By Kavita Iyer and Arun Upadhayay 
Raebareli, 30 April: Sachin Srivastava had been in the solar business for over fifteen years. He knew the technology, understood the market, and had the scars to prove it. But knowing your industry and actually scaling inside it are two very different things, and for a long time, AMPL was stuck somewhere in between.
The company was doing real work. Solar installations for homes and businesses across Uttar Pradesh, helping people slash electricity bills by up to 70%, delivering systems built to last 25 years or more. None of that was the problem. The problem was structural. Akupaad Marketing Pvt. Ltd was running everything out of a single branch in Raebareli, hemorrhaging cash on EMIs that touched ₹5 crore a year, and somehow expected to grow in a market that wasn’t going to wait around.
They were installing roughly 100 sites a month. For a company with Srivastava’s experience, that number felt like a ceiling, not a milestone.
The Decision That Changed Things
At some point, Srivastva made a call that a lot of founders resist making: he brought in outside help. AMPL entered into an engagement with Bada Business Private Limited, Dr. Vivek Bindra’s firm, under a program called Idea to IPO, which is exactly what it sounds like. Less hand-holding, more structural surgery.
What followed wasn’t a motivational overhaul. It was methodical. The kind of intervention that starts with the uncomfortable questions, where is money leaking, what’s actually holding operations back, and what does the business look like if you strip away the parts that aren’t working?
First, Fix the Money Problem
The EMI burden was suffocating everything else. ₹5 crore a year is not a number you build around it’s a number you survive around. Through deliberate financial restructuring, AMPL brought that figure down to ₹2 crore. More than 60% reduction. That’s not a rounding error; that’s oxygen returning to a business that was quietly running out of it.
Suddenly, capital that was disappearing into loan repayments could go somewhere useful. Into people. Into expansion. Into actually executing on the demand that was already there.
More Than a Contractor
One of the quieter but more consequential shifts was how AMPL started thinking about itself. For years, it had operated as an EPC contractor you call, we install, we leave. That model works until it doesn’t. What Bada Business helped Srivastva see was that the company had the bones of something bigger: a technology-driven solar platform, not just a service provider.
That repositioning isn’t cosmetic. It changes how customers perceive you, how investors look at you, and frankly, how the team inside the company thinks about what they’re building. It’s the difference between a firm and a platform and that gap matters enormously when you’re trying to raise capital or enter new markets.
Six Branches. Five Times the Output.
The operational changes were just as significant. Processes got digitized. Workflows got restructured. The manual dependencies that slowed everything down, tracking, customer updates, and execution visibility, started getting replaced with systems that didn’t need someone to be physically in a room to function.
And then AMPL expanded. Not tentatively, not with one foot in. The company went from its single Raebareli office to six locations Lucknow, Kanpur, Sitapur, Shahjahanpur, Bahraich, and the original base. Each branch wasn’t just a flag planted on a map. It was a working unit, part of a model that was now actually designed to scale.
Monthly installation capacity went from 100 sites to 500. Five times the output, from the same team that had been constrained not by ambition but by structure.
The Numbers Tell a Clear Story
Revenue grew 3.4 times. Profit after tax grew more than 3.5 times. For a company that had been struggling under debt and limited bandwidth, those aren’t incremental improvements; they’re a different business.
Srivastva projects 8x growth over the next two years. That’s an aggressive number, but it’s no longer an abstract one. There’s a foundation under it now, a debt structure that doesn’t choke the company, a model that’s been proven across multiple locations, and an operational backbone that can handle scale without falling apart.
AMPL is also now positioned for institutional investment, which is where the strategic repositioning starts paying its biggest dividends. Investors don’t fund contractors. They fund platforms with clear roadmaps, and AMPL has built one, timed well against India’s national solar push and the government subsidies that come with it.
Srivastva’s Take
He’s measured about it, which is probably how someone with fifteen years in the industry talks about anything. “The shift was not just financial, it was structural,” he said. “With the right strategy and execution support, we moved from being constrained to being scalable. Today, we are building not just projects, but a platform for long-term growth in solar energy.”
That word constrained does a lot of work. It’s honest in a way that founders rarely are about their own companies. Most people in his position would have blamed the market, or the policy environment, or the competition. Srivastva seems to understand that the ceiling was internal, and that removing it required looking inward before looking outward.
Why This Story Matters Beyond AMPL
India’s solar market is enormous and still underpenetrated, especially in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where awareness is growing faster than the infrastructure to serve it. Companies like AMPL aren’t just businesses; they’re part of a supply chain that the country’s energy transition genuinely depends on.
What happened with Akupaad isn’t a miracle story. There was no single breakthrough moment, no dramatic pivot. It was a grinding, deliberate process of fixing what was broken, the finances, the operations, the positioning, and then building on ground that could actually hold weight.
That’s what scaling in the real world looks like. And for Sachin Srivastva, fifteen years in, it finally feels like it’s working.
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Former financial consultant turned journalist, reporting on markets, industry trends, and economic policy.
- Kavita Iyer
- Kavita Iyer
- Kavita Iyer
- Kavita Iyer
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
Arun Upadhayay