Now Prasad decided to have only toast and coffee for breakfast. This completely upset my plans of having a heavy breakfast and then six or seven small meals throughout the day. Gouri has told me specifically not to gain too much weight on hotel food and my dietician at Talwalkars has put me on this small-meal diet.

But Prasad, I assume, is one of those heavy-dinner guys with low metabolism and expensive gym memberships, who just nibbles on toast. With him being so frugal it would hardly be proper for me to have the sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs and French toast that I’d been planning since I saw the breakfast menu in my room last night. So I just picked up a couple of croissants and some orange juice and hoped to God we’d get a good lunch at the JHA factory. Most clients have very poor catering though.

Our project is simplicity personified. A private equity company out of Bangalore wants to pick up a majority stake in JHA. But they want to make sure the company is in sound shape. So they’ve asked KPMG to do a thorough audit of the financial side of the business—BORING!—and Dufresne to look at the non-financial. Basically to make sure that the strategy, business plan and operations are all sound—INTELLECTUALLY CHALLENGING! So we’ll spend around four or five days evaluating various aspects of their operations followed by another couple of days in a strategy workshop with JHA’s top management. Finally we’ll spend a week evaluating their current business plan and suggesting improvements.

Prasad then divided up various parts of operational areas amongst the team. I will be taking care of the entire supply chain right from raw materials to finished goods dispatch.

I know exactly what you are thinking, Diary. Are they giving me the single most important piece of the project to see if I am ready to be made associate? I think so!

According to Prasad this is going to be a quick and simple project with clear timelines and deliverables. If we do our job well we are certain to get even more work after the private equity guys acquire JHA.

He told us that once investors took a stake in the company they would normally rehire a consultant to immediately implement operational improvements, reduce waste, optimize manpower and increase the efficiency of the plant. And they will think of Dufresne first at that stage if we do this bit well.

The project would start with a full briefing at the JHA factory this morning itself with their CEO after which we would start collecting data right away.

Prasad was just about to discuss our game plan for the meeting when the waiters told us that our cars had arrived. We immediately got up to leave.

This was a tragedy because I hadn’t even finished one croissant and my juice was untouched. I had to nod a lot while Prasad spoke and it was very awkward to eat in between. I wanted to speak to Prasad about moving to the Taj but decided to bring it up later in the day when I had time alone with him. I was starving.