Indian SMEs don’t stall because they lack ambition. They stall because they have too much of it, spread across five priorities none of which are properly resourced. Our job is to force the narrowing. Commit to two bets that can move the P&L, and shelve the rest with a straight face.
Every growth deck we read has the same slide. Five bold initiatives, all tagged “top priority”, all starting next quarter. Six months on, none have moved, the core business is distracted, and nobody wants to be the person who tells the promoter the emperor is short on clothes.
Our job is to force that uncomfortable conversation. We map the markets, size the real opportunity and not the TAM-fantasy version, pressure-test the assumptions with actual buyer interviews, and narrow the portfolio down to the two or three bets that genuinely deserve your team’s calendar and your balance sheet. Then the entry plan gets written, with milestones, gating criteria, and, non-negotiably, kill conditions.
This isn’t a research report that sits in a drawer. The output is a plan leadership commits to in writing, with a named accountable owner per bet and a shared understanding of what “go” and “stop” actually look like in six months’ time.
Growth-stall patterns repeat. If your last offsite produced more slides than decisions, you’ll recognise at least three of these.
Five new initiatives launched this year, none of them properly resourced. Everyone is busy and nothing is moving.
Ask three executives what the company should do next and get three different answers. Strategy meetings produce decks, not decisions.
The market size in the board deck bears no relation to what you can actually reach, win, or serve profitably in the next three years.
Opened a new city or country on instinct. Costs are real, revenue is slow, nobody wants to admit the hypothesis was wrong.
The catalogue has quietly doubled. A handful of SKUs make the margin; the rest drain operations. Nobody will cut them.
New initiatives only ever get added, never retired. Sunk cost keeps zombie projects alive and starves the good ones.
Four to eight months of structured work with the CEO and direct reports. Leadership in the room, not delegated downwards, otherwise the plan dies in execution.
We map the markets, segments, and product lines you could plausibly serve, size them honestly, and identify where the economics actually work.
Score the options on fit, attractiveness, and capital intensity. Kill the ones that don’t make the cut and commit to two or three that do.
Go-to-market model, partner vs direct, pricing, resourcing, milestones, kill criteria, written as a plan a team can act on, not a slide show.
A quarterly review cadence with clear metrics and gating decisions. We co-run the first two cycles, then hand over.
A committed plan, not a report. Every artefact is something the leadership team actively uses in quarterly decisions after we’ve stepped back.
A view of the landscape, segment economics, and where your right-to-win actually holds, evidence-based, not hand-waved.
A weighted evaluation of each bet on fit, size, time-to-revenue, capital need, and risk. Decisions get made on this, not on whoever spoke loudest in the last offsite.
The two or three bets leadership is actually committing to, and the list of things you’re explicitly not doing this year.
Go-to-market, operating model, pricing, partner strategy, and the first 12-month milestone plan for each bet you’re pursuing.
What each bet needs in people and money, where it comes from, and what gets deprioritised to fund it, honest trade-offs, not additive wishlists.
Quarterly governance rhythm with pre-agreed metrics and gating decisions, so you know in advance what “stop” looks like.
“We had three expansion ideas and the budget for one. They walked us through the math until the right bet was obvious, not just plausible. The other two went in a drawer, and the one we chose paid back in year two.”Result: New geography at 22% of revenue by month 18
Strategy work without alignment produces expensive theatre. Be honest with yourself about which column you sit in.
The five questions CEOs consistently raise. Bring the sixth, the one specific to your sector, to the call.