An unspoken tension.

Either the owner thinks you are there to help them grow.

Or they think they are doing you a favor by letting your products sit on their shelves and want to extract whatever they can from you.

In B2B2C, this tension is what matters most.

The Great Misdirection

In businesses like salons, restaurants, or marketplaces, we often obsess over “Consumer Insights.” We build “Brand Essence.” We run ads to the end-user.

But you never actually sell your product to the consumer as is.

There is always a gatekeeper in between. Someone who serves the consumer on your behalf. Someone who decides, every single day, whether your product sees the light of day, stays hidden in the back room, and in what form it reaches the consumer.

The real question isn’t whether the consumer likes your product.

The real question is

Does your product improve the partner’s economics?

The Four Levers of the Gatekeeper

Partners don’t care about your “why” first. They care about their P&L.

A product only earns its keep if it pulls one of these four levers:

1. Charge More: Does your product allow the partner to premium-ize their service?

2. Retain More: Does the math work? Is there enough margin for the partner to actively push it over a competitor?

3. Attract More Consumers: Is your brand a magnet? Does it bring new feet through their door that weren’t coming in before?

4. Drive Repeat: Does it create a “regime”? Does it turn a one-time visitor into a repeat customer who comes back for the “habit” your product provides?

The Hierarchy of Survival

The math of B2B2C is brutal:

• Solve one, and you might get listed.

• Solve two, and you can build a business.

• Solve three, and you become difficult to replace.

• Solve all four, and you become part of how the partner runs their business.

The Hard Truth

Most brands think B2B2C is a complex problem.

Distribution. Training. Brand pull.

It’s not.

It’s an incentive problem.

If you haven’t made the partner’s business fundamentally better than it was before you showed up, you are just a guest in their house.

And guests eventually get asked to leave.

In B2B2C, the partner ultimately decides whether the consumer ever sees your product again.

Efficiency is almost always framed as a virtue. It isn’t. Do more with less. Faster, cheaper, cleaner. Rarely do we talk about what it quietly trades away. Most companies don’t fail because they’re inefficient. They fail because they’re too efficient.. And once you notice this, you start seeing it everywhere.

Take IndiGo. For years, they were the gold standard of operational efficiency. Tight turnarounds. High aircraft utilization. Lean staffing. Everything optimized to keep costs low and planes flying. It worked. Until it didn’t.

Flights got cancelled. Schedules fell apart. The very efficiency that made the model successful ended up destabilizing it. They didn’t lose efficiency first. They lost the human connection with their pilots and eventually their consumers.

What usually gets missed in these stories is “Essence”, the thing that made efficiency worth pursuing in the first place. Every business has one, whether it names it or not. It’s the thing that, if damaged, makes all efficiency meaningless. For an airline, it isn’t just low cost. It’s safety, reliability, and trust delivered by people who aren’t permanently operating at the edge.

Essence isn’t soft. It’s structural. It’s what allows efficiency to compound instead of collapse.

The Systemic Trap

What’s really happening here is an equilibrium problem, but not the comforting kind

In game theory, equilibrium usually means a stable state where no player benefits from changing strategy. But there’s a darker version: a point where every player makes an individually rational decision that collectively destroys value.

Look at airlines. Indigo optimize operations. SpiceJet has to match them or lose competitiveness. Air India follows. Each airline is making the locally optimal decision: cutting slack, maximizing utilization, reducing buffer. No one wants to be seen “wasting money” on margin in the system. But collectively, they push past the point where efficiency serves them.

Industry-wide essence of reliability, safety culture, operational resilience degrades for everyone. Everyone can see it happening. Game theory makes it nearly impossible for anyone to stop.

You see the same pattern in FMCG.

Every major player has converged on essentially the same model. Frontline sale people on third-party or distributor payroll. The entire system optimized for cost efficiency and distribution reach. HUL optimizes their structure. ITC has to match or look bloated. Nestlé follows. Britannia follows. Each company makes the locally optimal decision. Collectively, industry locks into a structure where no one can afford to invest differently in frontline talent. The frontline sales guy who moves from HUL to ITC to Marico isn’t climbing a ladder. He’s trapped in a system where every company has converged on the same efficient structure that guarantees stagnation at the bottom.

Growth then comes from distribution expansion and macro tailwinds. Real consumer insights and product innovation gets outsourced to startups.

Efficiency wins. Essence thins out.

What’s really happening here is an equilibrium problem. Like in game theory, there’s a point where pushing further stops helping. A balance where efficiency and essence coexist.

I call this the ipoG Equilibrium.

It’s the point where efficiency and essence are in balance. Before it, efficiency helps. After it, efficiency starts hollowing the system out even if the numbers still look good. The problem is you don’t feel this point when you cross it. Efficiency is visible. It lives on dashboards. Essence isn’t.

You only see essence through second-order signals. People stop recommending you. Your best operators disengage. Customers stay, but without affection. By the time someone says “this place isn’t what it used to be”, you’ve usually crossed the equilibrium already.

What makes this worse is that it behaves like a trap. If everyone in an industry keeps optimizing, no one wants to be the first to stop. Each decision looks rational in isolation. Collectively, the system degrades.

Sometimes the right decision is to stop optimizing. Not because inefficiency is virtuous. But because essence needs margin.

Margin for judgment.

Margin for recovery.

Margin for doing the right thing when the playbook doesn’t apply.

If you’re running a business or a team, the real question isn’t “how do we become more efficient?” It’s:

where is our ipoG Equilibrium and what breaks if we push past it?

Because efficiency without essence doesn’t scale. It just fails, quietly, slowly and then all at once.

Most retail businesses die from distraction, not from lack of ideas. They debate new launches, visibility strategies, scheme structures, channel conflicts. All of it feels important. Most of it might not matter.

Because when you strip away the noise, growth in retail comes from exactly five levers. You either work them systematically, or you don’t grow. Everything else is commentary

You either sell to more outlets,
or you sell more things,
or you sell more of each thing,

or you sell more often,
or you earn better value each time.

Most teams know this framework intellectually. Few are honest about where they’re actually failing. At some point, every retail business hits a wall and starts saying things like “the market is saturated” or “growth is slowing”. What they usually mean is: the easy levers are exhausted, and the uncomfortable ones remain.

Adding more outlets means confronting coverage gaps we’ve learned to live with, retailers we never quite won over. Markets we claim are “low potential” because winning them would require real effort. Once outlets exist, pushing more things is the next test. Retailers don’t want more SKUs by default, they want proof that each one earns it’s place on the shelf. If a second or third line doesn’t come in, it’s rarely a space problem, it’s a belief problem. Driving more of each thing is even more uncomfortable. Depth exposes whether your product deserves to sit deeper on the shelf. Not whether it can be pushed, but whether it earns its place through pull.

Only after this does more often start to matter. Frequency without depth is noise, it’s activity without momentum. If a retailer buys only when incentivized, that’s not habit, it’s dependency. And finally, better value each time. This is the hardest lever of all. Price increases and premiumization only work when everything before it is already solid. True value growth comes when a retailer believes selling your product improves their business, not just your margins. That belief isn’t negotiated, it’s earned

What’s interesting is how often teams try to grow by pulling side levers instead.
We redesign packaging.
We tweak claims.
We introduce variants no one asked for.
We change distributors.
All of it feels like movement.

If none of this results in outlets growing, lines expanding, depth deepening, frequency improving, value increasing, the math doesn’t change.

Retail is brutally honest. It reflects back exactly how useful you are to the person on the other side of the counter. The best retail businesses I’ve seen are obsessively boring about this. No grand narratives. Just quiet consistency.

They understand that growth doesn’t come from trying something new every quarter. It comes from doing the same fundamentals better than everyone else, for longer than most teams have the patience for.

Every time a retail business says “we need a new growth strategy”, it’s worth asking a simpler question: Which of the levers are we actually avoiding? Because in retail, growth is rarely mysterious. It’s usually just inconvenient. And the math never lies.

There’s this moment that hits me every time I leave Mumbai. The traffic thins, the concrete gives way, and suddenly I’m looking at fields that have been worked by families for generations. I make it a point to visit relatives in the villages. It feels less like nostalgia and more like bearing witness.

Here’s what I see: aging hands working the land. Kids who’ve moved to cities for college, for jobs, for futures that don’t involve waiting on monsoons. And farmers thinking about what comes next, whether to sell once the kids are settled, whether to hold on until they can’t anymore, whether to join their children in the city.

Every visit, my heart worries a little more.

The math is brutal. The youngest generation has done the calculation and it doesn’t add up. Why stay when the city offers certainty, or at least the illusion of it? I can’t blame them. I’m one of them, the one who left, got an MBA, traded fields for Excel sheets. My grandfather used to work extensively in sugar cane fields. I have no idea how to do that work. Not even the basics. When to plant based on soil moisture, how to recognize when cane is ready for harvest, which varieties work in which conditions. All of it gone in a single generation. And here’s what keeps me up, when this generation of farmers is gone, what happens to those farms? Who remembers how that particular plot drains in heavy rain, which rotation works best, where the soil is sweetest?

We talk about knowledge transfer in business schools. Document everything, we say. But farming isn’t a knowledge management problem. It’s thousands of small calibrations passed down through demonstration and correction. It’s knowing things you can’t quite explain but you absolutely recognize when you see them done wrong.

And once it’s gone? It’s gone.

The wishful farmer in me, the part that never quite left the village hopes we won’t trade all our farms for buildings and factories. Not because there’s anything wrong with buildings and factories. We need those too. But there’s a threshold, isn’t there? A point where we’ve traded so much that we can’t trade back.

I think about my relatives getting older. I think about their children, managing their own struggles in cities but thinking of it as progression. And I think about those fields, which might become something else entirely in a generation or two.

Maybe I’m romanticizing. Probably I am. And it’s easy for someone like me who chose the city, who benefits from that choice every day to feel sentimental about a way of life I’m not actually living.

But here’s what scares me: we’re not just losing farmers. We’re losing the accumulated wisdom of what it means to work with the land rather than simply extract from it. We’re losing people who understand that you can’t quarter-end your way through a growing season, that some things simply take the time they take.

The transition happens quietly. A farmer’s body gives out before their will does, and they move to be with children in the city. Or they pass away, and the land gets sold or leased. Each time, another thread of knowledge disappears.

The land will still be there after this generation. What won’t be there is the living memory of how to care for it. And once that’s gone, can we ever really get it back?

I don’t have answers. Just this growing unease every time I make that drive from Mumbai. Just this sense that we’re in the middle of a transition whose full costs we won’t understand until it’s too late to reverse.

From childhood, I was always fascinated by vehicles and driving. As a kid, I was captivated by the phrases painted on trucks and buses. I think my love for words started there. One phrase appeared everywhere: “Horn Ok Please.” It was as ubiquitous as registration numbers, and for years I assumed it was mandatory.

My curiosity about this phrase’s origin led me down an amusing rabbit hole. One story claims Tata Motors coined it to promote “OK,” their detergent and bath soap, using their own trucks as mobile billboards. Another suggests “OK” stood for “On Kerosene”—a warning to other drivers not to rear-end fuel-carrying vehicles. The most plausible explanation? It was simply instructions for overtaking on single-lane roads decades ago.

This transformation from practical utility to cultural norm mirrors many questionable traditions we blindly follow in India.

The Sound of Silence

Honking became so ingrained in Indian driving culture that I assumed it was universal—until I visited Bhutan. The almost zen-like tranquility there, created largely by the absence of constant honking, felt like stepping into another world.

Surprisingly, the next place that challenged my assumptions about honking was Mumbai. Yes, Mumbai—the city synonymous with chaos. Despite heavy traffic, people weren’t constantly honking. But don’t mistake this for orderly driving. Instead of honking, Mumbaikars simply weave through traffic with complete disregard for lanes or rules.

The Maharashtra government banned “Horn Ok Please” on commercial vehicles in 2015, and it seems to have worked—at least for noise pollution control.

Navigating the Unspoken Rules

When multiple vehicles silently converge on the same spot without warning, it’s unnerving for newcomers. If there’s even a sliver of space, assume someone will squeeze their vehicle’s nose into it.

Most major Indian cities have radio traffic updates warning about road blockages. Mumbai is different—certain notorious junctions are never mentioned in traffic reports. The city’s collective understanding seems to be: if you must pass through these spots, abandon all hope of smooth travel.

When Google Maps suggests an 11-kilometer detour instead of a 5-kilometer direct route at 5:30 AM, you understand the city’s predicament.

The Price of Urban Dreams

Despite the charm of living in a shoebox while paying exorbitant rent, spending more time hunting for parking than actually driving, and celebrating “moderate” air quality like a miracle, Mumbai remains irreplaceable for many. Few cities offer comparable opportunities, even with their suffocating problems.

The situation isn’t improving. Megacities worldwide are pricing out ordinary people, turning homeownership into a lifetime financial burden. Until someone content with life’s basic needs can afford decent living in India’s tier-1 and tier-2 cities, we’ll see more megacities resorting to band-aid solutions—banning phrases like “Horn Ok Please” or implementing odd-even traffic rules.

The real question isn’t how to manage the chaos, but how to prevent it from becoming inevitable in the first place.

I recently visited the National War Memorial in India. It wasn't planned—I just happened to be there. What caught my attention wasn't the architecture or the inscriptions, but a soldier standing guard at the eternal flame. His posture was impeccable, his eyes sharp with focus. There was an intensity in his presence, as if he truly believed an enemy could strike at any moment.

Most of us will never see soldiers in action, and perhaps that's why we don't fully grasp what it takes for them to do what they do. Watching him, I couldn't help but wonder—when was the last time I approached my own work with that level of intensity?

Perhaps that's part of the disconnect. We go about our comfortable lives without truly understanding the discipline, commitment, and sheer effort it takes to protect them. Sometimes, all it takes is a brief glimpse of a soldier on duty to put things into perspective.

A few years ago, I heard author Diksha Dwivedi speak about her father, a soldier who fought in the Kargil War. She wrote "Letters from Kargil," a book filled with real correspondence from soldiers to their families. Through those letters, you don't just meet warriors—you meet sons, brothers, fathers, friends, partners. What struck me most was the vulnerability of these heroes. They were scared, yet they kept moving forward.

I am feeling very sad that I may not see you again, it is hurting me. But if God wants it that way, what can I do. I can’t complain

Their leaders were terrified.

But going to battle was a terrible and frightening experience. To motivate men to give their best, even their lives, while you fight your own inner fears. To put up a brave front in front of the men while inwardly you are yourself not sure

Yet they led men into situations where death was often a better fate than being captured.

There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed across the country, yet we only think about them when there's a conflict. We've absorbed so much from Western culture through movies and TV, but one thing we've completely overlooked is how they acknowledge their veterans. "Thank you for your service" is a phrase we rarely use here. I've never thanked an army person for their service. That realization hit me recently, and while it may have come late, better late than never.

I've also come across stories of senior army personnel struggling to transition into corporate life. Despite their leadership, discipline, and real-world problem-solving skills, they often find themselves overlooked. It makes me wonder: why don't we value their experience? Why don't we see what they could bring to our organizations?

With initiatives like Agniveer, thousands of young soldiers will soon step into civilian life. If they find a place in the corporate world, I have no doubt they'll outperform many classroom-trained MBAs and engineers. After all, if we can trust them with our lives, why wouldn't we trust them with our businesses, our tools, our time?

I think Resumes lie. Credentials don't tell the whole story. The best team members aren't always the ones with the most impressive titles or degrees.

A few years back, I worked with someone who defied traditional hiring metrics. On paper, they were unremarkable. But in practice? They were transformative. When challenges emerged, they didn't complain—they collaborated. They asked questions without ego, sought solutions without blame, and brought an infectious energy that elevated everyone around them.

They weren't just a colleague. They were the type of person you'd want leading your team.

Beyond Aptitude: The Attitude Advantage

Some of the world's most innovative companies have cracked this code. Netflix calls it the "Keeper Test": Would you fight to keep this person if they were leaving tomorrow? The question isn't about technical skills, but about that intangible quality that makes a team truly exceptional.

Take Southwest Airlines. Herb Kelleher, its legendary co-founder, had a simple hiring philosophy: "We hire for attitude and train for skill." When teamwork and customer service are your lifeblood, you need people who can navigate pressure with grace and humor.

Similarly, companies like Google prioritize "learning ability" over existing knowledge. They understand that skills can be taught, but attitude is fundamental.

The Universal Power of Attitude

This principle transcends business. Consider Tom Brady—the 199th pick in the 2000 NFL draft. He wasn't the most naturally talented quarterback, but his work ethic, resilience, and leadership transformed him into a legend.

The All Blacks rugby team codified this with their "No Dickhead Policy"—understanding that one toxic personality can undermine an entire team's potential.

The Hidden Challenge

Here's the uncomfortable truth: It's easier to measure competence than character. In a world obsessed with degrees and experience, identifying the right attitude requires deliberate, systemic effort.

We've mistakenly glorified "brilliant jerks" as visionaries, failing to recognize that true innovation comes from collaborative, empathetic team players.

The Ripple Effect

Attitude is contagious. Optimism, resilience, and genuine curiosity don't just improve individual performance—they transform entire organizational cultures. They create environments where people don't just work together, but root for each other's success.

The Bottom Line

Aptitude is what we train for, but attitude is what makes excellence possible. It's the difference between a team that survives and a team that thrives.

I'll always bet on attitude. Wouldn't you?

My wife has this ritual: every few weeks, she'll casually mention how our home "could use a refresh." Next thing I know, I'm staring at another Ikea product with their impossible-to-pronounce names. What surprises me every time, apart from their names, is their price. It's always lower than my best guess – stubbornly, consistently lower. As an MBA, I wonder about why the slow drift toward "maximizing shareholder value" never happened. I find myself marveling: after decades of leadership changes they're still obsessively true to their founder's mission of making good design affordable for everyone. In a world where mission statements are usually just corporate poetry, that's nothing short of remarkable.

Look around and you'll find these rare companies that treat their mission statements as constitutions rather than marketing copy. Novo Nordisk has spent a century focused on diabetes care, turning down countless opportunities to diversify into more profitable pharma segments. Bosch remains privately held, channeling 94% of its profits back into research and development, true to its founder's belief that long-term innovation matters more than quarterly profits. Tata Sons, perhaps most remarkably, has stayed true to its founding principle that community isn't just a stakeholder – it's the very purpose of business. Even today, 66% of the parent company is owned by philanthropic trusts, ensuring profit remains a means to serve society, not an end in itself.

But for every company that guards its mission like a sacred flame, dozens let it fade into corporate mythology. Remember when Johnson & Johnson's credo about putting patients first was so sacred they pulled Tylenol off every shelf in America despite no legal obligation? Today, they're battling headlines about talcum powder litigation. Or look at Wells Fargo, founded to serve Gold Rush miners with integrity, whose mission of trust devolved into cross-selling scandals. These companies didn't fail – they're still enormously profitable. They just stopped being who they promised to be.

We love to romanticize this consistency. "Built to last," we say admiringly. But here's the thing that keeps me up at night: lasting isn't just about survival or thriving. Johnson & Johnson thrived. Wells Fargo thrived. Technically. But, they're shadows of what they were meant to be. Their souls didn't survive the journey.

This haunts me during my entrepreneurial fantasies. You know the ones – where you're building something meaningful, something that might actually make the world a fraction better. But then the cold reality creeps in: how many great companies have been killed by their own children? Not through malice, usually. Just through the slow erosion of what made them special in the first place. Death by ambitions of personal wealth. Death by quarterly earnings. Death by MBAs like me. Death by "we need to evolve to today's environment."

That's what led me down the rabbit hole of Enterprise Foundations. When Ikea's founder Ingvar Kamprad set up the company's ownership structure, he wasn't just doing clever tax planning (though I'm sure his accountants were happy). He was trying to solve a problem as old as civilization: how do you make something outlive its creator?

The answer, it turns out, isn't about control – it's about constitution. Take Rolex. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation doesn't just own Rolex; it embodies a promise: keep making exceptional watches, use the profits for good. No shareholders demanding cost-cutting. No heir apparent pushing for a smartwatch line. Just a simple mission, protected by structure rather than sentiment.

It's the corporate equivalent of the Pyramids – built not just to be big, but to endure. While everyone plays quarterly chess, these companies are playing a game that spans centuries. Meta might have given Zuckerberg imperial control, but even emperors face the succession problem. What happens when the founder's grandchildren prefer yachts to yearly planning?

The irony is delicious: in trying to disrupt everything, we've forgotten how to build anything that lasts. We've got founders with sub-10% stakes talking about hundred-year visions, like someone renting a house but talking about their great-grandchildren living in it.

I'm not pretending I've cracked some grand secret here. My own company exists mainly in Chrome tabs and traffic-fueled imagination. But I'm becoming obsessed with this idea of building something that outlasts not just market cycles, but generations. Something that stays true to its purpose not because of some founder's iron grip, but because staying true is woven into its DNA.

The Enterprise Foundation model might not be perfect. But at least it's an attempt to solve the right problem. In a world where "long-term" usually means next quarter, these organizations are asking a different question: How do you build something that stays itself?

I've got more digging to do build a sophisticated Robin Hood model that creates value rather than redistributing it. More structure diagrams to decipher, more founding documents to study. Consider this Version 1.0 of my thinking. But maybe that's fitting – after all, anything built to last needs room to grow.