The Discipline of Profitable Growth

Resilience Has to Be Built Before It Is Tested

Saurabh Vij has spent more than two decades in engineered construction solutions across India, Asia Pacific and the Gulf, from specifying products through structural consultants in Delhi to leading a USD 45 million business across five Gulf markets. He now heads Engineering and Infrastructure at Würth Professional Solutions in the UAE. His view of growth is unsentimental: a rising market will hide almost anything, right up until it stops rising.

When Saurabh Vij took charge of a persistently loss-making business in North India, the instinct in the room was the familiar one. Sell more. Push harder. Grow the top line and the profit will follow.

He did not accept it.

“The first assumption I had to challenge was that the business needed to sell more to become more profitable,” he says. “In reality, revenue growth alone does not guarantee a healthy business.”

What followed was less dramatic than a restructuring and considerably harder. Instead of one decisive intervention, Vij went after the quality of the growth itself: where it was coming from, which customers and opportunities actually offered sustainable value, and whether the effort his sales teams were expending was converting into the right commercial outcomes. Market coverage, customer development, project selection and receivables all came under the same discipline, with sales and engineering pointed at a single set of priorities rather than two.

Over three years the business moved from sustained losses to double-digit profitability, with revenue compounding at 23 percent a year. Attrition in a team of more than 115 people fell from 18 percent to 5 percent.

“The turnaround was not about one big decision. It was about making better decisions consistently, from how we deployed our people to how we pursued projects and managed cash.”

The lesson he draws from it is the one he still leads by. “A turnaround begins when you stop treating symptoms and start challenging the assumptions behind the business model.”

The Costs Worth Keeping

Every leader handed a struggling business feels the same pull towards the cost line, because it is the fastest place to show progress. Vij is sceptical of that speed.

His test is not how much a cost is, but what it does. Costs that create value are separated from costs that merely consume resources, and the distinction decides everything. Cutting without making it, he argues, flatters this quarter’s numbers while weakening the business that has to survive the next several.

What he protects is specific: investments in customer relationships, in developing people, in productivity, and in anything that builds future revenue. In an engineered solutions business, he notes, technical expertise and project engagement are not overheads at all. They shape customer confidence, influence product specifications and determine long-term business potential.

What he challenges is equally specific: activity that has lost its original purpose, effort that duplicates other effort, and resources that cannot be traced to customer value or business performance.

The discipline, in his telling, is procedural as much as financial. Every investment should have a clear purpose, a named owner and a way of measuring whether it worked. Decisions should be driven by evidence rather than urgency.

“Cost discipline is not about spending the least. It is about getting the greatest sustainable return from every resource we deploy.”

Stability Is a Commercial Asset

The attrition figure from the North India years is the one Vij returns to, and not for sentimental reasons. He treats it as a commercial result.

Leading a large sales and engineering organisation, he points out, means results rest on far more than individual targets. They rest on customer relationships, local market knowledge, collaboration, and how much confidence people have in the people leading them. Churn erodes all four at once.

His approach is people-first, a phrase he is careful not to leave soft. He does not regard it as an alternative to accountability. People need clarity on what is expected, coaching to get better, the freedom to make their own calls and honest conversations when performance falls short. In a difficult market, he adds, consistency from leadership matters more than usual: teams need to understand the priorities, believe decisions are fair and see that their development is taken seriously.

What a stable team produces is continuity with customers, stronger execution and institutional knowledge that cannot be recruited back once it walks out.

“Ultimately, investing in people is an investment in business performance,” he says. Coming from someone who delivered the growth number and the retention number in the same three years, the claim is harder to dismiss as rhetoric.

Five Markets, One Strategy, Many Versions of It

Vij moved to Dubai in 2023 to lead a business of more than USD 45 million across five GCC countries including the UAE and Bahrain, growing at a low double-digit rate a year. Scale changed the question he had to answer. It was no longer how to fix a business, but where the next phase of growth should come from.

His answer was to stop treating growth as a single target and start treating it as a portfolio. Customer needs, market maturity, competitive dynamics and project pipelines differed across the five markets, and a strategy that performed in one could not simply be copied into the others. The work was in identifying where real potential sat: which customer segments were underpenetrated, where coverage could improve, which large projects or strategic accounts could move the number meaningfully.

Then came the harder discipline of caring about the quality of that growth, balancing core business against coverage expansion and large-project opportunities while holding commercial standards and building the capability of the sales leaders underneath him.

He is firm that none of it compounds unless it reaches the ground. Strategy, he says, only creates value when people understand what it means for their customers and their daily decisions, which is why each team got specific priorities, clear ownership and a regular review rhythm.

His formulation is worth keeping: growth should come from the intersection of market opportunity, competitive advantage and the organisation’s ability to execute profitably. Two out of three is a plan that does not survive contact with a P&L.

When a Process Earns Its Place

Across his Gulf tenure, Vij’s teams reworked more than 50 business processes while holding green global audit ratings from 2022 onward, which puts him in the unusual position of having tightened governance and reduced friction at the same time.

He judges a process on three questions: the risk it controls, the value it creates and the effort it demands. Anything protecting financial integrity, customer commitments, product quality, compliance or safety is essential, though he insists even those should be designed with intelligence rather than inherited wholesale.

“If a process exists only because it has always existed, without a clear business purpose, it deserves to be challenged.”

The craft, as he describes it, lies in removing complexity without removing control, and that requires understanding how work actually happens rather than how the manual says it happens. It means listening to the people who live inside the process and finding where approvals, handovers and duplicated steps are quietly costing days.

“The best process is not necessarily the one with the most controls,” he says. “It is the one that manages the right risks while enabling people to deliver results efficiently.”

Multiplying Judgement, Not Instructions

In the Gulf, Vij led more than 80 sales professionals through a direct team of nine leaders, and he is candid that the arrangement required him to change.

Early in his career, proximity to customers and execution was the job. At scale, that same instinct becomes a constraint, slowing the organisation down and stunting the people in it. “I had to shift from focusing primarily on getting things done myself,” he says, “to building an organisation in which other leaders could consistently get things done well.”

In practice that meant setting direction, developing leaders, establishing clear expectations and building an operating rhythm the business could run on. It meant making sure his Area Sales Managers understood not only their targets but the commercial reasoning behind the priorities and the standards expected of their teams. And it meant giving them room to decide within that framework, coaching them through difficult calls and holding them to outcomes instead of prescribing every action.

It also meant accepting something many senior leaders say and fewer practise: that a capable leader may take a different route to the same objective.

“Leadership at scale is about multiplying judgement, not multiplying instructions. Your success is ultimately measured by what the organisation can achieve without your direct intervention in every decision.”

What the Customer Is Actually Paying For

Vij’s career began on the technical side, specifying products through structural consultants and architects in Delhi after starting out in technical sales of switchgear at Larsen & Toubro. That grounding, close to construction applications where performance, safety, reliability and fitness for purpose decide everything, still shapes how he thinks about price.

Product management added the next layer: how product performance, portfolio strategy, pricing and profitability connect. Commercial leadership added a third, the customer’s own business objectives and the economics of actually delivering a solution.

The result is a definition of price that has little to do with cost or with what a competitor is charging. “Today, I see pricing as a reflection of the value a customer receives,” he says. For engineered construction solutions that value might include design support, technical approvals, installation reliability, product availability, productivity on site and less uncertainty during execution. The commercial case strengthens when those benefits can be demonstrated in practical terms rather than asserted.

He is notably unromantic about the limits of this. Technical value does not confer unlimited pricing power. Customers have budgets, alternatives and commercial constraints, and a supplier who ignores them is negotiating with themselves.

“The objective is not to sell the most expensive product,” he says. “It is to help the customer make the best-value decision and build a commercially sustainable relationship in the process.”

Consistency of Purpose, Not Uniformity of Execution

Before the Gulf, Vij spent two and a half years based in Singapore running product and trade strategy across nine Asia Pacific countries, work he credits with more than USD 15 million in revenue growth and with a durable lesson about transplanting ideas.

Customer expectations, purchasing behaviour, distribution structures, price sensitivity and routes to market can differ sharply between markets even when the technical application is identical. A value proposition that lands in one country may need a different emphasis in the next.

What he took from it was a habit of separating the underlying customer need from the chosen method of meeting it. The need for reliability, productivity or safety tends to hold across borders. How customers evaluate and buy a solution does not.

“I would not assume that a practice is transferable simply because it has worked elsewhere,” he says. “I would test it, listen to the local team, and use evidence to determine what needs to change.”

His summary of regional strategy is tidier than most: consistency in purpose, not uniformity in execution.

Where Engineering Becomes Commercial Advantage

At Würth Professional Solutions, where Vij is leading Engineering and Infrastructure, the question he spends his time on is when technical superiority actually converts into commercial advantage.

His answer is that it converts only when a customer can see it improving a real project outcome. A technically excellent product delivers nothing if it cannot be approved, procured on time, installed correctly or justified commercially.

In construction, he notes, the product is usually only part of the solution. Consultants need documentation and design support. Contractors need confidence in availability, installation and site execution. Commercial teams need clarity on total cost and value. His focus is on connecting engineering capability to those realities across civil, MEP and infrastructure applications, in anchoring, firestop, façade and fastening systems, supported by technical engagement, consultant approvals and jobsite execution.

He is equally clear about when superior engineering is not enough. A customer may prioritise immediate availability, an approved incumbent supplier, a budget ceiling or an existing procurement arrangement, and better specifications will not override any of those on their own.

“The real competitive advantage is not simply having a better product. It is making that product easier to specify, approve, procure and use, while demonstrating measurable value to the customer.”

What Growth Conceals

Asked what today’s leaders most underestimate, Vij does not reach for market conditions or technology. He reaches for time.

Building a business that performs consistently across different market conditions, he argues, takes longer and demands more organisational discipline than most leaders allow for. And expansion makes it easy to postpone. “Strong growth can hide weaknesses,” he says. When markets are rising, poor productivity, weak receivables, unclear accountability and an operating model leaning on a handful of individuals all stay comfortably out of view. They surface when demand slows or competition sharpens, which is exactly when they are most expensive to fix.

Hence the discipline he describes as non-negotiable: resilience has to be built before it is tested. Commercial standards held in good times, leaders developed before they are needed, growth diversified rather than concentrated, proximity to customers maintained, and processes that support sound decisions without slowing execution.

Two convictions close the argument. The first is that profitable growth and people development are not competing priorities, a point his North India numbers make more forcefully than any framework could. The second is about courage, specifically the courage to make difficult decisions early rather than waiting until market conditions force the issue, paired with enough adaptability to change direction when the evidence changes.

“Sustainable profitability is not the result of one successful year or one turnaround initiative,” he says. “It is the outcome of building an organisation that makes good commercial decisions, develops its people and serves customers well, even when conditions are difficult.”

Editor’s Note

Most turnaround stories are told as a single brave decision, because that is the version that makes a good anecdote. Saurabh Vij tells his as an accumulation of unglamorous ones, and the structure of his thinking rewards attention: he protects the costs that look cuttable, he challenges the processes that look protective, and he measures his own leadership by what happens when he is not in the room. For a Gulf construction market running at pace, his warning about what growth conceals may be the most useful thing in this interview, and the easiest to postpone.

Saurabh Vij is Head of Engineering and Infrastructure at Würth Professional Solutions in the UAE. He previously served as Director of Sales at Hilti Emirates and Director of Sales for North India at Hilti India, and holds a B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily represent those of his employer.

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