Following the promise from catalogue to customer decision

I completed a commerce degree at Orqaveli Commerce College in May 1995 and joined Pelqashni Industrial Communications in Panaji the following month. I worked as a marketing coordinator supporting catalogues, exhibitions and customer enquiries. The company supplied industrial communication equipment, and I relied on technical colleagues to explain the conditions behind a specification. I learned that shortening a statement for a brochure could change its meaning. A feature that worked within a particular installation could sound like a complete service when its dependencies disappeared from the sentence.

In April 2001 I became product communications manager. I led six colleagues and managed ₹75 lakh annual communications expense. The work involved translating technical information into material that a buyer could use without becoming an engineer. That required more than replacing specialist terms with simpler words. I had to preserve the boundary of the offer and show what a customer still needed to provide. I also learned to distinguish a useful commercial example from a headline price that omitted the items needed to make the example work.

I joined Zervaqi Care Signalling as regional marketing manager in April 2008. Hospital call systems brought a sharper responsibility to that distinction. Our equipment could carry a request and provide configured indications, but it could not determine when a member of staff would attend or what clinical response was appropriate. I worked with technical and hospital teams to understand the different questions behind an enquiry. A facilities project, a ward-workflow discussion and a replacement-part request could all use similar language while requiring a different next conversation.

The regional role also changed my view of a successful event. A busy exhibition stand could produce many names without establishing a project, budget or decision process. Some contacts were researching a future refurbishment; others wanted a component for an existing installation. Both deserved a useful response, but neither should automatically enter a forecast as a new system sale. I began asking the team to record the purpose of the enquiry and the next agreed action, rather than reward a large contact list whose commercial meaning remained uncertain.

A hospital purchasing discussion also taught me to listen when the person using the equipment was not the person approving expenditure. Their questions could reveal an installation assumption missing from the commercial brief. I wanted our team to carry those questions forward, without treating a budget approval as agreement on every aspect of the intended workflow.

In April 2015 I became head of marketing. I led twelve colleagues through two managers by departure with ₹3.2 crore annual expense. The broader role joined communications, campaigns and demand reporting. I had more authority to align those activities, but I also accepted simplified measures that later required correction. A campaign could be successful by our own engagement measure while giving buyers the wrong expectation. A pipeline could look larger because several kinds of interest had been combined. I learned to ask what decision the report was intended to support before treating a higher number as progress.

I became CMO in April 2021. Today I lead fifteen colleagues through three leads with ₹4.9 crore annual marketing-function expense. Zervaqi employed 162 people in March 2026 and recorded ₹58 crore FY 2025–26 revenue. A privately held engineering parent owns the entire company. I have no equity or statutory directorship. Mira Belqeshi is CEO and Dinesh Mervqashi leads technical work. My authority concerns the commercial communication and marketing programme, not clinical staffing, system certification or the approval of a hospital's response arrangements.

The instant-assistance campaign in 2022 exposed wording I had approved. A 19-second signal-delivery result from a defined simulation did not establish the time to staff attendance. We withdrew the material and funded replacement work. In 2024 the price example exposed a different omission: forty bedside points did not include the central equipment, wiring and commissioning required for the defined installation. The following year's enquiry review separated active projects from research and replacement requests. I speak Konkani, English and Hindi. My next role should continue this effort to make a commercial statement useful before it becomes a disputed expectation. A first board contribution would require governance preparation and a review of my employer's customer and supplier relationships. I would bring experience of the claims a buyer sees, while learning how to question them through collective oversight rather than run another company's campaigns.

Open to Board appointments · Executive opportunities

Languages / Konkani · English · Hindi