India’s SMEs Don’t Need More Training. They Need Transformation
JAIPUR, [3rd July 2026] : For years, the answer offered to a struggling small business has been the same: more training. A workshop here, a motivational session there, a slide deck full of frameworks. Yet the businesses keep hitting the same wall. A new initiative believes it knows why — and that the conventional answer has been solving the wrong problem.
A new venture, The Ascend Academyy, argues that the real ceiling on small-business growth isn’t opportunity or ambition — it’s understanding. And understanding can be designed
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The Ascend Academyy, launched by Leadership & Business Transformation Strategist Bharatesh Suvarna and MSME growth strategist Gaggan Jain, starts from an uncomfortable premise: most corporate training fails not because the content is wrong, but because information was never the bottleneck. “People rarely act differently because they were handed more facts,” the founders argue. “They act differently when their mindset, their confidence, and their conversations change.”
It is a quiet but significant reframing. Across India, millions of Small and Medium Enterprises sit at the same inflection point — the moment a founder who once knew every customer by name must now lead through managers, systems, and culture. The instinct is to add headcount or chase a new market. The harder, more durable work is to change how the organisation thinks. That work, the Academyy contends, is a business strategy, not an HR expense.
From knowing to doing
The distinction the founders keep returning to is the one between knowing and doing. A manager can recite every principle of delegation and still not delegate. A sales team can name every objection-handling technique and still lose the deal on trust.
“The gap between knowing and doing is where performance is actually won or lost. So we test every programme against one question: what will someone do differently tomorrow?”— Bharatesh Suvarna, Co-Founder
That test produced an unusually concrete recent engagement. Asked to train teams on the FOFO (Franchise Owned, Franchise Operated) model, the Academyy refused to simply explain the structure. Instead it taught teams to read the investor’s mind — the high-capital-at-risk anxiety of a franchisee, the fears that shape every decision, the questions that build or break trust. The lesson generalised: most growth is bottlenecked not by what a business can offer, but by how well its people understand the person across the table.
“Business growth is rarely limited by opportunity. It is limited by understanding. When teams learn to identify what stakeholders actually fear and want, the conversations change — and when conversations change, outcomes change.”— Gaggan Jain, Co-Founder
The conviction is backed by experience rather than theory. Suvarna spent more than three decades in retail leadership, business transformation, and people development. Jain leads the Academyy’s MSME practice and the development of Dhandha 360°, its complete business operating system for owners in manufacturing and retail, built on the Academyy’s ASCEND Framework — Acknowledge, Shift, Create, Evaluate, Now, Daily — the same six-step discipline that gives the Academyy its name.
Their broader thesis fits a pattern visible across Indian business: the most valuable interventions are no longer the loudest or the most content-heavy, but the ones that change behaviour and quietly compound. Markets shift, customers evolve, competition sharpens. Organisations that keep learning keep growing; those that stop learning eventually stop evolving.
Which is why the Academyy resists the label of trainer altogether, preferring growth partner. Its founding line doubles as its argument: growth is not an accident — growth is designed.
About The Ascend Academyy
The Ascend Academyy is a leadership, business, and organisational development initiative committed to helping individuals, teams, and businesses unlock their next level of growth. Through customised interventions, workshops, coaching programmes, and transformation initiatives, the Academyy helps organisations convert potential into performance, and ambition into achievement. Its guiding belief is simple: growth is not an accident — growth is designed.
About the Founders
Bharatesh Suvarna is a Business Transformation Strategist, leadership coach, and co-founder of The Ascend Academyy, with more than three decades spent inside the realities of Indian business. His career spans retail leadership, business transformation, and people development — the disciplines of moving an organisation from founder-dependence to professional structure, and from individual effort to repeatable system. Across that arc he has built and mentored leadership teams, professionalised operations, strengthened customer-facing cultures, and prepared managers to carry larger responsibilities as their businesses scale.
His approach is defined by a refusal to separate learning from results. Rather than deliver theory, he designs interventions around the specific decisions, conversations, and behaviours a business needs to change — measuring every programme against a single test: what will people do differently tomorrow? It is this practical, business-first philosophy, grounded in years on the shop floor and in the boardroom, that he brings to The Ascend Academyy and to the SME owners it serves.
Gaggan Jain is a business educator, MSME growth strategist, and co-founder of The Ascend Academyy. He leads the Academyy’s MSME practice, including the development of Dhandha 360° — the Academyy’s flagship business operating system and education programme for owners in manufacturing and retail — and the Academyy’s proprietary ASCEND Framework (Acknowledge, Shift, Create, Evaluate, Now, Daily). His work is grounded in real Indian business contexts and the day-to-day operating realities of founder-led enterprises, translating large-business discipline into practical tools that small and medium businesses can actually use.
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