Financial / strategic planning:

• Byju’s acquired 17 companies within a span of 5 years. Massive inorganic expansion needs to be meticulously planned in order to derive synergy benefits. Not only financial, there has to be cultural synchronisation as well to reap the fruits of acquisition. The Company went on acquisition spree chasing growth through acquisitions, thereby diluting its own culture and values, resultantly diverging from the core activity of providing quality education. The company could have focused on ensuring operational breakeven / profitability / positive cross sell and upsell synergy benefits from each acquisition
• Byju’s core business was to provide quality education service. As the company started focusing on hardware sales (tablets/SD cards with preloaded content), it diluted the company’s brand essence as they drifted from its core activity of providing quality learning experience.
• The company paid no heed to events having significant blow to their corporate governance – viz, resignation of auditors, failure to make statutory payments, default in loan repayments, resignation of CXO team, etc. The company could have saved itself from going this far, if early warning signs were captured before any of this gross event unfolded or such events were handled cautiously post their unfolding, these events led to significant mark down of investment value by the investors and ultimately eroding the reputation of the company.
• Aggressive marketing and sales backfired and led to a loss of trust amongst students and their parents. The company could have explored developing partnerships with traditional educational institutions like schools/colleges, etc to generate a stable customer acquisition funnel for itself while expanding offering horizons for such schools/colleges resulting in a win-win proposition for both!

• Efficiency improvements:

• Due to acquisitions spree, Byju built a huge employee base with arbitrarily defined roles and responsibilities. Implementing suitable efficiency metrics could have helped tab inefficiencies both at employee and each business segment levels
• Efficiencies could have been bought in with appropriate streamlining and creating provisions for uncertainties post each acquisition

• Risk management and compliance:

• Bujy’s could have opted for a professional Board including academicians, successful CEOs, etc as against only family members so as to instil strong corporate governance practices.

• Working capital management:

• Company secured considerable long-term debt to alleviate working capital constraints, yet failed to implement robust vendor management strategies. Lack of comprehensive credit risk evaluation and stringent quality controls in vendor relationships further destabilised operations, amplifying challenges at each levels.