Why we write these Insights? An insight into our insights

Running a business means making decisions with incomplete information. Should you hire a senior leader now or wait? Is your pricing holding you back? Is your business plan guiding the company, or just sitting in a folder? Are your contracts and policies ready for an investor’s scrutiny?

Most of these decisions don’t come with a manual. Founders and leadership teams learn the answers through experience, often expensive experience.

Insights by Zehncore exists to make some of those lessons less expensive.

What you’ll find here

Insights is where we share what we’ve learned from working with businesses at different stages, from early-stage startups to established companies. Each article takes one problem that businesses commonly face and examines it honestly: why it happens, what it costs, and what you can do about it.

Our articles draw on the same areas we work in every day:

• Strategy: business planning, growth decisions, and the choices that shape a company’s direction

• Marketing and go-to-market: positioning, brand, pricing, and how businesses reach the right customers

• Operations: processes, SOPs, and the systems that let a business scale without breaking

• People and organisation design: structure, roles, hiring, and building teams that work

• Business documentation and compliance: contracts, policies, ESOPs, and the paperwork that protects a business and prepares it for growth

These areas rarely exist in isolation. A positioning problem affects pricing and hiring. A growth plan depends on operations and cash flow. A fundraising round tests contracts, compliance, and governance all at once. Our articles reflect that connected view, because that’s how businesses actually work.

How we write

We hold our articles to a few principles:

• Practical over theoretical. Every article should leave you with something you can apply, whether that’s a question to ask your team, a signal to watch for, or a decision framework.

• Honest over comforting. We’d rather tell you where businesses commonly go wrong than repeat advice that sounds good but doesn’t hold up.

• Grounded in evidence. Where we reference research, books, or well-known business cases, we name them, so you can explore further and judge for yourself. We avoid statistics we can’t stand behind.

• Clear over clever. We write in plain language. Good advice shouldn’t need decoding.

Who it’s for

Insights is written for founders, business owners, and leadership teams who want to think more clearly about how their business is built and run. You don’t need a consulting background to use it. You just need to care about getting the fundamentals right.

Many of our examples and references relate to businesses operating in India, where much of our work is based. The underlying principles apply wherever you operate.

A note on our articles

Our articles are written to inform and to help you ask better questions. They’re not a substitute for advice tailored to your situation. This matters particularly for topics involving law, tax, or regulation, where the right answer depends on the specifics of your business and where rules change over time. For those decisions, we recommend speaking with qualified professionals, which is something we help clients coordinate as part of our work.

Start reading

If you’re new here, these articles are a good place to begin:

• Why Most Startup Business Plans Fail Before Year Two (And It’s Not the Idea)

• Your Product Isn’t the Problem. Your Positioning Is.

• Org Charts for Startups: When to Add Layers and When to Resist

• SOPs Aren’t Bureaucracy: How Documented Processes Raise Your Company’s Valuation

And if an article raises a question about your own business, we’re happy to talk it through.