The hottest business in town.

By ten o'clock that night the rain had come crashing down over Tollygunge. Neither of us noticed. Arunangshu M. Lahiri and I were bent over a computer in a book-lined study, rearranging figures on a spreadsheet, trying to find a way to pay for a bakery.

I was 25. I had a degree in catering technology, two or three years in hotels, and I had just left a middle-management job at a four-star hotel in Guwahati. I had taken a lease on about 120 square metres behind our house in Behala and enrolled for the postgraduate programme in management at IISWBM. Arunangshu, in his early forties, had spent fifteen years in marketing companies and advertising agencies and now ran his own direct marketing firm. I had asked him to help with a marketing plan. He ended up advising on the whole business.

Nutrishell was registered in mid-1993.

Nutrishell was to manufacture specialty loaves, breads and cookies. But as the project evolved and market feedback came in, I felt there was much larger scope. I could sense that the snack foods market was burgeoning.

The problem was the money.

I chose machines over the traditional bhatti: a dough mixer, an electric oven, an industrial power connection. The project cost rose to Rs 3.82 lakh. The bank wanted my own contribution of Rs 1.03 lakh spent on fixed assets before it released a rupee, and marketing could not be part of the loan at all. For a brand new consumer product, marketing was most of the job.

So we dropped the loan. We had no collateral, and I did not want a partner telling me how to run the place. We needed money that would come in as a share of profits, not interest, and we needed to grow faster than a bakery normally grows.

Sell the brand before it exists.

The breakthrough was Arunangshu's: franchise. Shop owners would pay a one-time fee for a ready-to-run Nutrishell Shoppe, and those fees would build the factory. The difficulty was obvious to both of us. You franchise a famous brand or a unique technology. We had neither.

This was a classic challenge. We had to build and sell a non-existent brand.Arunangshu M. Lahiri

We changed the product range towards cakes, pastries and snacks that added more value, and sold them only through Nutrishell shops. Then we put together a complete package for the shop owner.

Then we advertised.

The headline was "The Hottest Business in Town". We printed a prospectus, hired a business centre for the launch, and sat at the Nutrishell desk all day answering calls and visitors. Thanks to the logo and the prospectus, many people assumed we were a multinational, or at least a company from Bombay or Delhi launching in Calcutta.

A few months later, a franchise advertisement opened like this:

Imagine launching a franchised chain when no one had even heard of the brand name. We at Nutrishell did. (The competition took years to gather the courage.)Nutrishell advertisement, month four

It worked.

Within a year we were seen as a serious contender for the number two position in Calcutta's snack food market. Nutrishell was the first to open franchised bake shops in the city. I later sold the business at an eight-digit annual turnover.

What came next.

I was planning to exit my business (a chain of bake shops in Kolkata) and came across a newspaper advertisement for the position.

That position was faculty at ICFAI Business School, in 1999. The rest is in my journey.