This month, Essmart reached a big milestone. We had our first Sales Executives hit break even. Actually, “hit” is the wrong word. They surpassed break even by over 25%.
This is incredibly exciting for us. We have been working hard on reaching our break even for the past year. There are some factors that make this very difficult for an enterprise like Essmart – most notably the fact that, at our current size, we can’t take advantage of some of the economies of scale that other distribution enterprises have needed to break even. But even with these constraints… we did it!!
This really speaks to the core idea behind Essmart’s model. Peri-urban and rural markets are full of aspirational, intelligent consumers who deserve and demand access to life-improving essential technologies. And rural shop owners are the portals of commerce than can provide this access while also improving their own businesses and livelihoods.
These past several months have seen some major improvements to our operations that have helped us get to this point. We tightened up logistics, supported by launching our own proprietary last-mile logistics software. We increased our catalogue offerings to over 100 types of essential technology products. We helped our Sales Executives focus on a smaller number of retail shops so that we could provide more tailored support to these shops, making the Essmart network stronger and more sustainable. Our Sales Executives have been continually building to this point, and now the first ones have made it.
I am incredibly proud of our team, and how hard they have worked. And I am incredibly excited for the future. There are opportunities for continued growth and operational efficiencies. There are opportunities for economies of scale, as we have barely scratched that surface. There are opportunities to deepen our impact on the livelihoods of shop owners and lives of end customers and to broaden our impact throughout India. This is just the beginning.