Client Portfolio Optimization for MSMEs: OrgEvo's ₹35 Cr Success Story

For most fast-growing Indian services companies, the transition from founder-led businesses to a scalable enterprise is anything but easy. Leaders seek Business Architecture Services in India, Enterprise design consulting India and various organizational architecture solutions to help create focus, resilience, and profitable growth. Client portfolio optimization for MSMEs, shows how one such firm managed to unlock faster growth not by adding more customers but by choosing to work only with the right ones.

Growth in services firms usually looks like more. More clients. More projects. More people. More meetings. Very often it also means more chaos. This founder's story went the other way.

A ₹28 Cr B2B services firm came to us with a peculiar problem:

• They were growing on paper, but everybody felt worse.

• The senior leadership was stuck in client firefighting.

• Top talent were exhausted and quietly looking at external options.

• While revenue was higher, margins were shrinking.

The founder was spending more time managing noise than shaping strategy. Nothing was obviously broken. clients were paying on time, sales kept closing, and utilization looked healthy. If you only looked at the numbers, it's a fine business. If you listened to the people and sat in their meetings, the emotional state of the team told a very different story. That is when we helped the founder take a decision most people avoid: They had to let go 9 clients.

Not for non-payment.

Not for openly bad behavior.

Simply because they were the wrong fit.

What followed wasn't chaos. It was clarity.

The firm moved from ₹28 Cr to around ₹35 Cr in 10 months, with less stress, better margins and a calmer, more focused team. This is the story of how that happened in practice.

The Real Problem: Growth Built on the Wrong Clients

When we first mapped their situation, a pattern emerged:

• Roughly a quarter of clients consumed more than half of senior management time.

• Custom demands of a small group of accounts drove process complexity for everyone

• Some prestigious clients were low-margin once all hidden effort was counted

• Internal language had shifted from “opportunities” to “obligations”.

We ran a simple client portfolio diagnostic across four lenses:

• Profitability: not just billing, but total cost of serving

• Strategic fit: do these clients pull the firm in the direction it wants to grow

• Energy impact: How does the team feel before and after working with them?

• Operational friction: How often do these accounts break standard processes?

The result was uncomfortable: about a dozen clients showed a clear pattern of misalignment across two or more of these dimensions.

Instead of immediately "firing" clients, we did something more deliberate:

1. Segmented clients into those that could be realigned and those that were fundamentally misfit

2. Designed a three to six month transition plan, not an overnight cut

3. Created a pipeline and pricing strategy to fill the future revenue space with better-fit work.

Finally, 9 clients were exited in a planned and respectful manner.The real work, however, was what we rebuilt around that decision.

Shift 1: Redefining the Ideal Client with Honesty

The founder believed they know who their ideal client was: revenue size, industry, and location were all clearly defined. Once we looked at the actual high-fit accounts, the reality looked different.

For example:

Some small clients were more profitable and collaborative than big logos.

Certain sectors continually demanded customization that hurt delivery discipline.

From a branding perspective, a few star clients drained the most emotional energy from the teams.

What we did

Working with the leadership team, we:

• Listed their top three to five high-fit, high-energy clients

• Identified shared traits beyond size and sector: decision-making style, clarity, working culture, speed

• Wrote a "non-negotiables" filter describing behaviours or conditions under which they would not work

• Aligned marketing and sales messaging to this refined ideal profile.

• This is classic business architecture work, in practice: designing which segments the organisation will intentionally serve and which it will not, then aligning operations and talent around that choice.

Typical resistance

The sales team showed concern: "Will this not shrink our market?"

Our response: “It will narrow your market. That is precisely how you protect your energy and margins.”

When you stop saying yes to everyone, you start building a firm that compounds around what you do best.

Shift 2: Repricing Around Value Instead of Volume

One common thread among many of the misfit clients was

• They were on old, low-margin retainers or legacy pricing models.

• Revenue looked good at the top line but t he real work was much more than the initial estimate.

• Scope creep had become normal and unchallenged.

Teams felt the need to over-service the account to preserve the relationship

What we did

We helped them:

• Audit all accounts for real margin - after considering effort, escalations and rework

• Define the results that they were truly great at delivering and which customers appreciated most

• Create two or three clear pricing tiers linked to value and outcomes rather than hours or volume

• Train the sales and account teams to sell impact stories rather than effort-based line items.

For already existing but fixable clients, we designed structured repricing conversations:

• Share data on effort and value delivered to date

• Offer a clear, enhanced model with defined outcomes and service levels

• Provide a realistic transition period where needed

Some decided to stay and upgrade; others opted out, which made room for new, aligned clients.

This is where enterprise design consulting in India becomes very real: changing the way value, pricing, and delivery interlock, rather than only changing pricing tables.

Shift 3: Simplifying internal operations around core offerings

Once the misfit clients were removed and pricing was reset, a new question emerged:

What would our delivery engine look like if we stopped building processes around exceptions?

Challenge we faced

• Operations carried scars from years of “just this one custom thing” for individual clients:

• Various shadow processes existed across different teams.

• Reliance on specific individuals who “knew how this client works.

• No consistent rhythm of delivery, since each account ran on its own tempo.

• Capacity planning, quality control and onboarding new team members were all more painful than they needed to be.

What we did

• We conducted an operations-focused sprint to:

• Map the core delivery flow for each key service line

• Identify recurring breakdown points where the work got stuck, reworked, or escalated.

• Standardize on a small set of core offerings, not an infinite variety.

• Eliminate low-value customisation that added effort without real impact to the client

• Automate predictable steps like handoffs, updates, and basic reporting, and document the rest in simple, usable SOPs.

Within a few months, they had cleaner, more predictable workflows with fewer internal emergencies triggered by unique client requests

A foundation that could scale with new, better-fit clients, rather than collapsing under variety.

This is a practical example of organizational architecture solutions: shaping structures, flows, and rules so that the organization behaves in a consistent, reliable manner.

Shift 4: Refocusing Talent on High-Leverage Work

Top performers, in particular senior managers and practice heads, were spending:

• Hours per week soothing disgruntled clients

• Late nights fixing work that had been rushed or misunderstood.

• Very little time spent on long-term improvements, innovation, or coaching their teams

• They had been hired for strategic thinking but were used for patchwork.

What we did

By working with the founder and HR, we:

• Audited how the top talent spent their time across a two- to three-week period.

• Identified low-leverage activities to stop, delegate or redesign

• Clearly defined roles, based on strengths, not just gaps

• Protected blocks of time to do deep, strategic work - no calls, no firefighting

• Created simple dashboards to enable leaders to view delivery health without being pulled into every minor issue.

• We also re-skilled mid-level managers to take on more of the day-to-day, with clearer processes and playbooks in place, letting the senior talent shift from "surviving the week" to actively building the next version of the firm.

Shift 5: Rebuilding Culture Around Energy Instead of Exhaustion

On the surface, culture looked acceptable. People were polite, meetings happened and clients were served.

Below, we heard:

• "Mondays feel heavy"

• “We are always one escalation away from a bad week”

• "I am proud of our work, and yet I feel tired all the time"

Misfit customers and chaotic delivery had normalized the exhaustion culture.

What we did

Taken together with the leadership team, we focused on some apparently soft but deeply structural shifts:

• Removing energy-draining clients, not just low-margin clients

• Celebrate clarity and steady progress instead of last-minute heroics.

• Protect time for deep work and learning by scheduling purposeful no-meeting blocks.

• Make internal feedback loops visible by using simple energy and friction pulses

• Designing small rituals such as end-of-week wins round-ups, monthly process clean-up sessions and cross-team learning circles

The internal language changed over time:

From "Who messed this up" to "Where did the system fail us"?

From “We have to keep this client” to “Does this client fit who we are becoming”

That shift looks subtle on the surface, yet it compounds into a very different organization.

The Impact: Cleaner Growth, Calmer Company In approximately 10 months. The company:

• Grew revenue from approximately ₹28 Cr to ₹35 Cr Increased profitability through a focus on higher-margin, better-fit work Reduced operational chaos, with fewer escalations and late-night emergencies

• Saw a visible lift in morale, as well as retention, amongst key talent.

• Most importantly, the founder moved from acting as a safety net for every problem. from serving as the architect of the firm's next stage.

Growth did not come from doing more. It came from doing less of the wrong things and more of the right things, intentionally and consistently.

Practical Questions for Other Founders If you lead an MSME or mid-sized services firm, consider reflecting on these questions:

1. Which clients bring you money, but suck your energy?

2. If you removed your top two or three energy-draining clients, what capacity would it free up?

3. Do you know your ideal client beyond revenue and industry labels?

4. Are your best people creating value or just patching leaks?

5. How many of your processes exist only because of exceptions?

6. What is the emotional state of your company on a random weekday morning?

Sometimes, the most strategic move is not to chase the next client. The real shift often begins when you consciously release the clients that no longer fit the business you are trying to build. Saying no to cloudy revenue is often how you say yes. To a clearer, calmer, and more scalable company.

Ready To Clean Up Your Growth? If you suspect your firm is growing in the wrong places, with the wrong clients, the wrong pricing or an overloaded internal system, connect with OrgEvo to explore how our Business Architecture Services in India and organizational architecture solutions can help you redesign your client mix, operations and talent focus for cleaner, sustainable growth.

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