Preparing a Leading Fashion Retail Brand for IPO Through Leadership & Process Transformation
Client Overview
A market-leading ethnic fashion retail brand in India, led by a strong promoter-founder, was preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). To secure investor confidence and a strong valuation, the business needed to professionalise its leadership structure, strengthen its systems and streamline people and business processes.
Transformation Goal
To build a leadership team with ability to operate and grow the business autonomously, with minimum involvement of the Promoter, thereby creating greater investor confidence and valuation prior to a planned IPO.
- Leadership: Empowered & autonomous
- Systems: Technology enabled, efficient & predictable
- Employees: Higher satisfaction scores and improved retention
Business Challenge
Transforming the business from Promoter led to professionally managed to invoke investor confidence.
- Strategic & Operational Challenges
- Unscalable processes enabled by technology, creating unpredictability
- Parallel manual processes required to keep system operational
- Problem solving mindset vs. Systems building mindset
- Centralised decision making
- Cultural Challenges
- Leadership team heavily dependent on the promoter
- Low process maturity leading to learning churn and inconsistencies
- Gaps in people processes impacting stability and scalability
- Leadership misalignment and lack of clarity in decision-making
- High front-end attrition reducing operational effectiveness
Engagement Objectives
Planet Ganges was engaged to redesign, facilitate and implement changes to the current ways of operations in the business.
- Strengthen leadership cohesion and alignment
- Assess existing leaders for future suitability
- Recast key leadership positions where required
- Identify & resolve people and business process gaps
- Improve organisation-wide retention and stability
- Shift accountability from promoter → leadership team
Approach & Methodology
01
Diagnostic
- Leadership One on One meetings to ascertain the issues
- Focus group meetings with next level of leaders
- Comprehensive debriefing with the Promoter
02
Self-regulated leadership team
- Design a structure and process for leadership team (minus the Promoter)
- Agenda based conversations to resolve mutual team issues
- Formulating rules of engagement and partnering
03
Delegation of Authority
- Ascertaining the empowerment requirement for self-regulated working
- Establishing the empowerment framework (DOA)
- Implementing the Delegation of Authority & governance process
04
Coaching the Promoter
- Shift Promoters focus from daily operations to long-term growth
- Encourage to delegate, trust and review (vs. monitor)
- Dealing with own anxiety and lack of trust
05
Re-evaluating existing leadership talent
- Identifying change catalysts, fence sitters and resistant players
- Coaching and mentoring fence sitters and resistant players
- Facilitating hard choices on resistant players and incompetent leaders
- Enabling replacement hiring & seamless integration
06
People Processes & Rewards
- Streamline for tech enablement
- Align rewards to desired behaviours
- Growth path for change catalysts
Results in 9 Months
- Strong leadership cohesion established
- Business and people processes stabilised across the organisation
- Partial empowerment success (limited by promoter reluctance to fully let go)
- Front-end attrition reduced from 54% → 32%
- Engagement scores improved from 63% → 81%
- The company became structurally and culturally better prepared for its IPO journey
Client Testimonial
Planet Ganges is a prominent player in Business Transformation, delivering tailored interventions in Organisational Culture, Climate, and Leadership Capability.