Consulting · Business planning · Industrial rubber · Mumbai
They asked for a growth plan. We asked whether the factory could make it.
The short version
Zenith Rubber has made industrial rubber since 1965 — rubber sheets, wear-resistant rubber for mining, flooring, EPDM waterproofing, coated fabrics and inflatables. It is family-owned, works across India and the Middle East, and runs its head office at Nariman Point with factories in Dombivli and Ras Al Khaimah. Debox has worked with Zenith since October 2024, across growth planning, procurement and organisation design.
Management wanted a three-year growth plan and a reality check: could the planned product mix, production capacity and prices actually reach the targets? Over eighteen months we led the planning and Zenith’s team delivered it. We built the plan, aligned production and capacity to it with their inputs, and set KPIs for every salesperson. We facilitated monthly reviews, and Zenith’s team changed how the outlets hold stock using levels we set.
Customers stayed longer, lapsed customers came back at nearly twice the earlier rate, and domestic sales grew more than twice as fast as the year before. Exports still grew in a year when US sales fell by about a quarter, though below the first-year plan. Zenith’s team knew the market and led the reset; we turned it into numbers. In March 2026 we handed over the data, dashboards and reviews, and the team runs them alone now.
A target is a number. A factory makes a mix.
Growth targets are usually set as one revenue figure. But a rubber factory does not make revenue. It makes kilograms of specific products, each with its own price and its own production capacity. A target only becomes a plan when it says who will buy how much of what, at what price, and whether the factory can make it.
So we started with Zenith’s history rather than its ambition. Three years of sales showed how growth and the product mix had changed. Market research and competitor analysis gave the outside view. We mapped capacity by product and reviewed every customer to see who was still buying.
That review produced the first surprise: nearly seven in ten customers on the domestic books had stopped buying. The data needed cleaning before any of it could be trusted, because product categories and customer records were not consistent from one year to the next.
The resulting model built revenue from customer, product, volume and price, tested it against capacity, and showed what happened if any of them moved. Where the target and the factory did not match, we adjusted the product mix and aligned capacity to the plan, working from Zenith’s production inputs.
A target nobody has broken down by customer, product and price is not a plan. It is a hope with a deadline.
What we did, step by step
A plan nobody tracks is just a document, so most of the work went into the tools and routines to run it. Some steps we led, some we built with Zenith’s team, and the day-to-day running was theirs.
Steps five and eight gave the sales team ownership. Each person saw their own numbers every month against their own targets, instead of a company number that belonged to nobody. Step nine moved fastest.
At the outlets, lead times were losing the sale
Zenith’s seven domestic outlets — Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune — sell to distributors and end users who usually need material straight away. Fast-moving items were not kept in stock, so every order waited for production. Lead times were long and the outlets lost the sale.
The answer was not more selling. We helped set minimum stock levels for each outlet’s fast-moving items, based on demand and past seasonal patterns, with a restocking plan that sent stock ahead of orders rather than after them. Zenith’s outlet and supply teams ran it from June 2025.
Once stock was on hand, customers who used to buy from the factory could buy from their nearest outlet instead. Outlet sales in January to March 2026 were 48% higher than the same quarter a year earlier. March 2026 was the outlets’ best month in three years, and the number of customers buying each month rose about 13%.
An outlet that has to order from the factory is not an outlet. It is a catalogue with a counter.
What got in the way, and how we got past it
Exports still grew about 5% in the first year, in a year when US sales fell by roughly a quarter. They finished about 17% below the first-year plan, for three reasons.
Zenith’s team had the market and industry knowledge; our job was to make the reset rigorous. Because reviews were monthly, the US shortfall showed up in the first half rather than at year end. The team shifted effort to markets that were holding. Europe and the UK grew about 17%, every quarter ahead of the year before, and exports outside the US grew about 23%.
The second-year plan was then rebuilt from what customers had actually bought. Price assumptions stay close to last year’s, volume growth is set at about half the first-year pace, and targets exist only where buying history supports them. The US target sits close to actual sales, with growth expected from Europe and the UK. New capacity timing is now part of the plan rather than an assumption behind it.
The product programmes focused on the slow categories. In the domestic market, EPDM waterproofing sales nearly tripled and inflatables grew by more than three quarters.
Strong teams do not wait for year end. They spot the gap in the same month and adjust course.
What it produced
How to read this
All figures come from Zenith’s own sales records for the periods shown.
The results belong to Zenith’s team. Their people ran the reviews, held the stock and sold the product. We designed the system and guided it. Stock levels, KPIs, reviews and initiatives all ran at the same time, so the gains came from everything working together rather than from any one change. Eight of the ten months from June 2025 to March 2026 beat the same month a year earlier.
Retention did not move in one step. It sat at 54–55% for three years, reached 65% in FY24–25 — the year planning began in October — and 67% in FY25–26. The headline spans the full change; most of the first jump happened in the year the work started.
Domestic growth is the fairer number. Part of the outlet growth came from customers who used to buy at the factory and part from new customers. Domestic sales as a whole, counting both, grew 25% against 11.5% the year before.
Retention is measured at the outlets only. The factory now focuses on fewer, larger accounts, as many smaller buyers moved to the outlets once stock was there. Measuring at the outlets keeps the comparison like for like.
How it ended
The project ran from October 2024 to March 2026. At the end we handed the data model, dashboards and review routine to Zenith’s internal team, who now run the planning cycle and monthly reviews themselves. Debox continues to work with Zenith, most recently on organisation design and 100 Ops.
The lasting change is in how the business makes decisions. Targets are discussed in terms of customers, products, volumes and capacity rather than one revenue number, and a miss is discussed in the month it happens rather than discovered at year end.
If it still needs us to run it, we have not finished the job.
What we now build in from day one
Market risk is named up front. The US was set to deliver a large share of export growth, and one policy change moved the whole year. Our plans now name market concentration as a risk, with a fallback agreed in advance.
Sales and capacity share one timeline. The first-year sales plan assumed new capacity would be ready on time. Plans now tie revenue to capacity dates from the start, which gives a sharper and more reliable first-year target.
Selling more to each customer is the next opportunity. Retention and win-back have improved; cross-selling is the next lever. For a manufacturer with Zenith’s range, the next stage of growth is more categories per customer rather than just more customers.
If you are setting a three-year target
Break it down before you commit to it. Who buys how much of what, at what price, and can the factory make it on the dates the plan assumes. A revenue number that has not been through that test is not a target, it is an aspiration with a date attached.
Then review it monthly against the same breakdown. A shortfall found in month four can be answered. The same shortfall found at year end is just a post-mortem.
Read another
Every figure sourced from the client’s own systems, with the basis stated and the exclusions named.Advik Hi-Tech
The CAI Store
Fine Jewellery Manufacturing
Measurement note. Scope, methodology and deliverables are from our own project records. All performance figures are drawn from Zenith’s own sales records for the periods stated and were not independently audited by us. Retention, win-back and revenue-retention figures are measured at the outlets, where the year-on-year comparison is like for like.
