Lots of people work from home these days, but how many people do you know that run a cutting-edge store in Scotland from 4,000 miles away in India? Meet Snehal Magadum….
By Antony Begley
In the post-Covid years, working from home has become standard practice for lots of people – but it’s not something you come across much in local retailing, for obvious reasons. How could you possibly run a store from home? Especially if your home happens to be more than 4,000 miles away from the store you run?
That’s a question that Snehal Magadum gets asked all the time because she is the operational driving force behind the multi award-winning Girish’s@Barmulloch Premier store in Glasgow – and she lives halfway around the world in India.
“If you’re working from home, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re half an hour’s walk away or a 14-hour flight away from the store,” she points out, matter of factly. It’s a fair point, but it still just seems, well, slightly bizarre.
Unconventional approach
To be fair to her boss, Girish Jeeva, he’s a man with a bit of previous when it comes to ignoring convention and rewriting the local retailing rulebook. Just because no one else is doing it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It was only a few months ago, for example, that he became the first local retailer in the UK to launch a 24-hour delivery service – since replicated by several others. He was also a very early adopter of a range of solutions and technologies like beer caves, self-scan tills, AI-powered crime retail management systems, digital SELs and more.
So it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that he and Snehal have forged ahead, ignored the doubters, and developed a working-from-home model that sees Snehal sit at her desk in India and control virtually everything that happens in the store in Barmulloch. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it still does.
What’s perhaps even more surprising is that it works. In fact, it works perfectly. “I think we were all a little concerned when we first started working this way about it affecting store performance and sales and profits,” explains Snehal. “I know that I personally was a little nervous about it but I was also totally confident it would work. The reality a few months down the line is that it definitely hasn’t been a problem and store sales are where we expect them to be and, on lots of occasions, they’re actually up on where we were budgeting. I know a lot of factors can affect sales like weather and sporting events and whatever, so it’s difficult to isolate the specific effect of running the store this way, but all of the indicators tell us it’s working just as we’d planned.”
In with the bricks
It helps, of course, that nobody knows the store better than Snehal. “I’ve been here from day one,” she explains. “When Girish bought the store I came for an interview and he didn’t even have the keys yet, so he actually interviewed me in his car sitting outside the shop! That was in November 2020, about a month after I arrived in the UK from India to do a Master’s degree in Supply Chain Management at Glasgow Caledonian University.
“I got a job in McDonald’s, but I heard about the job with Girish through a friend and I was really excited because it was much more relevant to my degree. I got the job, fortunately, and was totally hooked from day one. I had zero experience in convenience retailing but I loved it from day one and I have a huge passion for running the store as efficiently and well as I possibly can.”
Snehal’s passion and clear talent for getting to grips with every intricacy of running a modern convenience store didn’t go unnoticed by Girish and she rapidly rose through the ranks, learning about every nook and cranny of the business as she went. Girish has openly admitted for a long time that, “it’s Snehal who runs the store, not me!”
There’s a bit of self-deprecating modesty in that statement because Girish is as sharp and visionary as they come but there’s also a lot of truth in what he says. As far as everyday operations go, Snehal does indeed run the store. From ordering, staff training and ranging to merchandising and pricing, from home delivery, gap checking, stock control and rota management to date checking and waste control, Snehal is the one tracking the data and pulling the strings.
She had more than proven she was capable of running the store, then, but letting her run the store from India? That would probably have been a step too far for most store owners. Fortunately for Snehal, Girish isn’t “most store owners”.
“I told Girish that I had to go back to India to get married, so we discussed various options, and we came up with this plan. Girish just said, ‘Let’s try it’,” she recalls. “A lot of what I do is done at a desk on a laptop anyway, so I knew I could do most of that work anywhere as long as I had internet access. The other challenge was setting up systems that allow Snehal to communicate with every member of the in-store team in real-time, quickly and efficiently, to make sure that she could allocate them tasks and then check that they had been done correctly.
“We try to maintain very high standards right across the store,” she says. “So the new system had to allow me to keep our standards where we need them to be but without me being able to walk around the store to physically check.”
The solution? “A lot of WhatsApp groups,” laughs Snehal. And when she says, “a lot,” she means it. “We have groups for every task, for every team, for literally everything we do. Everybody in the full team is a member of all the groups they need to be in and that lets me ensure everything gets done the way it needs to be done.”
And how does she check that everything has been done to her satisfaction? “Photos, a lot of them,” laughs Snehal again. “If we re-lay a bay, for example, I send the product list and the shelf placement. The team action it, then have to send me a photo of the bay once they’re done and I can make tweaks or approve.
“But that same system is used every day for every fixture. When we do gap checks and stock replenishment, the team send me photos of every fixture, every day.”
It sounds labour intensive, but Snehal insists it’s really very simple and efficient once you get used to it – and it also gives her a permanent record of every instruction and every task completed.
“In some ways, it’s even more efficient than physically walking around the store myself,” she says. It doesn’t take much time at all to check the entire store.”
It helps of course that Snehal can rely on her trusty supervisor Harshita on the ground back in Barmulloch. She explains: “Harshita has been an incredible support in-store, consistently making day-to-day operations smoother and more efficient. Like me, she started with us within a month of arriving in the UK and has shown remarkable dedication and adaptability from the start. Girish has a knack for spotting talent early and he said right from the beginning that she would be a valuable asset to the team. His instincts were right: Harshita’s potential is now clearly demonstrated by the positive impact she continues to make.”
Stress testing
In preparation for leaving for India in January this year, Snehal spent months preparing her systems, running tests and effectively trying to break the model to find out where the problems or potential weaknesses lay.
“I even did a full stock take of every single product over the course of a week, working at night because it was too busy when the store was open,” she explains. “That way the stock levels on the system exactly matched what was on the shopfloor and in the stockroom. We use automatic ordering which saves us hours per order so it’s important the stock control system is very accurate.”
Stock control, it turns out, is a passion of Girish’s too, especially after a slight mishap during the first few days after Snehal joined the business. “When we took over the shop, one of the first things I did was date check all the stock that we had inherited,” she says. “Because I had no experience in retail and certainly no experience of how packaging is labelled in the UK, I threw out a mountain of stock that I thought was out of date because I checked the production date and not the expiry dates! Girish has never let me forget that one!”
Perhaps as a legacy of that little incident, Snehal’s real-time stock management system is now a priority. “When we started out, we were maybe getting 80% accuracy on stock control,” she says. “But over time we’ve improved it bit by bit and I’d say we’re now 99% accurate. If anything goes missing, it tends to be full cases – which is usually an error with the delivery or with signing stock in. But they’re easy to spot and fix. And we also check the dates routinely. Every product in the shop will be date-checked at least once a month.”
Snehal is also responsible for managing the 24-hour home delivery side of the business (including the Snappy Shopper app) and for creating all training documents for all parts of the business for all staff as well as also handling rotas and payroll. “I track the rota and any amends to it as we go and then send Girish the payroll information and he pays everything out,” she explains. “The team have to sign in and sign out of every shift which comes straight into my system so I can track everything accurately.
“On the training side, I’ve created a full bank of training assets that make it easier to train everyone, including new recruits, because they’re all getting exactly the same training using exactly the same training materials. It keeps everything consistent and clean.”
So how does it actually work in reality? “It’s pretty simple, really,” says Snehal. “I work a full shift at my desk. There’s about a four and a half hour time difference and I tend to just do the same shift in India as a did when I was actually in the store, which is 2pm until 10pm. That means I start in India around 10am then work through until 6pm.”
And does she manage to stick to those hours? “Yes, I do, actually!” she laughs. “If anything, I’m more effective because I don’t get as many distractions as I would sitting in the office above the shop. I know what I need to do every day, and I work through it and generally I’ve done everything I need to do by the time 6pm comes. I do occasionally work later or at weekends if there’s something urgent or something has cropped up, but most of the time I don’t need to. I spend a few minutes every weekend checking the auto-ordering but that’s about it.”
To help her work through those tasks each day, she carried a bank of tech and kit with her back to India including her laptop, mobile phone, scanners and a home delivery gun. “I have everything I need right there so I can deal with everything without leaving my desk,” she says.
An added bonus is that her UK salary goes a lot further in India, especially when the exchange rate is good, as it is at the moment.
To add another twist to the story, Snehal’s fiancé lives and works in Berlin. He too will be heading to India soon for the wedding but the plan after that is that the newly married couple move to Berlin. Not that it should affect Snehal’s work pattern much, as she explains: “As I said earlier, when I’m working from home, it doesn’t really matter where home is. But in Germany I’ll only be a two-hour flight away so I will be able to come back to Scotland more often as required.”
It seems like she has it all planned out, then, and it also undeniably seems like this most unlikely of working arrangements is actually working out just perfectly.
In the meantime, Snehal has just taken over the running of Girish’s first store, a smaller unit on London Road in the east end of Glasgow, and that’s going swimmingly too. “I know the system inside out now,” explains Snehal. “So implementing it in London Road has been pretty easy actually!”
And when Girish finally does get that third store he’s long been dreaming of, Snehal will take that one under her wing too without too much fuss. That third store is something that Girish badly needs because his only frequently voiced frustration with the Barmulloch store is that he’s “run out of things to improve”. A nice complaint to have, but frustrating nonetheless for a man with enormous ambition and hunger.
As for the short term, Snehal has a wedding in October to look forward to and another trans-continental move from India to Germany to plan. The only slight problem, she says, is that she doesn’t speak German yet. But that seems like a trivial challenge for a capable young woman who clearly doesn’t let much stand in her way.
