“Class” for the middle class

While picking into numerous expense sheets over the last 2 years, I’d hardly realized it. Last week, I did, though, while making our budgets for the upcoming financial year. An item on the P&L had remarkably changed trends over my years as a general manager. It’d dropped and stayed small. It’s G&A. 

For a multi location, tier II spread organization like OfBusiness, road travel and out of office stay are significant heads in G&A. In the continuum of necessities, comforts to luxuries, these 2 heads are to provide service levels of comforts (to drive efficiency) while being priced at necessities (to drive down costs). Any other position in the continuum makes G&A move from being an investment to an expense that hurts. 

3 names have made it happen: Oyo, Ola and Uber.

As a firm with firm middle class values (cost conscious, profit minded, hustling yet dreamy), these 3 are our gifts from the new age. Our business model is predicated on they running smoothly. They are so much a part of us that we cease to take notice. It’s ironic that when we hear of them, we think of them as businesses (with their ephemeral ups and downs). And not as vehicles that have created “class” for the middle class, one that’s used to a non-classy position in the continuum above.