Getting Paid by Strangers

Ten names and a Kinetic Honda

Seven of my first ten customers were found by walking, and the walking was done in one pair of Bata shoes that I wore through at the left heel by October 2004. I kept the list. It is in the same drawer as the Bajaj calendar cost sheet, written in the back of a receipt book, ten names with the date of each first order beside them.

Two came with the machines. When Vilas shut, he still had small buyers who had never been the problem: a pickle maker in Moshi who took 800 cartons a month, and a man assembling switchboards behind Nehru Nagar. Vilas gave me their numbers the day I paid him. He did not have to. I think he wanted somebody to look after them, the way a man selling a cow tells you which one kicks.

One came from my old job. I had spent nine years as an accounts clerk at the auto-parts supplier in Chinchwad, which meant I knew Mr Gadgil in purchase by his first name and his tea order. He gave me a trial of 1,500 boxes for brake shoes in May, mostly, I suspect, out of pity. The boxes were fine. The pity ran out after two orders, and the business stayed for six years.

The other seven I found on a Kinetic Honda with a sample carton tied to the back seat with a bicycle tube. I had the printed directory of the Bhosari industries association, ₹350 from their office, and I worked through J-block and then T-block, unit by unit. The method was not clever. I went in, asked the watchman who bought packaging, and waited. At one pump assembler near the Telco road I waited two hours and ten minutes in reception, and the purchase officer, a young man called Sachin, gave me four minutes.

"What is your rate for 5-ply?" he said.

"Depends on the size and the paper," I said.

"Then come back with a rate."

I came back the next morning with a rate. That was the order, a small one, and it taught me more than any of the friendly ones did. A purchase officer is not judging your box on the first visit. He is judging whether you come back.

Out of roughly sixty doors in those first five months, ten became customers, and three of the ten had stopped ordering by 2006. I tell new owners to expect something like those numbers and to be pleasantly surprised if they do better.

Where buyers already gather

What I did not understand in 2004 was why my best leads kept coming from within three kilometres. Buyers cluster. A box maker sits near pump makers and pharma packers because they need him weekly; a phenyl maker should look first where floors are mopped by the hundred square metres.

When Meena and I sat down with her list, we split it into four sources:

• Walk-ins within ten kilometres: hotels, hospitals and nursing homes, school trusts, housing societies with a paid housekeeping contractor, and the facility managers of the larger units in Satpur and Ambad MIDC.
• The association directory: in Nashik, the industries association publishes members by estate, which is a map of who has a canteen floor and a toilet block to clean.
• IndiaMART: useful for being found rather than for finding. The cheapest paid package she was quoted in July 2025 was a little over ₹30,000 a year. Most enquiries, in my experience, are traders asking for a price to quote somebody else. Some are real. Check the package and the city filter before paying.
• People who already buy: her hotel's housekeeping head knew three others in the same trade.

That last one surprised her. Housekeeping heads change jobs between hotels the way my operators change jobs between box units, and they carry their suppliers with them.

Meena's first week of walking produced eleven visits and one order: 60 litres to a nursing home on Gangapur Road, paid in cash on delivery because the owner's wife did the accounts and did not like owing anybody.

"That one I want ten of," Meena said.

The man with a godown

Ten of the nursing home did not come. What came instead, in the third week of August, was a stockist.

His name was Kishore (I have changed it), and he had a godown, a warehouse, behind the vegetable market in Panchavati, from which he supplied cleaning goods to around 140 small shops and a few hostels. He had seen Meena's bottles on the nursing-home counter. He offered to take 400 litres a month on one condition: the whole of Nashik district, exclusively, and forty-five days' credit.

Meena rang me that evening, delighted. I asked her what she was charging the nursing home. ₹38 a litre. And what would Kishore pay? He wanted 12 per cent off for himself, and his shops expected another 18 per cent off the retail price. Worked backwards from a shelf price of ₹45, his buying price came to about ₹32.50.

Her full cost, from the sheet she had sent me the month before, was ₹27.80. So nearly ₹5 a litre of margin remained, on volume she could not get by walking. That part was sound. It was the rest of his offer I did not like.

Distributors are worth their margin when they do three things you cannot: hold stock, deliver small quantities to many doors, and collect from those doors. Kishore did all three. But a stockist who asks for a district before he has sold a single case is buying an option on your business with your money. I told Meena to give him something smaller:

• Territory by name, not by district. Panchavati, Nashik Road and Deolali to begin with. Satpur and Ambad stayed hers, because her hotel and factory buyers were there.
• A ninety-day review. If he had not lifted 1,000 litres in three months, the territory reopened.
• Credit with a ceiling. Thirty days, not forty-five, and a limit of ₹15,000 outstanding. Above that, the next delivery waits.
• A security deposit. ₹10,000, refundable, which most serious stockists will pay and most unserious ones will argue about for a week.

Kishore argued for four days and then paid. He has lifted between 350 and 520 litres every month since, and he once held back a delivery to a hostel that owed him money for longer than it owed her. That told me he understood credit control better than I had at his age.

Selling to the government without knowing anyone

Meena then asked about GeM, the Government e-Marketplace, because a cousin had told her the government buys phenyl by the tanker.

It does buy a great deal of it. Registration is free and done online: PAN, Aadhaar, GSTIN, Udyam certificate and a bank account, all of which she already had. Small enterprises are exempt from paying earnest money on most bids, and central departments are supposed to source a quarter of their purchases from MSEs. Those are real advantages. Read the current rules on the portal yourself, because they are revised often and I will not pretend to track every change.

My own experience is narrower. I registered in 2019 and bid on corrugated cartons for a central government stores depot in Pune. I lost the first three bids. I was second lowest each time, once by eleven paise a box, to sellers whose prices I still cannot make work on paper. The fourth I won: 6,000 cartons. Payment is meant to follow within ten days of the buyer issuing the CRAC, the receipt-and-acceptance certificate. Mine took thirty-four days, because the officer who had to click a button was on leave.

So my advice to Meena was modest. List her product in the catalogue, where small direct orders can come without a bid. Watch the bids for a month before entering one. Never bid below the full cost on her sheet, however good the department's name looks on a reference list.

She listed in September. The first enquiry came from a railway training institute near Igatpuri, for 200 litres.

"Do I trust it?" she said.

"Deliver it," I said. "Then we will know."

Vendor code, eleven months

A factory buys differently from a nursing home. The owner's wife pays cash because she dislikes debt; a purchase department pays nobody until you exist in its system, and existing in its system takes longer than most new owners can bear.

My own lesson came from the pump maker whose carton I costed in the last chapter. I first walked into their Bhosari purchase office in February 2005 with a sample box under my arm, and the officer, Mr Gokhale, turned it over, pressed a thumb into the flute and handed me a form. Fourteen pages. Company details, machine list, bank reference, last year's turnover, names of three existing customers, and a section headed "Quality System" which I filled in with more confidence than I had a quality system.

Then nothing happened for seven weeks.

When something did happen, it was an audit. Two people from their stores and quality departments came to my shed on a Tuesday morning and spent ninety minutes there. They did not look at my slotter much. They looked at:

• Where the raw material sat, and whether reels were off the floor (after the May flood, they were, on pallets I had bought in a panic).
• Whether I could show a test result for burst strength on paper I had received, which I could not.
• A fire extinguisher, which I had, expired.
• What happened to rejected boxes, which was that they leaned against a wall near the good ones.

They left a list of six "observations". I closed four within a fortnight, the extinguisher for ₹1,800 and the burst tester by borrowing time on one at a paper dealer's in Pimpri. The other two took longer, because one of them was really "write down how you work", and I did not yet know how.

After that came samples. Not one sample: three trial lots, of 200, 500 and then 1,000 cartons, each checked at their goods inward on a drop test from a fixed height with a pump inside. The second lot failed. Two cartons out of the twenty they tested split at a corner joint. I went to see the failure myself rather than accept a phone call about it, and that visit, I think, did more for me than the boxes. Gokhale watched me measure the glue line on the split cartons and said, "Most people send a new lot and a new excuse."

The vendor code came in January 2006. Eleven months from first walk-in to first purchase order. My first regular order was 2,500 cartons a month, perhaps a fifth of what they used, because I was the third approved supplier and the third supplier gets what the first two cannot deliver on time. Within two years I was getting more than either of them, for the dull reason that my lorry arrived when the schedule said it would.

That is the trade you are making. Approval is slow, the first share is small, and it is very hard to lose once you have it, because the buyer has invested as much paperwork in you as you have in him. Nobody in a purchase department wants to re-qualify a supplier who has given no trouble.

Meena's version arrived in October. The facility manager at an engineering plant in Ambad, which employed about 600 people across three shifts, said he could not buy from her on a cash bill as the nursing home had. He gave her a vendor registration form, asked for a material safety data sheet and wanted a test report showing her phenyl met the BIS standard for disinfectant fluids. A lab in Nashik charged her ₹4,500 and took twelve days. She sent him the report, the form and a 20-litre trial can.

Three weeks later she rang me, unsettled. The plant's housekeeping contractor had been using the can and said it was fine. But nobody had written back.

"Should I go and ask?" she said.

"Go every fortnight," I said. "Take nothing. Ask one question about the trial and leave."

She went on a Thursday. The facility manager was on leave, and his deputy had never heard of her.

She left a second copy of the test report with him, wrote the date in her diary and caught the bus home. A plant that size either comes in a year or does not come at all. In the meantime there was a smaller customer who already had her phenyl and had not paid for it.

Day thirty-one

The hotel was on Gangapur Road. In August it had taken 120 litres on thirty days' credit, a bill of ₹9,840, and the manager had been warm about it, which in my experience is a poor predictor of anything. Thirty days came and went. Meena waited a week, then rang and asked, in her schoolteacher's voice, whether everything had been satisfactory. He said it was excellent. He did not mention money and neither did she.

That is the most common collections mistake I see, and I made it for three years. The new owner is grateful for the order, a little afraid of the customer, and asks about quality when he means payment. The customer hears a supplier who is not in a hurry.

The cure starts before the sale. Every quotation that leaves my office has a short block of terms printed at the bottom, and every new customer signs a copy of it with the first order:

• Credit period in days, counted from the invoice date, never "from receipt of goods".
• Interest on late payment, stated even though I almost never charge it.
• Supply stops when any invoice is fifteen days past due.
• One named person at the customer's end who approves our payments.

Micro and small suppliers also have the MSMED Act behind them, which caps agreed credit at forty-five days and allows a complaint through the government's Samadhaan portal. I have filed exactly once, in 2016, and received the money eight months later. It is a backstop. It is not a method.

The method is Sunita, my accountant. She rings on day thirty-one, without fail, and she reads very nearly the same words every time. I asked her to write them out for Meena:

"Namaste, this is Sunita from the box unit in Bhosari. I am calling about invoice 412, dated 3 August, for ₹48,200. It was due yesterday. On what date will it be paid?"

Then she stops talking. Sometimes the silence runs ten seconds. She lets it.

If they give a date: "Thank you. I am writing down the ninth. If it has not arrived I will call you on the tenth." And she does, on the tenth, before eleven.

If the person who signs cheques is away: "Who approves it in his absence? I can hold."

If they raise a complaint about the goods for the first time: "Then I want to hear about it today. Can our supervisor come tomorrow at ten?" A real complaint deserves a visit. An invented one usually disappears once a visit is offered.

What Sunita never says is "sorry to disturb you", or "whenever convenient". She asks for a date because "when" invites a mood, and a date can be written in a register. Her register is a ruled notebook, one line per promise, and when I check it at month end about four promises in five have been kept. The fifth customer gets a second call, then a visit from me, and then no more boxes until the account is clear.

Meena copied the script on to an index card and rang the hotel on a Monday morning. The manager said the owner was in Mumbai. She asked who approved payments in his absence. There was a pause long enough that she nearly filled it.

"The accounts lady," he said. "She sits upstairs."

The accounts lady said the twelfth. The money came on the fourteenth, and Meena told me about it as though she had won the GeM bid all over again.

Then she said something else. Her helper, Pooja, nineteen, who mixed and filled every can in the Satpur shed, had not come in since Thursday. Someone had told her a pharma unit in Sinnar was paying ₹700 more a month.

"I can sell it now," Meena said. "I cannot make it alone."