Why I keep the office in Rajkot — not Mumbai, not Bangalore
An honest take on why headquartering a multi-sector group in Saurashtra is the right operating decision in 2026 — and why most Indian SME founders should stop apologising for their home city.
Every Indian SME founder I meet under forty asks me the same question in the third meeting: 'Don't you want to move the office to Mumbai or Bangalore?' The premise of the question is that ambition lives in those two cities, and that a Rajkot address signals you don't have it. I have run a multi-sector group from Saurashtra long enough to be confident in the opposite answer.
The prestige bias is expensive and wrong
Indian SaaS and VC culture has, over the past decade, created a default that the only legitimate business address is BKC, Powai, Indiranagar or Whitefield. For tech businesses with the right customers and the right capital, that's a defensible choice. For distribution-led real-asset businesses — which is most of Indian MSME — it is a category error. You're paying Mumbai rents to serve customers and dealers who don't live there.
What proximity actually buys
Sahayog Energy installs rooftop solar systems for households across India. Most of the actual operating week is spent in conversation with: regional dealers (across Saurashtra, North Gujarat, South Gujarat, Maharashtra, MP and Rajasthan), installation crew leaders, OEM service teams, finance partners, and the customer themselves. Rajkot is within a four-hour drive or short flight of every one of those constituencies. Mumbai is not.
VVP Solar's manufacturing line is in Gujarat. V.V. Patel & Co.'s trading network is anchored across Saurashtra and Kutch. Sahayog Ferti Chem's dealer ecosystem is rural Gujarat and Maharashtra. Every one of these businesses is closer to its customer from Rajkot than it would be from Mumbai.
The cost gap is enormous and underrated
A 5,000-square-foot office in BKC runs ₹12-18 lakh per month. The same footprint in Rajkot's commercial centre runs ₹80,000-1,20,000. Multiply across a five-year horizon and add senior team housing differential — the gap funds an entire department of operating talent. SME founders chasing prestige addresses are quietly choosing a Mumbai office over a third sales region.
The talent question is real but answerable
Yes, recruiting senior finance, engineering and product talent into a tier-2 city is harder than recruiting in Mumbai. Three things have shifted since 2020 that change the calculus: hybrid working is now culturally accepted, COVID normalised senior talent returning to home cities, and Tier-1 colleges in Gujarat (IIT Gandhinagar, IIM Ahmedabad, BITS Pilani-Goa) produce a pipeline the local SME ecosystem couldn't access a decade ago.
The honest framing: we lose maybe 15-20% of senior candidates who insist on a Bangalore address. Of the remainder, retention is significantly higher because people are home, not displaced.
What I tell SME founders in your position
If your customer is a household in Tier-2 / Tier-3 India, your dealer is a small-town distributor, your operations involve physical movement of goods or people across regional geography, and your operating discipline is the moat — then your headquarters should be as close to the dealer and the customer as possible. That is almost certainly not Mumbai or Bangalore.
Stop apologising for the home city. The most enduring Indian business families — across textiles, jewellery, pharmaceuticals, chemicals — built their operating spine from Tier-2 cities and only later opened representative offices in Mumbai or Singapore. The order matters: build the business from the source, layer the metro presence on top when it serves a specific function. Don't do it the other way around.
Got a question on what you've just read — or a project that touches one of the categories above? Write directly to the office.
First-generation Indian industrialist. Founder of Sahayog Energy and a group of ventures spanning solar, manufacturing, agri-inputs and trading.