I worked closely with the leadership team of a listed Indian education and services enterprise that operated across multiple business lines, including EdTech, test preparation, marketing services, content, student mobility, and assessment-led businesses.
At the time of this strategic planning exercise, the enterprise had crossed approximately ₹300 crore in consolidated annual revenue. The leadership ambition was to build a five-year roadmap that could help the group move towards a ₹1,000 crore revenue scale.
This required more than routine business planning. The company had multiple operating engines, each with different customer segments, revenue models, sales cycles, and growth challenges. The task was to build a clear strategic direction across these businesses, identify new growth levers, and then translate the larger vision into business-level initiatives that could be executed on the ground.
Strategic Objective
The central objective was to create a structured growth roadmap for the group.
The roadmap had to answer five important questions:
- How can the existing businesses grow faster?
- Which new businesses should the group enter?
- Where can international and dollar-linked revenue be created?
- Which inorganic opportunities can help the group build new capabilities?
- How can different group companies come together to offer larger solutions to institutional and enterprise customers?
The larger ambition was to move from a ₹300+ crore enterprise to a much larger, more diversified platform with strong growth engines across B2C, B2B, domestic, and international markets.
My Role
My role was to contribute to the formulation of the five-year strategic business plan and then support the execution of key strategic initiatives flowing from that plan.
This involved working across three levels.
At the first level, I contributed to the overall business planning exercise. This included understanding the current revenue base, identifying growth opportunities across existing and new businesses, and helping convert leadership ambition into a structured strategic roadmap.
At the second level, I created detailed strategy notes and GTM plans for individual initiatives. These included new business opportunities, international expansion plans, digital assessment opportunities, higher education transformation offerings, and cross-business revenue initiatives.
At the third level, I helped coordinate with business heads and operating teams to make sure these initiatives moved from boardroom discussions to actual ground-level activity. This included building trackers, defining major goals, breaking them into smaller milestones, and creating a rhythm of review across multiple workstreams.
I was also closely involved in preparing investor and board-level presentations, leadership business notes, and strategic review documents.
Growth Levers Identified
The ₹1,000 crore growth vision was built around multiple strategic levers.
1. Scaling Existing Business Engines
The first lever was to significantly grow the existing business engines. These included the core education business, test preparation, marketing services, content-led businesses, and other established group-level revenue lines.
The idea was to improve revenue from current assets by strengthening product offerings, improving go-to-market execution, aligning sales and marketing, and identifying cross-sell opportunities across group companies.
2. Building International and Dollar-Linked Revenue
The second lever was to expand international revenue.
The group had the potential to serve students, institutions, and partners across global education corridors. The strategic direction was to support an “anywhere-to-anywhere” student mobility model, where students could be supported across geographies through international programs, study-abroad pathways, assessments, and institutional partnerships.
This required identifying international markets, understanding student demand, mapping partner opportunities, and designing a channel-led approach to expansion.
3. Entering Digital Assessments Through Inorganic Growth
The third lever was to build a dedicated digital assessments arm.
The group wanted to expand beyond traditional education and marketing services into high-scale assessment infrastructure. This required evaluating potential acquisition targets, understanding their strategic fit, and identifying how assessment capabilities could strengthen the group’s overall platform.
A major acquisition in the digital assessments space later became one of the most important growth moves for the group. It added significant revenue scale and gave the company a stronger position in testing, assessments, and evaluation-led services.
4. Expanding Across Key International Geographies
The fourth lever was international expansion across selected high-potential markets.
The focus was on markets such as Nepal, Bangladesh, UAE, the Middle East, and other relevant geographies where the group could build education, assessment, student mobility, or institutional partnership-led businesses.
The strategy involved identifying priority markets, understanding regulatory and partner landscapes, and developing models for local partnerships, enterprise channels, and international program delivery.
5. Creating New B2B Education Transformation Offerings
The fifth lever was to build new B2B offerings for higher education institutions.
The group had capabilities across admissions, assessments, content, student engagement, marketing, employability, and placements. The opportunity was to bring these capabilities together into a single higher education transformation suite for universities and institutions.
This offering was designed around the full student lifecycle: from admissions and outreach to in-campus assessments, formative and summative evaluations, student development, career readiness, and placements.
The goal was to move from selling individual services to offering a more integrated institutional solution.
Execution Approach
The strategy was not treated as a static document. It was broken down into specific initiatives, each with its own goals, business owner, milestones, and execution rhythm.
For each major initiative, the process included:
- Defining the strategic objective
- Creating the first strategy note
- Building the market opportunity view
- Refining the revenue model
- Identifying the GTM approach
- Coordinating with relevant business heads
- Creating leadership and investor-facing presentations
- Tracking progress across major and minor milestones
A key part of my contribution was converting broad leadership ideas into clear strategy documents and action plans. This helped business teams understand what needed to be done, why it mattered, and how it connected to the larger growth roadmap.
Stakeholder Management
The work required coordination with multiple stakeholders across the group.
This included senior leadership, business heads, product teams, sales teams, marketing teams, finance teams, and external partners. In several cases, the work also required preparing material for board-level or investor-level discussions.
Because the group had multiple businesses, stakeholder alignment was important. Different teams often had their own priorities and revenue targets. The strategic planning process helped create a common direction and made it easier to align initiatives across business units.
Business Impact
The strategic roadmap helped the group think more clearly about its next phase of growth.
One of the biggest outcomes was the addition of a large digital assessments business through acquisition. This created a major new growth engine for the group and added significant revenue scale.
The planning process also helped identify and structure multiple other growth opportunities, including international expansion, student mobility, institutional offerings, and cross-business revenue alignment.
More importantly, the exercise helped move the company from a collection of individual businesses towards a more integrated platform strategy. The group could now think in terms of three broad engines: education, marketing services, and assessments.
The most important learning from this work was that a growth strategy becomes valuable only when it is translated into clear initiatives, accountable owners, business-level milestones, and regular execution tracking.
This project helped me operate at the intersection of strategy, business building, and execution.