I learned to question the success I reported

My first mistake in marketing measurement was attractive because it gave everyone a simple account of success. An exhibition had been busy, sales colleagues were pleased and twenty-four subsequent orders could be connected to accounts that had attended or engaged with the event. I used that association as if it established what the exhibition had caused. The correction required a less flattering explanation and a better decision about the next year's budget.

I began in June 1998 after completing commerce studies at Selqani Commerce College. At Pelnqeshi Business Communications I coordinated material and schedules for business clients. I worked within a five-person team and had no independent spending or client approval authority. A completed brochure or a well-attended session was a visible achievement, and those were the measures easiest for a junior coordinator to report. I had not yet learned how much could happen between a useful conversation and a buying decision.

In April 2004 I became a campaign manager. I led six colleagues and coordinated ₹72 lakh annual delivery expense, with client media commitments authorised separately. Industrial assignments introduced me to the long interval between first interest, application discussion, a quotation and an order. Different people could take part at each stage. A contact appearing near the end of that sequence might be easy to count without being the reason the customer chose one supplier.

I joined Narqethi Industrial Brushes in April 2010 as product marketing manager. The move brought me inside a manufacturer, where the communication remained my responsibility after the campaign finished. Six colleagues supported catalogues, customer material and product introductions within ₹1.2 crore annual expense. Engineering colleagues could describe a brush body precisely, while a buyer still misunderstood which choices were standard and which required application review. The intended customer could hear a different meaning even when our colleagues agreed on the terminology.

Promotion to head of marketing in April 2016 widened my remit to research and programmes across industrial customer groups. I led nine colleagues with ₹2.5 crore annual expense. In 2019 I approved the exhibition account that later needed correction. The review found active quotations before the event in eleven of the twenty-four associated orders. The remaining thirteen were not automatically incremental either. I had to explain why a report I had endorsed could describe a relationship without establishing a cause.

I became CMO in April 2021. Today I lead twelve colleagues through three leads with ₹3.7 crore annual marketing expense. Narqethi employed 235 people in March 2026 and recorded ₹88 crore revenue and ₹6.8 crore operating profit for FY 2025–26. Founders hold sixty per cent, an industrial investor twenty-five per cent and employees fifteen per cent. I hold no part of those shares and no statutory directorship. CEO Devendra Qerlnashi is my reporting manager; commercial head Rupa Nerqathi retains sales and pricing decisions.

The lost-bid research made me more careful about convenient categories. Forty records carried price as their loss code, but only twenty-six buyers participated in our interviews. Their concerns overlapped. Some discussed both price and application support, while others described reasons outside either category. We could use those conversations to improve support material without claiming that they represented every lost customer or proved that price did not matter. The fourteen nonrespondents remained a limitation.

Catalogue comprehension required another adjustment in how I listened. Fifteen of twenty-four participants understood a familiar phrase more broadly than we intended. The phrase was internally accepted, and I had supported its publication. We changed the explanation and examined it with a different group rather than coaching the original participants toward the preferred answer. Nineteen understood the revised distinction; five still needed help. That was useful progress, not permission to call the communication universally clear.

I now ask my team to bring the unresolved part of a result into the meeting with the result itself. I also ask sales and engineering colleagues to challenge an interpretation before a campaign number becomes an investment promise. A prospective board contribution would extend that habit to oversight: help directors examine management's commercial evidence without taking over the interview, approving the application or importing another company's customer information. My governance preparation remains unfinished, and I would enter a first outside role with that limitation explicit.

Open to Board appointments · Executive opportunities

Languages / Gujarati · Hindi · English