CASE STUDIES

Praveen Masalewale (SUHANA)

Background of the company –

From a humble beginning 60 years back, SUHANA has now become a major player in the spices and blends. The company has over 250 products catering to diverse taste preferences of millions of Indians in India and over 40 countries where the products are exported. SUHANA has an annual revenue of around Rs 1300 crores and is a major player in Maharashtra. Uncompromising quality, focus on launching new innovative products and expanding distribution reach have been some of the key success factors. Two grandsons of the Founder are the Executive Directors and their Father is the Chairman of the company.

  • 1. Envisioning the Future

The Owners desired to transform the company from being a significant regional player to a dominant national player in the organized spice market. Besides creating a legacy organization, they also had a desire to reduce their daily operational involvement in the business.

 

  • PAREESATTVA Solution – Envisioning the Future

PAREESATTVA team conducted a series of meetings with key stakeholders comprising family members and their legacy advisors who have guided them for the past two decades.

Through these rich discussions, emerged the Vision of the Company –To grow “10 X in 10 Years” while building a professionally run legacy organization.

A series of townhall meetings were undertaken to enrol all the Department Heads and teams beneath them into the war-cry “10X in 10Y”. The key strategic anchors to achieve the stated Vision panning all arms of the Organization were outlined in these townhall meetings.

Status – The entire organization is aligned and inspired by the Vision. All medium term initiatives are aligned to the long term vision.

  • 2. Business Owners’ Confidants

The Owners were concerned about the impending retirement of the Sales Head – a person who had built the current sales organization brick-by-brick over the past two decades. A recent recruitment of senior lateral professional talent was not successful in terms of culture fit resulting in quick exit.

Specifically, the Owner had two concerns

(i) Whether or how will I be able to recruit a Professional VP (Sales & Marketing) who can fit into my Company’s culture and carry along the teams beneath him?

(ii) With the exit of the Sales Head, how do I manage the Business-As-Usual?

  • PAREESATTVA – Business Owners’ Confidants

PAREESATTVA partners played the role of close confidants of the Owner during this entire transition phase.

Phase I

The first task was to ensure that the Business-As-Usual does not get adversely impacted. PAREESATTVA Partners stood beside the Owner all the time while they implemented an interim re-structuring of the Sales Team through a series of following steps

  1. Assessing the competencies of all the 6 RSMs reporting into the Sales Head by spending time with each of the RSMs, visiting customers with them, interacting with them and their teams during review meetings
  2. Competency Evaluation of all the RSMs and ASMs by an expert agency
  3. Interim Sales Structure with 3 Sales Group Heads out of the 6 RSMs based on competencies assessed above
  4. Constructive conversation by Owner and Advisor with each of the RSMs motivating him to drive his new role and highlight opportunities

 

Phase II

The next phase was to recruit VP (Sales & Marketing) through a series of steps –

  1. Selecting a suitable Search Partners with experience in working with Family Businesses
  2. Implementing a structured recruitment process
  3. Mediating between the chosen candidate, Owner and Search Partner to conclude the compensation negotiations
  4. Engaging with new VP to ease him into the organization and help him take charge

 

Status – The Owners are more forthcoming in active delegation to the two CXOs and have been freed of daily decisions and execution so that they can focus on more strategic outlook for the company

 

  • 3. Execution Centricity

90% of the company’s revenue comes from a single state of Maharashtra. Obviously, the Owners knew that the pathway to the Vision of “10 X in 10 Y” was to create ‘multiple Maharashtras’ and possibly, ‘multiple Indias’. It was easier said than done! The challenges experienced in the past –

  1. Taste preference is very localized giving rise to strong regional brands
  2. Lack of brand awareness of Suhana
  3. Inability to attract good distributors leading to limited outlet reach
  4. Lack of senior managerial focus due to heavy dependence on Maharashtra

 

PAREESATTVA’s Execution Centricity

PAREESATTVA took on an ambitious goal of trebling the sales in Gujarat taken as Pilot region. A 360-degree hyper-action was taken up through a series of steps as below-

  1. First task was to identify a leader for whom Gujarat was significant part of KRAs. This was achieved through the Sales restructuring
  2. Constituting a Cross-Functional Team comprising R&D, Sales, Costing and Marketing to drive 360-degree in timebound manner. This team took on the task of developing and launching a special Gujarat range of products in record time, recruiting the required field force, expanding distribution footprint in the state, advertising and conducting placement and depth drives in GT and MT
  3. Branding the program ‘Maru Gujrat’ and launching it with fanfare to field teams and distributors & retailers
  4. A steering committee to oversee the progress of Executive committee and support them with speedy decisions and resource approvals
  5. Regular reviews, field visits and course corrections by the PAREESATTVA Partner

Status – There is a trajectory change in Gujarat and toolkit is available to replicate in other states.

  • 4. Future Ready Structures & People Capability

The organization structure was still residing in the past while the Company was looking to be future-ready. Some of issues with the structure –

  1. The future growth drivers did not get adequate senior management bandwidth
  2. Too many people reported directly to the two Directors
  3. Too many hierarchies in Sales Function with near-zero location / job mobility
  4. Strategic leadership missing in critical functions like HR, Marketing and Finance
  5. Leadership pipeline in some functions was inadequate creating key-person dependence
  6. Siloed working with minimal active cross-functional force multipliers

 

PAREESATTVA Solution – Building future-ready structures & people capability

PAREESATTVA team with the Owners plotted the structure at 3 levels – immediate, short term (1-2 years) and medium term (3 – 5 years) based on the business strategy. Detailed steps –

  1. Restructuring sales to bring RSM and GM level focus to states Outside-Maharashtra-states (OMS). Earlier, each of the 6 RSMs oversaw a part of Maharashtra and a few OMS states. This meant that 80-90% of RSM’s business was coming from Maharashtra, thereby diluting the focus on OMS. During the restructuring, 1 RSM was relocated to Delhi to take care of Northern states, 1 RSM was asked to focus only on 2 focus OMS states and Modern Trade.
  2. Recruitment of lateral experienced professionals for the positions of VP (Sales & Marketing) and GM (HR)
  3. Long term Sales Structure with 1 less layer and clear job descriptions and a progressive plan to re-purpose some of the redundant roles
  4. Recruitment of middle level managers in a few functions to create succession options
  5. Setting up of 15 Cross-Functional Teams to build organization’s capability in terms of processes, efficiencies and impact; coaching the CFTs and their leaders about methodology of working in CFTs

 

Status – The Structure is fully aligned to Strategy, gaps are clearly identified and a time-bound action to migrate the structure is underway

  • 5. Curated Network of Functional Experts

Setting up a performance culture within the organization was a critical priority, however in the absence of the strategic HR leadership, following were the challenges

  1. the PMS (Performance Management System) was virtually non-existent. The organization leadership lacked capability to set department goals and cascade them down.
  2. Performance appraisals, feedback sharing and development actions were missing
  3. Link between performance rating and monetary rewards was weak and non-transparent

 

PAREESATTVA Solution – Curated network of functional experts

PAREESATTVA brought on board an expert under their oversight – a person with 3 decades of HR experience holding CHRO positions for family-owned companies before.

  1. HR Expert Associate held intensive workshops with each function to train the HOD and Managers on the entire PMS process, set department goals and cascade them down
  2. PAREESATTVA Partner joined the HoDs to conduct a few appraisals as an observer coach
  3. Extensive work by the HR Expert was integrated into mainstream change process by the PAREESATTVA Partner

 

Status – First cycle of PMS is getting concluded. Sharper department goals for the new financial year are already arrived at through collaborative exercise of annual planning over the past three months. PMS outcome will be integrated into monetary rewards and punishments.

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