The chief executive who shut her largest revenue line in week three

The board of Ashva Learning had spent two years doing the things boards do when a company stops growing. It had reduced headcount by roughly forty per cent. It had closed two regional offices. It had changed chief executive once already. What it had not done was stop selling the product that was losing the money.

Sandhya Nair arrived in February 2026 from Rupaya, where she had spent seven years building a consumer lending business, and spent her first three weeks doing almost nothing visible. She read contribution margin by product line, by cohort, by acquisition channel. Then she went to the board and proposed shutting direct-to-consumer tutoring, the line that generated the largest share of revenue and effectively all of the losses.

It was the largest loss line and we were describing it as traction. Once you say that sentence out loud in a board meeting, the decision makes itself.

An outsider’s appointment, defended

Nair is not an education person, and the board said so openly when it appointed her. The reasoning was that Ashva’s problem had stopped being pedagogical some time ago. The company built reasonable products. It acquired customers at a price that no retention curve could justify, and it had been describing the resulting revenue as evidence that the strategy was working.

She is candid that the first ninety days went badly in ways that had nothing to do with arithmetic. She misread how the school-partnership sales cycle worked, assumed a procurement rhythm borrowed from financial services, and lost a quarter to it. "It mattered enormously for the first ninety days, and I made mistakes because of it," she says. "It matters less now, because the problem in front of us is arithmetic."

One number, publicly

Ashva now guides on a single operating target: contribution-positive by the end of the 2027 financial year. Nair has declined to guide on revenue, on headcount, or on the number of schools in the partnership network — a refusal that has irritated at least two of the company’s investors, who have said privately that the disclosure is thinner than they would like.

Her argument is that a company recovering from a growth-at-any-cost period cannot credibly publish growth metrics, because the organisation will optimise for whatever appears on the slide. "If I put a school count on the board pack, I will get school counts," she says. "Some of them will be schools that never pay us."

What she inherited from lending

The habit Nair brought from Rupaya is cohort discipline. Consumer lending forces a business to look at customers as vintages that either perform or do not, and to accept that a bad vintage is permanent. Education companies, she argues, rarely think this way, because a student who stops attending is treated as a retention problem to be solved rather than a unit that has already failed to pay back its acquisition cost.

Whether the school-partnership business can carry the company is unresolved. It is smaller, slower and structurally lower margin than what it replaced. It is also, for the first time in Ashva’s history, a line that makes money on the customers it already has.