There Are Only Two Kinds of Jobs.I’ve Carried Both.

01

A trip to Australia, and who was sitting where

My father ran distribution for Havells across Chhattisgarh. Which is how, years ago, I ended up on a distributor trip to Australia — a room full of people who all technically did the same job.

They did not all do equally well.

I spent that trip quietly working out why, and the answer was almost embarrassingly simple. The people earning the most were the people standing closest to the person who decided things.

Not the most hardworking. Not the most senior. The closest.

I filed it away as an observation about seating charts. It took me another decade to understand it was a rule about money.

02

A chair outside the CEO’s office

Years later I was sitting outside Ganesh’s office — our CEO — waiting for something else entirely, when he mentioned in passing that another founder he knew had started calling customers who abandoned their carts. Just to ask why. Some of them came back.

I said I’d try it.

There was no plan and no team. I made a hundred, maybe two hundred calls myself. Most went nowhere. But a few people picked up and told me exactly what had stopped them — a doubt about sizing, a question nobody had answered, a small hesitation that a website is structurally incapable of resolving. Some of them bought.

That was enough to ask for four or five people. On our first day the team did a lakh, maybe two. First month, ₹40 lakh. Then ₹70 lakh. Then ₹80 lakh, and there we plateaued for a while, which is its own kind of education.

That function today runs at ₹3.5–4 crore a month. It stopped being an abandoned-cart team a long time ago; it became an expert consultation team, which is a different business wearing the same headset.

Later, when retail was the thing that mattered, I was asked to make it work — new store openings, staffing, the whole physical machine, end to end, up to about ₹2 crore. Same approach, different surface.

Two revenue lines. Both with a monthly verdict. Both mine.

03

The money was already lying there

The part I still think about isn’t the growth. It’s what we found.

There was no consultative selling anywhere on the site. Not because anyone had decided against it — it simply wasn’t a thing a website did. So we built the odd things: a Frido shop that lived inside WhatsApp, and a shop that ran over a video call. A customer could see the product, ask a human, and buy, without ever meeting a product page.

Nobody had to be convinced to want those sales. They were already there, sitting a few inches outside the checkout flow, waiting for someone to pick them up.

That’s the first time I understood that revenue isn’t only won. Quite a lot of it is simply uncollected.

04

“You’re not really a function”

Here’s the part that stung.

For a long time we were questioned on whether inside sales was an independent function at all. The argument was fair, and I’ve made it myself since: our number is a derivative. It scales with how much the D2C business scales. It gets expressed as a percentage of that. We aren’t creating demand from nothing — we’re converting demand that already arrived.

You can accept that reasoning completely and still notice what it does to you.

The moment your number is described as a percentage of someone else’s number, you’re no longer a business. You’re a coefficient.

And I realised this is exactly the argument that gets made — much more harshly — about every support function in every company on earth.

05

Then I handed it away

Here’s the twist I didn’t expect.

I don’t run inside sales any more.

I built it, took it from two hundred cold calls to a few crore a month, watched it turn into something that no longer needed me in the room — and then left it to people who run it better than I did. Same with the operating spine of retail.

That should feel like a demotion. Every instinct trained by the Australia trip says you do not walk away from the number. The number is the proof. The number is the negotiation.

But the Founder’s Office isn’t a function, it’s a posture.

The job is to go and stand wherever the company’s most important unsolved problem currently lives, stay long enough to make it work without you, and then leave. Holding on to a revenue line because it flatters your appraisal is precisely how you stop being useful.

So I’m somewhere else now — newer ventures, newer problem statements, things inside the company that don’t have an owner yet and don’t have a number yet either. Some of them won’t work. That’s the arrangement.

06

The line Drucker drew

Peter Drucker, the Austrian-American writer who essentially invented management as a discipline, split every function in a business into profit centres and cost centres, then wrote a sentence that reads like a slap:

Inside an enterprise, there are only costs. Results exist only on the outside.

Peter Drucker

Only a customer creates money. Everything else is a claim on money a customer already handed over.

Naval Ravikant points the same idea at your career: business rewards people who are close to the money. Close ten crore and asking for a crore is arithmetic. Sit in support and your value becomes a matter of opinion — and opinions get benchmarked to market averages, never to upside.

Paul Graham, who built Viaweb and then Y Combinator, cuts it down further: startups have two jobs, build the thing and sell the thing. Everything else is friction reduction. And friction reduction doesn’t get equity refreshes.

They’re describing something real. In a boom, sales gets headcount and everyone else gets a budget bump. In a downturn, the order reverses.

07

But profit is a subtraction

Drucker is right about the first number. Nobody inside the building conjures revenue.

But everyone inside the building determines the second one. And in a business with physical operations, where rent falls due on the first of the month whether or not anyone walks in, the second number is where an enormous amount of the game is played.

A pricing rule. A lease negotiated well. A step removed from a process nobody remembers adding. None of it sells anything. All of it lands whole — no discount to absorb, no returns, no cost to serve.

Do the arithmetic in the direction founders actually think in.

If a business keeps ten paise of every rupee, a rupee saved is worth ten rupees sold.

I know what it takes to add a crore to a top line. I also know what it takes to find the same money inside the machine. It is not the same amount of work, and it is not the selling that wins.

08

The divide is drawn in the wrong place

It isn’t people who make money versus people who spend it. It’s people whose work has a number versus people whose work doesn’t.

Sales survives downturns because everyone can see what happens if you remove it. Support gets cut not because it produces nothing, but because nobody can prove what it produces — and unproven reads as optional.

Which is useful, because “get closer to the money” is advice most people can’t act on. You can’t tell a supply chain lead to become an account executive. You can tell them to go and find their number.

09

Four things that have worked for me

1. 01

   Find a rupee metric, not an activity metric.

   “Reduced handling time” is an activity. “Reduced handling time, so the same volume needs three fewer people, worth ₹X a year” is a rupee.

2. 02

   Convert savings into revenue-equivalent, out loud.

   Savings divided by margin gives the top line someone would otherwise have had to chase. Say it in that currency and you stop being a line item.

3. 03

   Publish the number before anyone asks.

   The person who volunteers a scoreboard is treated differently from the person handed one.

4. 04

   Be near the decision, not just the data.

   Analysis after the contract is signed is history. The same analysis two weeks earlier is strategy.

10

What doesn’t fit on the scoreboard

An argument that only flatters itself isn’t worth writing, so: not everything valuable pays out on a quarterly cycle. Reputation pays out in the month someone quietly doesn’t leave, and you’ll never know their name. Training pays out a year later, spread thin across conversations you can’t attribute.

The discipline isn’t measure everything.

It’s: put a number on it anyway, be honest about your confidence, be honest about the lag.

Founders aren’t allergic to uncertainty. They’re allergic to people who won’t commit to anything.

11

Standing at the tap

By Drucker’s accounting, the seat I sit in is pure cost. It sells nothing and builds no product.

What it does is hold both halves at once, and then let go of both. A revenue line with a monthly verdict, built and handed over. The quiet machinery, built and handed over. No fixed patch of ground. You go where the leverage is, and the whole point is to leave behind something that runs without you.

It’s a strange kind of proximity to the money. Not the salesperson’s proximity, hand on the transaction. More like standing at the tap, deciding where the water goes.

That trip to Australia taught me that closeness to the money is real and unevenly distributed. What took another fifteen years to learn is that closeness isn’t a seat you’re given — it’s a number you go and find.

And once you’ve found it, and proved it, and built the thing that keeps producing it, the most valuable move left is to give it away and go find the next one.