.
Sample report. Arunodaya Polymers, its people and its figures are illustrative and created to show the shape of the deliverable. Any resemblance to a real company is coincidental.