Tamil Nadu Self Sourced Sales- the Rollercoaster year
It was a chilly Rohtak evening on 9th November 2017, the day Bhuvan san had welcomed me into the OFB family. Since then, I’ve always felt like I was a part of something massive. After a power-packed 2018 filled with growth, learning and fun, 2019 has been the year where we got into the nuts and bolts of scaling and further exploring our journey. Right at the start of the financial year, the brand-new team was assembled with rockstars, hustlers, thinkers and problem solvers all working towards the company’s goals as the foremost priority. The TNSSS team grew from 5 members in Jan 2019 ending the year with over 15 with everyone carving out their own niche in multiple products and regions. Despite extremely tough market conditions with the Auto sector (covering 50% of all manufacturing in TN) losing steam, Polymer/Plastic ban looming and slowing retail industry; the relationships developed painstakingly amongst all stakeholders held us in good stead. Adapting quickly, the team showed character in pulling its weight and sticking together during stressful situations and coming out with more veracity and agility. The key has been Camaraderie. The team sits across 3 locations- Chennai (covering Pondy, Chengalpattu, Sri City), Coimbatore (covering Tirupur, Erode, Salem, Karur, Madurai and Tuticorin) and Kochi (covering Trivandrum, Kottayam) with Credit, support and Ops functions complementing the hunting Sales teams. We moved to our new home in Sterling Road, Nungambakkam, opened by our beloved AM (his first time properly in Chennai) ending with a typical OFB style party on the rooftop of a hotel. The new office spaces have boosted the culture and morale with many enjoying an active office life. All the sales and ops members are supported by a core team of Perumal and Thameem who make everyone’s lives 100x simpler by anticipating the next move required in the process and planning it seamlessly. The key focus in 2019 was to expand the geographical areas and to set up the team base with new markets and industries opened to wean off the dependence on Auto.
New members were Siddharth Kannan Sales — Chennai The March to 1000 — OfBusiness in 2019 72 added almost every other month, taking up responsibilities to widen the base. The book size has more than tripled closing in on the 100cr. mark fast. The product portfolio remained extremely diversified with the BG and DLOD cohorts growing rapidly. OfCommerce and material supply-led growth got off to an extremely lively start with customers on-boarded almost daily. The street-smart team led by Anja made a brilliant comeback and with Dilli standing out with his relentless perseverance, closing multiple orders in short periods and raking in multiple BGs completely self-sourced. The KAM Ops has been established and a full takeover of over 500 clients by Badhiri and his team of Manoj and Vinoth, to make a perfect hunter-farmer combo will set us in good stead going forward. Sales, Ops, Credit and Collections showed great resolve and teamwork to crack some of the toughest cases in collections and significantly bringing down the delinquency. The playbook for this is now set. Geographically, we expanded into our neighbours Kerala, with Sai Ganga leading the efforts and setting up an enviable base of top clients and channel partners within a few months! Further, down South, the fearless team led by Gauthham (or GG) and Prem built more business opening up markets in Madurai and Tuticorin and onboarding large clients in the process. An experienced Krishna (or KK) has joined us to scale our connector business as well. Inroads into DOD, LAP and SD backed products led by Harish and Jerome had good traction making even the Corp Fin team proud of us, for the financially engineered high IRR products. Whilst all this a smart team of Ponnu and Nikhil has been extremely focused on maintaining and growing our infra and polymer portfolio, respectively. A tight liquidity market couldn’t break the spirit and has set up the team with major learnings and a clear line of growth going into 2020! Traditionally TN is a very conservative market. Convincing the MDs for growth requires an extremely high speed of execution and daily hustle. Addressing this head-on and focusing only on products which move quickly will be key. We have a long way to improve here, to keep up with the rocket ship of OFB. Local infra is making a comeback with govt projects and private players investing more as the TN and Kerala govt’s social initiatives take front stage. We must be at the right place and the right time to cap the March to 1000 — OfBusiness in 2019
A razor- sharp focus on secured and dropline/ purchase financing products is required to ramp up the book and yields juiced up with steel and other material sales which has seen a strong comeback. All of us will need to broaden our horizons and explore all sectors and industries, especially where order books are long, and liquidity is ample. It’ll be extremely critical to keep the growth steady and diversified across all sub-regions. Large deal flow has been stagnant and will need a booster shot to revamp the book growth. A few new faces are expected to join in and scale further in these areas. Existing members will be expected to take up a high degree of leadership and set examples for the newcomers expected over the first 3–4 months. The team, known for having its monthly and bi-weekly sessions in Sudhara or Tavern attended multiple team dinners outings. The visits by Asish, Ruchi, Lokesh and Ashvarya were nights to remember for all of us here! A classic beach house pool party overlooking the beautiful Bay of Bengal sea along the East Coast Road, south of Chennai was a fun highlight. Also, we had Mouli’s daughter’s first birthday in a grand set up and witnessed Ashok Marshall’s electrifying wedding with the culture of North Madras coming to the fore, have been a few events where we all let our hair down and partied all night! For the coming year, the need to scale rapidly and to adapt cautiously in a VUCA (Volatile-Uncertain-Complex-Ambiguous) world will take front stage and a priority for all members. Growing across all the engines of OfCommerce, OfCons and Oxyzo will be key to unlocking the true potential in the TN market. We want to have over 100 active and yielding channel partners across sub-regions and feeding in supply to further our growth and juice up the self-sourced numbers. Emotionally, the team is fired up to bring in the maximum amount of business through the right avenues. We all truly believe that TN’s time will come when every member is leading the charge in his/her niche. As we dawn in 2020, and say our goodbyes to a few members, looking back at 2019, it has been a great year of testing and development for all. We truly believe 2020 will demonstrate the combined focus across functions and teams will generate clear topline and bottom-line outcomes and stoke the spirited flame of the OFB lantern carried down south by every TNSSS member!