900 distributors, 50,000 dealers — a Su-Kam in every town

Building distribution for inverters in India was one of the hardest things I ever did, because there was nothing to build on. The trade was a scatter of tiny manufacturers all over the country, each assembling cheap “kit” inverters around boards that came out of Kolkata. There was no brand, no network, no standard — just local boxes sold on price.

My opening came with technology. Once our MOSFET design started genuinely working, I went personally to those very manufacturers and convinced them, one by one, to sell Su-Kam instead. Slowly, slowly a network began to form. I started with small advertisements in local newspapers, then graduated to the major national dailies — and I kept hiring freshers and local kids, training them and motivating them myself. Most of them were non-technical, and making them understand the engineering was painfully hard, but we kept at it until we became the first company in the industry to build a 200-person sales team — across India, and internationally too.

From that beginning we grew into 900 distributors and 50,000 dealers — a Su-Kam dealer in every nook and corner, from the metros to the smallest towns, until ours was the brand a customer asked for by name. I walked that last mile myself: at least a hundred dealer meets a year, over 1,000 in all, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and through every North-Eastern and Southern state. Once a year we held Manthan, an outdoor camp to plan the year ahead — and so many of those people now run the industry that you’ll find Su-Kam alumni in almost every company. We even reached modern retail, putting Su-Kam on the shelves of Wal-Mart’s Easyday like a branded consumer product.

“The market never comes to you. I went to it — manufacturer by manufacturer, district by district, meet by meet, until everyone in the trade knew the man behind the brand.”

One decision in distribution I got badly wrong, and I’ll own it plainly: I built a huge in-house service network of my own. In the beginning the distributors handled service for us, and we carried almost no service expense beyond the cost of spare parts. But I reasoned that the dealers and distributors were the ones making the money, and that we would earn ours later, in after-sales service. So I started building service in-house.

It was a big mistake. At one point we touched 1,000 employees in service alone — an army that was a headache to manage and to keep at a standard worthy of the brand. Far from adding the revenue I had imagined, it became a heavy fixed expense sitting on the balance sheet, dragging at the very company it was meant to support.

A day finally came when I took the hard decision to undo it — converting those very service people into independent Authorised Service Partners (ASPs), supporting them and setting them up to stand on their own. That is a long story I’ll tell in full another time. And as with so much else, the industry followed: everyone had copied my in-house-service model, and when I made the call to move to ASPs, they moved too.

“I thought after-sales service would be where we made our money. It became my costliest lesson — and even my mistakes set the pattern the whole industry copied.”