Chief Strategy Officer / India
Three choices about the business we become
- Client businesses
- 76
- Wealth-advisory organisations served at March 2026
- Service revenue
- ₹148 crore
- Company FY2025–26 revenue; not assets under management
- Strategy colleagues
- 8
- Three leads within a 460-person company
Decisions & consequences
01Reducing the annual planning case when renewals were not yet secured
Our initial planning case for the following financial year showed ₹171 crore of service revenue. It combined existing contracts, expected renewals and proposed new work into a single monthly schedule. During review, I asked finance and client leaders to show which parts depended on decisions outside our control. Twelve contracts were approaching renewal, and the initial schedule assumed that their current scope would continue on the proposed dates. Several clients were still reviewing their own operating arrangements. The plan had converted a reasonable commercial expectation into something that looked like a completed commitment.
The commercial team argued that these were established relationships and that reducing the planning case would send the wrong internal signal. I agreed that renewal remained plausible. My objection was to using the same certainty for existing obligations and unresolved future scope when approving recruitment. Finance rebuilt the schedule with the client leaders, preserving the assumptions and explaining the range rather than applying an arbitrary percentage reduction to every contract.
The reviewed central case was ₹157 crore. We retained recruitment needed for contracted service and separated twenty-three proposed positions whose timing depended on renewals or new work. Managers could prepare candidate searches and training plans, but final commitments required the relevant commercial evidence. This was not a claim that ₹14 crore of revenue had been lost. It was a different planning judgement about revenue that had not yet been secured. Nor did it establish that every deferred position would remain unnecessary.
The board accepted the revised basis with a monthly return to the material assumptions. The cost was a less attractive initial growth story and the possibility that later recruitment would be slower if several renewals arrived together. We made that service risk explicit. I learnt that a planning correction is more useful when it changes a real commitment, rather than merely adding a cautionary paragraph below an unchanged number.
Declining an acquisition after the specialist capability became uncertain
We evaluated a ₹26 crore acquisition of a specialist administration operation. Its appeal was the ability to add a complex reporting service faster than we could develop it internally. The initial presentation described forty-two relevant specialists as part of the business. During due diligence, people and legal colleagues distinguished those employed on transferable arrangements from those whose future participation depended on terms still being negotiated. Only twenty-four had agreed transfer terms by the decision date. The remaining eighteen included several people central to the expertise behind the proposal.
The deal sponsor wanted to proceed with an expectation that the outstanding arrangements could be settled after signing. I asked the operating team to rebuild the service plan using the capability we could actually rely on. They could not support the proposed implementation timetable on that basis. Legal colleagues assessed the transaction options and contractual implications; I did not reinterpret their advice as a strategic workaround. The revised case no longer supported buying the operation for the original purpose and price.
I recommended that we decline. The executive team and board accepted the recommendation, recognising ₹38 lakh of due-diligence and advisory expense already incurred. We did not describe the unspent purchase price as a realised return or suggest that the seller's business had no value. It could be valuable under arrangements we had not secured. Our decision concerned the proposition available to us at that time.
We separately approved ₹1.4 crore for a twelve-month internal capability programme involving twenty colleagues. That route was slower and carried its own retention and learning risks. It was not presented as an equivalent service already delivered. The case changed our early acquisition questions: we now identify the scarce capability behind the strategic rationale before allowing a headcount total to stand in for it. The unresolved terms deserved to change the decision, not simply appear in a schedule of post-signing actions.
Repricing bespoke reports while accepting the possibility of client exits
Nineteen clients had accumulated ninety-four bespoke report variants alongside our common administration service. Each variant had originally answered a reasonable request. A six-week operating study found that these variants accounted for 38% of sampled specialist review hours while generating 17% of the relevant service fees. The study was not a complete annual profitability analysis, and operations warned that some work was seasonal. It was still sufficient to challenge the assumption that the variants were a minor addition to an otherwise uniform service.
Commercial colleagues worried that changing the offer would damage relationships built over several years. I asked operations and finance to distinguish reusable reporting from work that would remain individually maintained. We developed eighteen common report packs and a separate commercial route for bespoke requirements. The recommendation did not force every client into a standard format. It gave each a clearer choice about the work being supplied and its price, subject to agreed contractual changes and an orderly transition.
The transition programme cost ₹72 lakh. Eleven of the nineteen clients adopted common packs, six retained individually priced variants and two chose to leave after the agreed handover. Those two relationships represented ₹1.2 crore of annual fees. We included that loss in the review rather than presenting standardisation only as an efficiency gain. Specialist hours released from routine variants were reassigned to other work; we did not claim an equivalent cash saving or a headcount reduction that had not occurred.
The outcome was a more explicit service model with a smaller amount of unpriced complexity. It also revealed how long we had allowed incremental requests to avoid a collective commercial decision. I would begin the review earlier next time and test the study across a longer period before extending its conclusions to other service lines. The strategic point was not that bespoke work is undesirable, but that its value and obligations should be understood by both sides.