Financial / strategic planning:

• The earning per customer per service though discounted to capture the market share was lower than the acquisition cost per customer, despite being in business for 7+ years with poor repeat customer rate leading to its eventual downfall. Prudent financial planning and strategy could have highlighted this constant inconsistency earlier and using budgeting tools / different customer acquisition strategies like B2B2C tie-ups, Dealership tie-ups, Traffic Police dept. tie-up could have helped the Company manage their finances effectively and efficiently

• Efficiency improvements:
  • Company was struggling with inefficient cost structures and low repeat customer order rate and was increasingly spending on performance marketing spends to capture the market share without being focused on making the base business unit-economic level profitable. Proper efficiency improvement exercises or efficient monitoring could have helped them manage the situation better
• MIS / Dashboards:
  • The Company was grippled with inefficient financial reporting and no KPI driven business performance tracking. Further revenue numbers were inflated to demand a higher valuation compared to last round and also manage existing investors growth expectations. This could have been fixed by establishing comprehensive reporting framework, proper due diligence and KPI driven performance analysis
• Risk management and compliance:
  • The Company could have used various financial management tools (viz liquidity ratios, profitability ratios, CACs monitoring, Revenue tie-up with cashflows etc.), perform competition benchmarking exercise to monitor performance, onboarded a growth consultant and also laid emphasis on industry trends / consumer behaviour to identify the early signs of stress. In this case, it would be worthwhile to go through the commercial diligence report conducted on behalf of various investors and identify if the same was captured as a business risk
• Cash flow management:
  • The Company should have robust cash management tools to help them identify potential cash requirements at regular intervals. It should have emphasized on positive cashflow from operations or a linear trend towards profitable unit-economics of the business
  • Strategic thinking coupled with robust implementation processes while the business still had experimental equity capital could have meant long-term stakeholder value creation
• Working capital management:
  • The Company emphasised on short term growth vs long term sustainability – A proper due diligence into the business / diversification of existing revenue streams, addition of accessory products etc. could have helped in turning around the business.