Entering India without learning it the expensive way
Market entry, operating model and go-to-market work for firms coming into India — done by the partner who signed the proposal, not handed down.
A consulting partner built for companies ready to expand beyond borders
We combine deep market insight with hands-on execution, which in practice means the person who wrote your entry study is the person sitting in the registrar’s office four months later. Planning, incorporation, compliance and operations are one engagement rather than four. What that costs us is the ability to take on twenty clients a year. What it saves you is the handover, which is where most market-entry projects quietly fail.
What we do
Four engagements. Each is fixed-fee and each has a written scope before it starts.
01Market entry study
Whether to come in at all, and on what structure. Demand, competitive position, regulatory route, and the three numbers that decide it. Six to eight weeks. About one in five of these ends in a recommendation not to proceed, which is charged at the same fee.
02Operating model
What the Indian entity actually does and what stays at head office. Legal structure, hiring plan, the first two years of cost, and where the local team needs authority to decide rather than to recommend.
03Go-to-market
Channel, pricing and the first hundred customers. We build the pricing against local willingness to pay rather than against a converted home-market figure, which is the single most common way an entry fails quietly.
04Post-entry review
Twelve to eighteen months in, when the plan has met the market. What is working, what was wrong in the original study — including ours — and what to change before the second round of investment.
Selected work
Four engagements, named by sector and city rather than by client.
Specialty foods · Melbourne to Mumbai
A market entry study that recommended a distributor partnership over a subsidiary. Live for three years; the subsidiary question was reopened last year and the answer changed.
Precision optics · Zurich to Pune
Operating model and hiring plan for a fifty-person manufacturing entity. The first-year cost came in four per cent above the plan, which is the closest we have been.
Diagnostics · Boston to Bengaluru
A go-to-market study we ended early and refunded in part, because the regulatory route changed underneath it. The revised study ran six months later.
Electric mobility · Stuttgart to Chennai
Post-entry review at eighteen months. Found the pricing had been set against a converted European figure and was about twenty per cent too high for the segment it was aimed at.
Trusted by businesses worldwide
ELEMA made our market entry seamless in the only sense that matters — there were no surprises in year one that were not already written down in the study. Two of them were unwelcome and both were flagged.
The partner who wrote the proposal ran the work. In this industry that is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason we came back for the operating model.
They stopped an engagement halfway and returned part of the fee when the regulation moved. I have never had a consultancy do that, and it is why they did the second study.
The entry study told us not to enter for eighteen months, with the reasoning attached. That advice cost them the follow-on work and saved us a subsidiary we would have had to unwind.
Highly recommended for any business looking to elevate its online presence — but what we actually valued was that every assumption in the model was labelled as one.
Working with this team was a seamless experience from start to finish. Their attention to detail, strategic thinking and ability to translate our vision was outstanding.
Before you engage anyone
Questions worth putting to us and to whoever else you are speaking to.
Who actually does the work?
The partner who signed the proposal, with at most one analyst. We do not staff a study with people you have not met, and the named partner is in every working session. That caps how many engagements we can run at once, which is why we sometimes say we are full.
What does a study cost?
A market entry study is between ₹18 and ₹32 lakh depending on sector and how many cities are in scope. It is fixed at the start and does not move — if the scope changes we write a new one rather than raise an invoice you did not expect.
What if the answer is “do not enter”?
You get that answer, in writing, at the same fee. Roughly one study in five ends there. A consultancy whose studies always recommend proceeding is selling the second engagement, not the first.
Do you implement, or only advise?
We advise, and we will sit in on hiring for the first two senior roles because getting those wrong undoes the plan. We do not run the entity, and anyone offering to both recommend and then be paid to execute has an interest in the recommendation.
How long does an entry take end to end?
Between seven and fourteen months from first study to trading, and the spread is regulatory rather than commercial. We publish the range rather than the best case, because the best case is what everyone quotes and almost nobody hits.
Ready to look at India properly?
A first call is forty minutes and free, and it ends with a written view on whether a study is worth commissioning at all.