Prioritize people and stay frugal to ride the uncertainty out: Vaibhav Dabhade, CEO of Anchanto
Confined indoors by social distancing measures, thousands of people around the world are turning to online shopping to meet their needs. It would seem that e-commerce is booming right alongside delivery services—but that is not necessarily the case, according to Vaibhav Dabhade, founder and CEO of global e-commerce platform provider Anchanto.
People Matters asked Vaibhav what the situation is really like for his industry, and how he is steering his company and people through these troubled waters. Here are the highlights of the conversation.
How is the e-commerce industry doing now?
Many business sectors are suffering, and e-commerce is no exception. Logistics is the backbone of e-commerce and now with major airlines shutting down their operations, freight costs have skyrocketed resulting in a disruption in the e-commerce ecosystem.
Looking at the current e-commerce cycle of operation, online sellers will eventually reach low inventory resulting in a larger lead time to retrieve and start reselling online. Many of them will also possess old and near-expiry stock that they would need to exhaust before their new stock, and there we foresee a cash and liquidity crush that may continue for a while. Also, the majority of e-commerce sellers have short cash reserves, of a month or at most, however, they'll continue to have fixed costs which will create a cash flow imbalance if the shutdown continues for a longer period.
In such a challenging situation, what are your own top priorities during this period?
The safety of each and every team member remains our top priority. We will take all necessary efforts to make sure that none of our team members get infected, even if that means lower productivity during this period.
Our customers are next on our priority list and we have scaled our efforts in making sure that we offer our best assistance to them. We understand that all businesses have been impacted, and are currently struggling to tackle this crisis.
Next, we are focusing on preserving our cash reserves. Although we have un-utilized funds from our last funding round and a long runway in front of us, we prefer being frugal due to the uncertainty associated with the pandemic.
Lastly, we are also focusing on revising our operations internally, in terms of products, people and processes to make sure we maximize our efficiency.
Could you share some of the more successful adjustments you've implemented to address the situation?
The first adjustment that we made was to change our expectations. As remote working can get tiring at times, we make sure that we do not push any team member to deliver results.
We have changed the KPIs of some of our teams such as Sales, as they cannot travel at the moment to meet prospects. All our sales team members are focusing on providing assistance to our current customers. The sales team members have also been asked to focus on ‘leads’ rather than ‘deals’. For our technical team, we did some process changes and implemented some code review SOPs to improve efficiency. We also implemented collaboration tools such as Asana and Slack to enhance our internal communication.
We are glad to inform you that we have not laid off any team member due to this situation. Although we had to part with some of the members a while back due to performance issues, we are firm on our decision that no performing team member will lose their job at Anchanto, no matter the situation.
We have enough money to survive this situation for more than 18 months and hence we are poised to protect the jobs of all our team members.
How are you adapting your personal leadership style to the current situation?
To be honest, it is indeed quite frustrating for someone like me who spends half of my time traveling and around 12 hours in the office the rest of the time. Now with the lockdown in place, there’s this huge change that has taken place all of a sudden.
Earlier, I used to focus a lot on face-to-face meetings. But with the current scenario, I have adapted and started doing everything over phone calls. I have also become much more considerate in my approach than before.
As I now have some more time to think, I spend a lot of time prioritizing and planning the next strategy for the company. I also spend a considerable amount of time reading about topics such as Marketing, Positioning, Branding that will be useful in the future.
Looking back at the last couple of months, what would you say was the most important factor in keeping things going smoothly?
The most prominent factor that has helped things go smoothly for us has been the way our teams have adapted to remote working. Even though there was confusion regarding remote working in some countries initially, our teams tackled the situation quite brilliantly which helped a lot in keeping things smooth and steady. In fact, the remote working has increased our productivity in non-field activities tremendously. Our process compliance and team communication has also improved significantly.
But I believe that continuing with the same strategies will not work in the future. There are major uncertainties regarding the future and we cannot really say what will work and what won’t just yet. Hence we plan to keep adapting to the changes as and when they happen.
What's your prognosis for the future?
After the economy recovers, ecommerce industry will never be the same again. Businesses will realize that being offline only will never be enough. Because of this, I firmly believe that our platforms will be more relevant in the coming time. COVID-19 has been the biggest call for retail transformation/digitization, and it has shown businesses that everything is possible electronically.