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90-Day India Launch
You have the plan, the partner and the product. What you do not have is one accountable person in India making it happen across five vendors, a distributor and a headquarters in a different time zone. That is this engagement.
Launch failure is rarely dramatic. It is a slow accumulation of small gaps: the creative agency waiting on product data, the distributor waiting on pricing approval, the marketplace listing blocked on a compliance document nobody owns, the exhibition booked before the collateral exists. Every individual party is doing their job. Nobody is running the critical path.
This engagement puts one senior person in India on that critical path, with the authority to make day-to-day calls and the discipline to report them upwards weekly. It is deliberately time-boxed: ninety days is long enough to launch properly and short enough to keep everyone honest about progress.
The ninety days
Days 1–15 · Mobilise
Confirm the plan against reality, appoint or brief agencies, build the master calendar with dependencies, establish the reporting cadence and dashboard, and identify the compliance items sitting on the critical path.
Days 15–45 · Build
Localised content, collateral and product data; channel and marketplace setup; distributor enablement material and training; PR and analyst groundwork; paid media accounts, tracking and creative in production.
Days 45–70 · Prime
Soft launch or limited listing, pricing and promotion validated in market, sales team and partner briefings, event and exhibition preparation, and correction of whatever the soft launch reveals.
Days 70–90 · Launch and hand over
Full launch, campaign live, first commercial results, and a documented handover: what worked, what the run-rate plan should be, and whether ongoing leadership is warranted.
What is actually managed
- The calendar and critical path — one master plan with dependencies, owners and dates, reviewed weekly, with blockers escalated rather than absorbed.
- Agencies and vendors — selection where needed, briefing, quality control and payment milestones across creative, performance, PR, content, events and marketplace specialists.
- Channel and partner enablement — the material a distributor or integrator actually needs — pricing, technical documents, application notes, sales arguments, training — rather than the brochure they are usually given.
- Content and localisation — product data, collateral, website or listing content, and the claims discipline that keeps you compliant and credible.
- Measurement — tracking implementation, the KPI dashboard, and honest attribution rather than flattering numbers.
- HQ reporting — a written weekly report in English with progress, risks, decisions needed and spend against budget. Predictable enough that headquarters stops worrying.
What sits outside the fee
Third-party spend is yours and paid by you directly: media budget, creative production, PR retainers, event and exhibition costs, translation, research panels, marketplace fees, sampling and inventory. I recommend, negotiate and manage those relationships but do not mark them up, because a consultant taking a margin on media spend has an incentive you do not want them to have.
Regulatory, legal, customs and tax work is likewise separate and handled by qualified specialists. Where a registration sits on the critical path, managing that timeline is part of this engagement; performing the filing is not.
Questions
What overseas teams ask
Is ninety days realistic for a full launch?
For most categories, yes, provided regulatory registration is complete or genuinely not required. Where import registration or certification is still pending, ninety days is realistic for everything except the commercial launch itself, and the engagement is structured so the build work happens in parallel rather than waiting. The one thing that cannot be compressed is a regulatory queue.
How much of your time does this take?
Substantially more than a fractional retainer — typically two to three days a week during the build phase, with travel to your distributor, agencies or events as needed. That intensity is why it is time-boxed and priced as a project rather than a monthly fee.
Can you manage agencies we have already appointed?
Yes, and often that is the better arrangement because they already know your brand. Where an incumbent agency is genuinely not capable of the work, I will say so early rather than manage around it for ninety days.
What happens on day ninety-one?
One of three things. Your distributor and agencies run it with a light advisory arrangement; ongoing fractional CMO leadership continues at a lower intensity; or you begin hiring a permanent India marketing lead and I support the recruitment and handover. The right answer depends on what the launch revealed about the size of the opportunity, and it is a conversation held around day sixty rather than at the end.
Do you work with our Quiamo-style production needs in-house?
Where you want landing pages, ad operations, content velocity, SEO and PR running at agency pace under one roof, Quiamo — my execution agency — can take that scope. It is optional and separately priced, and independent agencies are briefed just as readily where you prefer that.
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Talk it through before you commit budget
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether India is a real opportunity for your category, what the sensible first step is, and what it should cost. No deck, no preamble.