My Brief Story

A business leader entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience, mostly in the FMCG industry in India, with Coca-Cola, Mother Dairy, Heritage Foods, Kuwaiti Danish Dairy. I also have 4 years of experience in the training and development industry with Team Productivity Consultants. The last 5 years I was the Founder & CEO of AnKa SumMor a tech enabled S&D platform for emerging and challenger FMCG brands, partnering over 25 brands.
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Despite being an average student initially, I transformed my career trajectory through hands-on learning. My first job was with Blue Dart and I was one of the first members of a newly formed Aviation Express division, here I had to train new team members including my future bosses on the Blue Dart way of doing things. I loved this so much that I decided to move into training and I joined a training & development company, where I was trained as a Sales Trainer and conducted Sales training for fresh graduates. Over time I got into Business Development for corporate training, where I got to interact with Senior Management of large and medium companies across industries, gaining insights on how senior management thinks and operates. While we were conducting training programs across levels on skills and mindset, we never really got to know how the learning was implemented after the training program.
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I was keen to know what happened after the training program and when an opportunity to join Coca-Cola came, I jumped at it. Fortunately for me at Coca-Cola the training function was part of a larger function called Consumer Service System (CSS), which focused on S&D System Capabilities (infrastructure, structure, processes) and Human Competencies (knowledge, skills, mindset). Here we were working on live projects to impact both aspects of the function in different markets. For the first time I started to understand the power of System Capabilities and Performance Metrics. For instance, carrying capacity of a vehicle decides the revenue potential, or secondary sales is actual sales not primary sales which is actually a movement of stock from company warehouse to Distributor warehouse, or increase in outlet time to increase sales by reducing stem time (time from depot to outlet and time in between outlets) and many many many more learnings which we implemented across geographies in India, gaining in knowledge and skills and also about markets & strategy. On the people competencies side, I learnt the power consistency of learning & action, small wins lead to big wins and importantly to celebrate them, also that each person has their own motivations, desires, speed of learning.
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As a natural progression, I moved to Sales Operations, first as a temporary assignment in North Karnataka and then to Kerala as Sales Manager. North Karnataka we had almost 80 % market share and in Kerala we were around 25% share, plus we had been degrowing in Kerala for 3 years. I took over charge of Kerala and was given a target to grow the sales volume by 100%. I changed the performance metrics to Secondary Sales, Distribution expansion and daily reporting, by middle of the year we had already crossed the volumes of entire year of the previous year and delivered 100% growth, followed with a 47% growth the following year. All my career after that has been about improving S&D system capabilities with a focus on developing human potential of people who showed both desire & action to grow.
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Which became my model in all subsequent leadership assignments at Mother Dairy as Head Sales & Operations, Heritage Foods as COO, KDD as Business Head India and AnKa SumMor as Founder & CEO. My greatest success has been in guiding and leading future sales and business leaders to grow in their career. There were successes and also failures, but what helped me was the curiosity & ability to learn from both of them.