In my last month in Calicut, I stopped shadowing and started running a distributor— AZO Marketing, the RS point I was handed to actually operate, not just observe.
Every morning I was there before it opened. Have to give Calicut this, the beach is stunning, and AZO stood right on it. I’d confirm stock and make loading sheets. My highlight was when all the MEs came in and we’d all sit together and discuss progress on current schemes and drives we were running. I had a beautiful colour-coded spreadsheet tracking their metrics that I used to send out everyday, tagging the people I needed push from. Then everyone got their beats and it was off to work. Between the filter coffee and my broken Malayalam, it was a classroom like no other.
None of this was glamorous. It was mostly just being present early enough that if something was going to go wrong that day, it went wrong while there was still time to fix it.
I hadn’t expected how many people it took to get one carton from a depot into a shopkeeper’s hands, or how invisible most of them were to me until I was the one accountable for all of it moving together. It truly does take a village.
The MEs I already knew from riding beats with them. But there was someone reconciling what was ordered against what was billed against what was actually delivered, by hand, every day; packers and loaders who knew— without anyone telling them— that the last stop on a beat went to the back of the truck and the first stop went up front, because they’d been doing it long enough to feel it rather than think it. There was a delivery team navigating streets that flooded without warning, chasing a window the weather didn’t respect. It was a well-oiled machine that I was thrust into. That’s the thing about the UFLP, as the CEO Factory put it— they genuinely do “throw toddlers into the deep end.”
I got things wrong. Multiple times. But nobody made me feel stupid for any of it. They just corrected me and moved on— patient in a way I hadn’t earned yet, teaching me things that weren’t their job to teach.
By the end of the month, AZO hit its target. My ASM gave me a Silk Oreo to celebrate and asked me what I learnt. But I didn’t do anything clever to get there. I just showed up every day and let the people who actually knew what they were doing, do it, while I made sure nothing slipped between them. I think that’s the thing about sales— it looks so incredibly simple from the outside, but you only find the layers once you start peeling the onion.
Somewhere in that same month, I was also quietly going through AZO’s own numbers— a separate ask, nothing to do with the target— and what I found didn’t match the version of the business I was watching run so cleanly every morning. Costs that were higher than they had any reason to be. A rent arrangement that didn’t look like a market rate to anyone who’d checked. Money moving in directions the books weren’t built to show. Bad debt sitting unresolved in the market. None of it showed up on the floor. On the floor, everyone just did their job, well, every single day.
AZO shut down the following year anyway. I still don’t fully know how to sit with that. A month where every visible part of the machine ran the way it was supposed to— and it still wasn’t enough, because the thing that was actually failing was never on the floor to begin with.
I’d walked in assuming a hit target was proof of something, that if the number worked, the business underneath it was healthy. It isn’t. A number can be right for a month and still be sitting on top of something that was never going to hold.
