Business Head for Travel Agents sales at Oyo

Currently working on planning, launching & executing a new business vertical at Cox & Kings, geared towards taking our entire holidays’ business online. The vision is to assist consumers to customize and book holidays online by themselves, as well as creating a marketplace of advisors who leverage C&K’s supply through an online engine. It aims to solve for the unit economics problem of making an online holidays’ business profitable and delivering value to our consumers.  SWOT analysis of the existingo Business at C&K, with focus on the process flow & unit economics for its online businesses. o Technology platforms (existing and upcoming) including CRM solutions, supplier integrations, third party integrations, operations and ancillary modules.  Stitching and presenting viable online business plans (with alternatives) to the board of C&K for budgetary approval with revenue projections, costs, team structure and execution strategy.  Creation of the entire product road map of the new business initiative including o B2C consumer features – Customization, recommendation and supply engines. o Advisor marketplace – Gamification, lead purchase & management, recommendation engines, task lists and actionable. o Suppliers’ marketplace – taking inventory and pricing online and building a recommendation / analytics layer over it.  Hiring and mentoring a team mix of business, product and technology to deliver the project.

Launched & executed the business function at GoFro.com, responsible for driving P&L – for both international and domestic segments. Led a team of 24 people driving efforts in various aspects.  Managed the P&L delivery across all destinations – Direct and indirect management of the Business, Marketing, Product, Content, Sales Channels, Supply & Operations teamso Responsible for end to end management of the consumer funnel from traffic to query generation to product listings, sales funnel management, supply and operations o Spearheaded the supply and contracting team for both fixed packages from companies such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Thomas Cook and 30+ others, as well as customized packages from 150+ suppliers for airlines, hotels and on-ground operationso Grew the net margin by 75% in the last 3 months of operations by leveraging business analytics.o Led the online marketing team for traffic and lead generation, tripling the conversions in a period of 6 months, and bringing down the spends/GMV from 18+% to 4%. o Worked with internal and external sales channels (over 650 agents) to drive the business’ top line, doubling the revenue in the past 5 months. o Set up processes for the internal operations team to keep a tighter control on the bottom line  Influenced the Development of Product and Led the Business Intelligence Processes to strategize the future growth trajectoryo Directly managed the content team to power the listing and inventory/pricing updates of all products, leveraging my in-depth understanding of destinations and consumer travel behavior. o Strategized the destination & advisor level analytics to optimize the consumer funnelo Led an application engineers’ team to build short-term tech based solutions in VBA Excel & Python which were later productized to help increase content, margin & marketing efficiencies o Influenced the product team to determine features to further optimize the business.

Zomato White Label powered digital presence for restaurants with full-service smartphone apps.  Overall leading the new business vertical, figuring out go-to market strategies & implementation. o Recruiting and training of a multicultural global sales team spread across India, Australia & UAE. o Multi-functional coordination with product, PR, legal, finance and recruitment teams. o Expanded the team to 120 people within a short span of 2 months. o Guided the product team to attain a product market fit, prioritizing feature releases.

Zomato Cashless was a seamless in-app payment mechanism for consumers to pay their bills using a convenient card-on-file solution at participating restaurants. An Uber for restaurants. Managed the global launch and execution of the business vertical.o Led a team of 60 people in Dubai to drive merchant acquisitions & consumer engagement.o Negotiated with banking partners to launch consumer specific offers to drive product adoption. o Multi-functional coordination with product, PR, legal, finance and recruitment teams.

It was fun spending 5 months off work and get a much needed recharge as well as to take stock and figure out the next step. Traveled around a bit, spent some quality time with family and friends and before you know it 5 months passed by in a jiffy. The travel included a 70 day road trip in the lower 48 states of the US and Alaska and a week long hike in Kashmir.

Built the business from scratch by raising funds from IIT-Delhi’s incubation unit and further expanding the business organically wearing multiple hats over the course of 10 years.Business Management Role (2009 – 2014)o Negotiations with prospective buyers interested in acquiring Mechartes o Launched a joint venture (JV) based out of UAE to expand service offerings in the Middle-East.o Led a sales team to deliver a 100% growth year on year. In its third year the entity managed to reach a revenue base of 1.2 M AED, organically. o Launched a JV with a listed Swedish manufacturing giant – Systemair – for engineering services.o Launched in Canada with a focus on new customer acquisition in the North American market o Strategized geographical expansion, service baskets and product offerings to further growth. o Managed local sales team catering to the Indian market. Delivered a 20% growth year on year.o Drove the introduction of a Quality Management System (ISO:9001–2008) to help scale operations.o Oversaw the HR strategy and policy formulation, finance, cash-flow management, investments. Software Architect Role (2004 – 2009)o Techno-commercial software services sales pitch to prospective customers within & outside India. o Requirements gathering at client site with multiple stakeholders including design, manufacturing & internal sales teams.o Subsequent training to end users on usage of the developed software platform in a multi-lingual/ cultural environment. o Conceptualized software architecture, algorithms & data structures for multiple B2B products. o Led a team of 11 software developers.

New Product Innovation : Porting a deaf telephony device called Teldem, for internet VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). The project invloved converting the signals from Teldem into characters, converting the words formed into speech, and transmitting it over VoIP to a PSTN terminal. and the other way round (PSTN -> VoIP -> speech recognition -> words -> characters -> Teldem)