Meesho CFO Jatin Mazalcar on pioneering rules of the game for the finance and legal teams of India’s largest and fastest-growing social commerce business
Guest blog by Jatin Mazalcar
At Meesho, everyone is singularly focussed on “Making our Entrepreneurs Successful”. This is at the heart of everything we do irrespective of which function we are in and my team is no exception to this. I have been entrusted with leading the Finance, Legal, IT and Admin / Facilities team at Meesho since November 2018. While these are classical functions in any organisation, at Meesho we go that extra mile to Make our Entrepreneurs Successful; after all, it is our most important core value.
Besides this, we have a defined set of well thought out values which act as great reference points to us Meeshoites. Two values which drive us and are very close to me personally are “Speed over Perfection” and “Dive Deep and Solve Problems”.
Managing risks at Meesho
Finance and Legal teams are naturally trained to act with great caution, take well thought out decisions and act as sounding boards to business teams in our day-to-day decisions. In fact, we are infamously called “risk managers” at times :).
I have of course had the good fortune of working closely with some great finance leaders in my career and see them shape business and growth with their sharp financial and commercial acumen. I owe my learning to them in a big way! And I have tried to apply those past learnings at Meesho as much as possible as keeping pace with a fast-paced environment is one of the biggest expectations from us. Given the nature of our work, this value more often than not becomes “Speed AND perfection” for us.
There have been many such examples where we have gone to new geographies, started new businesses, done things for the first time where we have had to come up with innovative solutions and support business. I am amazed at my team’s tenacity to come out successfully every single time.
How to be a pioneer
The other value which I want to speak about is Dive Deep and Solve Problems. We are not just India’s but one of the world’s largest social commerce businesses with a very unique distribution model. We have pioneered this business in India and are by far the largest and fastest-growing social commerce business in India. It is usual to speak of category dominance and market share in the business world, but here we are pretty much the Category and we define it.
In a situation like this, we have to lead, innovate not just on business but also in functions like Finance and Legal. And, there is no template to refer to. We are in fact writing that template. The Meesho Finance & Legal team has pioneered so many finance, legal, tax processes which didn’t exist before, even reimagined the P&L structure to make our assortment competitively priced which has helped in making our Entrepreneurs super successful.
One such instance was the pandemic, when there were severe restrictions on the movement of non-essential goods and brought our business to a standstill. No amount of planning and risk management could ever equip any organization to deal with an unprecedented crisis like this.
Pivoting for hyper-growth
We were cruising well and were on a hyper-growth path until this happened. For us, growth is paramount, absolutely a top priority. Everyone in the organization irrespective of their function and level is driven by the growth mindset. Even the finance folks, who are naturally conservative, are driven by Meesho’s core values of “Speed over Perfection” and “Think 10X”. With the sudden developments and restrictions on the ground, our business was severely impacted. It was Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) of the highest order.
The only thing which gained importance at that point was survival. The theme changed to hyper-growth to survival and sustenance. We were quick to switch gears and this is what the Finance team did:
- Scanned through the entire P&L to look for every possible penny of savings/cost avoidance/cost deferral
- Renegotiate contracts
- Discontinue unnecessary spends
- Look for partnerships which were relevant e.g. Groceries, Essential goods
- This involved everyone coming together from the Business Finance, Finance Controller, Legal, Facilities and Information Technology team and reaching out to our partners
Crisis situations sometimes bring out the best in you. They make one stronger, resilient and also help us in discovering our business partners who stood by us in our tough times. We saved significant money through this exercise and were and ready to bounce back at the right opportunity. As the restrictions started getting lifted, we bounced back really strong in a super sustainable way. Today, we are much bigger than what we were pre-lockdown at much better economics and with a much stronger Balance Sheet.
Also read:
Why Product Managers at Meesho are the guardian angels of entrepreneur success
Are you following us on social media yet? You might want to head over to Life at Meesho’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages if you are a fan of fun and positivity.
