Financial / strategic planning:

• ReshaMandi’s example warn about overestimating market potential and underestimating operating challenges associated with running a B2B business. Without a realistic market landscape assessment, more ambitious growth plans can quickly result in financial troubles and risk the going concern of entire organisation
• Subpar operating procedures needs to be identified and altered immediately, any amount of equity funds deployed without fixing the core business issues will not result in capturing the market share or making the idea big. The business plan must be chalked out to also account for a worst-case scenario wherein even if the worst possible scenarios play-out like in this case potential investor Temasek backing out, business at least continues instead of shutting down
• Instead of relying completely on a small equity round to clear the arrears company must have made the base business model replicable to ensure sustained scalability. Here, it was also observed that it had been involved in several corporate governance problems, such as inflated income and fraudulent bills.
• The company terminated 80% of its workforce at a go leading to immediate halting of operations and employee unrest. The company should have planned and accessed the critical activities required to continue the business rather than completely halting the operations. Even if the company had to let go off its employees, the company should have resorted to planned reduction and adequately providing for potential litigations due to mass layoffs.

• Efficiency improvements:

• Company could have introduced sufficient quality checks in the sourcing to ensure quality and consistency of products. Collaborations with esteemed institutions to ensure product market fit and satisfying the potential end consumer need should be the forefront before hitting the growth-at all cost pedal. Product re-engineering could help in many ways incl. increasing shelf life, consistency to have a sustained on-going demand without the need of burning incremental dollar to generate demand for a subpar product
• Company went on a hiring spree and increased its manpower without planning work allocation. Company could have employed appropriate efficiency metrics to identify employee level & business level inefficiencies

• 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. Ensuring a strong governance practices and timely monitoring of management decisions could have aligned existing investor interests

• Risk management and compliance:

• The Company could have used various financial management tools (viz liquidity ratios, profitability ratios, unit-economic metric etc.), sought external advice and questioned the achievability of revenue targets or conducted m-o-m variance analysis compared to the budgeted performance.
• In this case, it would be worthwhile to go through a commercial diligence exercise to decide if turnaround was still a possibility worth exploring

• 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 took venture debt with a long duration to fill in the working capital issues. No proper vendor management practises were employed nor were the same complemented with credit risk arising out of dealing with vendors without appropriate quality and other checks which added to de-stabilisation of business at current scale.