Most business owners treat training like a chore. Do it once, tick the box, move on. Tushar Jawar, Head of Learning and Development at DSP Mutual Fund, spent an hour making the case that this attitude is quietly costing distributors more than they realize.
The session opened with a simple question: how many of you have trained your team more than six times in the last seven months? The chat responses said it all. Never. Zero. Once or twice. For a business built entirely on knowledge and trust, that's a problem.
Tushar broke down the reasons why training gets ignored. The first is what he called the "curse of knowledge." If you've spent 20 years in the industry, you forget what it felt like to not know how STP or SWP works. You assume new hires will pick it up. They don't. The options is simple but uncomfortable: design every training as if the person sitting in front of you knows nothing. Even if they've been around for five years.
The second problem is the absence of standard operating procedures. Tushar shared a striking example — a distributor managing over Rs 1,500 crore in AUM, in business for 60 years, with 12 relationship distributors who did not share a common pitch for the organization. Not even a three-line introduction. Every investor got a different version of the company depending on who they spoke to. That's not a branding issue. It's a training issue.
Third, there's what he described as hidden revenue leaks. A 25 lakh SIP opportunity that dies because the relationship distributor forgot to follow up. No CRM entry. No next-step process. These aren't talent failures — they're system failures. And systems come from training.
Fourth is the "false confidence in experience" trap. Someone who's been pitching ELSS funds since 2015 might still be using the same approach. Mobile phones get software updates every few months. People don't — unless someone deliberately builds that into the culture.
The practical framework Tushar offered was direct: map your org structure, define what each role is supposed to deliver, identify the gaps between what people know and what they need to know, then build training around those gaps. Not theory. Not random sessions. Targeted material tied to real problems.
He spent time on the buddy system too — pairing juniors with seniors in a structured way, not just throwing a newcomer into the worst client calls and hoping they learn something. The senior should take the new hire to three types of investors: someone new, someone happy, someone who has complaints. That's how you actually prepare someone.
The closing point was the one that stuck. The gap between a 100-crore MFD and a 1,000-crore one usually isn't knowledge. It's a repeatable system. The founder who trains the team, documents the process, and builds a structure that can run without them — that's the person who gets to take a two-week vacation without checking their phone every hour.
Training is not a cost. It's how you buy back your own time.
Best regards,
Written By Samyak Naik
