Arjun then informed his father that he wanted his father to manage the company's accounts during his leisure. He also wanted Karan to work under his father and get to know more about how accounting worked.
His father who was already convinced happily obliged, Although it would be quite difficult to deal with Karan he accepted it after hearing about Arjun's plans for Karan. Now he could somewhat understand Madan's thought process behind investing fifty thousand rupees.
Arjun informed Karan about his soon to be position inside the company. Karan was very enthusiastic about learning accounting from Pratap.
He knew how much Madan stresses about managing finances. If he could learn things from the local government clerk in managing company finances he could be of much more help to his father in the future.
Together they visited the small business street inside their village and rented a medium sized shop for rent of two hundred rupees per month. Although Arjun felt they were overcharged quite a bit he felt it was okay considering their need for pace.
The next couple of days went on pretty uneventfully. By the fourth day Mallesh and his son were done with shifting their families to the village and reported for work.
Arjun handed them the task of overlooking the repair process of one of the offset printing machine. He wanted them to make sure all the machines were in their optimal conditions so that there would be no issues when they began the printing process.
He also asked them to hire a couple workers from the village and teach them the inner workings of the machines so that they could operate at full speed once the layout book is completed.
Arjun and Karan then headed towards school noticing it was time for the high school to be over. They had asked Venkateshwar Rao to assemble toppers from the Tenth class.
Once they reached they both introduced themselves to the six people who were huddled together in the first two benches of their class.
Arjun then explained their purpose for the meeting. He wanted them to arrange past year's question papers and their answers into two different books.
He offered five hundred rupees each for this task but also warned they would only receive the said sum only if they submit their work within the next three days. He also offered another five hundred each for proofreading the All in One that he had already commissioned.
All of them were very enthusiastic regarding this as they had already practiced these previous year question papers and started dividing tasks between them based on their preferred subjects.
Arjun then asked them about their preferred subjects, He suddenly had another idea which he felt could be very useful in establishing their brand in the minds of the students.
He asked for people who were good at Physics, Biology, Geography, History and English to assemble him ten pages of interesting information for each subject. They could come up with anything as long as they were interesting and had factual proofs. He offered another two hundred rupees per each student to get this task done but extended the timeline for this task to ten days instead of three like the other task he had given them.
Arjun remembered a certain book brand from his past life which gained considerable popularity among the student demographics just by including some interesting facts about the subjects and sometimes puzzles like sudoku or word matching at the start and end of the book.
He felt this would be perfect addition to their book for gaining more traction among the kids. The main requirement for this to succeed is to make them random so that no student sitting next to one another would have the same facts so they can share their books to read more facts or complete more puzzles.
The seniors accepted the task as this would mean making more money. Their family income per month was only around four hundred rupees meanwhile Arjun offered them a total of twelve hundred rupees if they could get the tasks done within the set deadline.
Once they were done the kids returned to the printing press to observe the father and son duo work for a while before retiring to their own homes.
The next couple of days passed on very quickly, finally Kavitha was done with designing the logo. She had done away with the pen and book symbols as when she had tried to integrate into the logo, it felt too clustered.
The current one was a very simple logo very similar to the general electronics symbol consisting of the letters pk stylized inside a circle. There was nothing extravagant about this logo but it was very easy for kids to remember.
Instead they had decided to name their student line of book products as BrightLeaf book line. Arjun felt this would be a much better way to proceed than try to complicate their logo just for a single line of products. After all P.K company would expand from press to many more industries. Limiting the logo to a single field by using a pen or book in the logo would be too shortsighted.
Arjun and Saritha together with Karan who joined them mid way proceeded to attend the school. On their route they met up with the seniors whom they had met earlier in the week.
These people were already done with assembling previous year question and answer sheets already. They were already in the process of gathering interesting facts for their subjects and asked for Arjun to meetup after the school hours for checking their progress and mention if any changes would be necessary.
During their lunch break Venkateshwar Rao asked for Arjun to meet him in staff room. It seemed things were progressing faster than he initially anticipated, It could be considered a very good thing for their plans.
When Arjun entered the staff room he could notice how excited the teachers were, especially Mrs. Mamatha who was very animated. They settled down once the head master and himself entered the room.
Venkateshwar Rao then proceeded to happily announce the initial process of assembling Layout book was completed and handed Arjun seven individual books. Arjun reasoned it would have been easier and for each teacher to do their work individually.
Arjun then motioned for the head master's attendant and asked him to take two copies of xerox for each book after handing him a five hundred rupee note. He asked one of each copies to be distributed among the teachers randomly.
Arjun wanted the teachers to proofread the others works to make sure the quality was up to standard. He gave them another week to get this task done and informed Venkateshwar Rao that the earlier agreed amount would be handed to him next day by Madan. He also offered another five hundred each for getting this task done and set the deadline for the proof reading to be done within the next week.
After the high school bell rang Arjun and Karan headed towards the tenth standard classroom with sets of books in their hands amidst the strange glares they were receiving from other students. After all it was very rare to see a couple of fifth class kids near the tenth classroom especially when one was the son of village head.
Once most of the other students in the class left and only the six students from earlier were left Arjun gathered the previous year papers and answer sheets they had prepared and took a look at them.
It seemed these kids put even more effort than he had imagined. But he could still notice some areas which would need improvement.
He pointed many answers were not concise enough and included many unnecessary steps while some had critical steps missing in them. He also mentioned it was imperative that if a diagram was part of the solution it had to be included in the answer sheets.
He proceeded distributed their works randomly among them. He then handed them the xerox copies of All in One books according to their interested subjects. He wanted them to proofread these according to his requirements.
Even though he had enough confidence in his teachers especially since they were proofreading separately he also wanted a student perspective too as they would be the final consumers.
Once they were done Arjun and Karan went to Karan's home and handed his father the initial version of All in One. Madan was surprised by the how quick the draft was done. It seemed offering incentives for speeding up tasks was very useful.
Arjun then asked a loan of ten thousand rupees from Madan. He embarrassingly explained about how over did the incentive parts to kids without considering the amount he had with him.
Together with kids and teachers it would cost him around eighteen thousand rupees meanwhile he only had little less than fifteen thousand with him. He figured asking an extra of seven thousand would be more productive than repeatedly running to Madan for small sums.
Madan who was impressed by the kid's planning and execution laughed out loud. Finally he had seen Arjun make a mistake, although it was not something that would be detrimental it made Arjun look more human. His earlier feats made it look like he could accomplish miracle after miracle so such set backs could help Arjun be more down to ground. After all nobody liked to take to loans at least not in this generation.