Building the Leverage Edu Visa Vertical

Joined Leverage Edu's Founder's Office with a mandate to build a new business vertical from scratch. The brief was vague: make it cashflow positive, diversify from core, and do something with visas. Sandesh had no travel background and was the first person in the vertical.

In his first month, he went to Nehru Place and other travel agent hubs, sitting with agents to understand why they chose particular visa processing companies and what those companies got wrong. He identified three variables that determined whether a B2B visa business would win: price, supply, and turnaround time. He cracked price and supply in month one. Turnaround time required a deeper investigation: he worked with two suppliers simultaneously, tracked their processing times, sat with their representatives to understand the mechanics of delays, and consulted travel industry veterans with ten to twenty years of experience to fill in the gaps. He also negotiated with India's largest visa supplier, who required a deposit to open an account, running multiple meetings to demonstrate Leverage Edu's scale and credibility until the supplier agreed to work with them.

Once all three variables were solved, Sandesh hired a distributed field team across Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore, and Delhi. He did the sales and operations work himself first, learning the exact time and effort each task required, then used that knowledge to train an operations manager and set clear role expectations. He introduced KPIs, activity reports, location tracking for field reps, and surprise checks to maintain accountability across a remote team.