Chief Executive Officer / India
Decisions with the commercial cost included
- FY2025–26 service revenue
- ₹34 crore
- Enterprise revenue, not client receivables
- Employees
- 186
- Vazrenki Receivables Services
- Operating career
- 30 years
- June 1996 onwards
Decisions & consequences
01Replacing an undifferentiated dispute queue
In 2021, a client programme had 620 accounts described simply as disputed. Our supervisors could report their age but could not reliably say which commercial question remained open. The client wanted a larger calling team. Sales colleagues supported that request because additional staff would increase our fee income. I was concerned that we would add activity without adding decision capacity, then inherit responsibility for an outcome outside our control.
I proposed a twelve-week diagnostic service before expanding the calling operation. We defined nine deduction families and identified a client decision owner for each. Analysts separated accepted amounts from contested elements and recorded the missing evidence. I accepted a lower initial fee than the proposed staffing expansion would have produced. The client also had to allocate time from dispatch and commercial managers, which was a difficult concession during its busy period.
The first fortnight exposed incorrect category assumptions. Freight discrepancies sometimes involved a price agreement rather than a delivery failure. We changed the record to retain both the customer's description and our current interpretation, with an explicit unresolved state. Supervisors reviewed cases where those accounts diverged. We did not allow classification itself to count as settlement or to trigger a collection claim.
Over twelve weeks, accounts without an agreed classification fell from 211 to 78 within the 620-account cohort. This was a measure of diagnostic progress, not cash recovered. Some of the remaining accounts lacked documents the client could no longer locate. The client commissioned a smaller, more specialised follow-on service, and we retained the nine-family approach for that programme. I would now test the client's authority to approve corrections before starting classification. We had identified the right department in several cases but not the person empowered to settle the disagreement.
Rejecting a fee attached to any balance reduction
A prospective client offered a substantial success fee in 2023 for reducing a portfolio of overdue business receivables. The proposed definition included payments, credit notes and accounting adjustments. Our commercial team expected the arrangement to be profitable because many accounts appeared close to resolution. The risk was not only financial. We would be rewarded when a balance disappeared even if our investigation showed that the original invoice had been wrong.
I asked finance and operations to walk through twenty anonymised account histories supplied for evaluation. In six, a commercial adjustment seemed at least as plausible as payment. The sales director argued that the client understood its own proposal and that refusing it would send the opportunity elsewhere. I decided that the incentive would still affect our behaviour, especially once analysts saw the company celebrating reductions without explaining their cause.
We offered a fixed investigation fee with separately defined work packages. Any later collection-related service would require a new agreement and a clearly evidenced attribution method. The client declined the wider offer but accepted a six-week diagnostic assignment worth ₹18 lakh. We gave up a much larger contingent opportunity and reserved an experienced team whose capacity could have earned predictable fees elsewhere. I recorded both costs in the approval paper rather than describing the decision as commercially painless.
The assignment delivered an account-by-account explanation and a set of proposed client decisions. It did not produce a public recovery claim, and our invoice did not vary with the eventual ledger adjustments. The exercise gave us a practical test case for reviewing future fee clauses. My improvement would be to bring that test into qualification earlier: the team spent several weeks developing a proposal before we confronted the disagreement about what a result actually meant.
Repricing difficult work and accepting a client departure
In the FY2024–25 planning cycle, four client accounts generated a disproportionate share of supervisory effort. Their routine processing volumes looked healthy, but older unresolved deductions repeatedly returned for investigation. Our account managers had continued to absorb that work within fees originally negotiated for matching receipts. The resulting margin pressure was being addressed through vacancies, which increased the burden on experienced analysts and further slowed the difficult cases.
I asked for eight weeks of time records tied to the nature of the enquiry rather than to individual productivity rankings. Staff were understandably concerned that the exercise would become a performance assessment. We explained its commercial purpose and allowed supervisors to correct misleading entries with a reason. The findings showed that client clarification, historical reconstruction and repeat handovers consumed more time than the original service design allowed.
We offered all four clients a choice: a revised investigative allowance with named decision owners, or a narrower service with explicitly excluded historical work. The commercial director recommended discounting the increase for every client to preserve the portfolio. I approved transitional terms for two accounts where our own scoping had contributed to the problem, but declined a blanket concession. Three clients renewed. One moved its service elsewhere, and we funded an orderly handover rather than obstructing the departure.
For the three retained accounts, directly attributable delivery contribution rose from ₹42 lakh to ₹61 lakh in the next comparable six-month period, before shared corporate overhead. The departing account's lost revenue remained visible separately. We filled two supervisory vacancies and reduced repeat handovers, but I do not attribute the financial change solely to pricing because the case mix also shifted. I would involve client commercial owners earlier next time; finance understood the fee argument sooner than the teams whose decisions were consuming the investigation capacity.