Rodinhood.com by Alok Kejriwal

On the last day of my ICSE exam (10^th standard finals), my Nani (Grand mother) offered me a free seat into the Marwari Business School. I was 16 and I had the opportunity to go and sit in my Nana’s (Grand father) office.

I took up the offer.

These are the seven subjects I learnt:

M = Monetization Mentality

For Marwari’s, money pretty much means everything.  It’s the ‘currency’ of success – pun intended. People are sized and measured not by their waist sizes but by the width of their balance sheet. A Marwari’s religion is making money and they meditate on it.

What Monetization and its terms means is also unique for Marwari’s.

For instance, I learnt that Revenue was not what you ‘bill’ or ‘pass-thru’ or ‘recognize’. Revenue was always what you ‘net-net’ earned that came in your coffers.

Revenue is bottom line for a Marwari – not top line.

Also, the facets of revenue became very clear to me. Every capital investment (be it land, or machine or even cars and computers) had a ‘monetization expectation’ attached to it. You could spend on things only if they made money. Hence ordering flowers for office tables in a typical Marwari office would be disallowed (despite the plea that they enhance profitability).

This ‘monetization mentality’ made me create what I believe was the most detailed costing breakup of any socks factory in the world. I took 3 years to ‘post mortem’ the cost of everything we incurred (whether real or notional in terms of interest lost) and link it back to revenues that were being earned. So, I could tell you that if you ran extra air-conditioning in the office building, then ‘X’ was the revenue that needed to be generated to make a PROFIT on that extra spend.

Also, I learnt that revenue was something to be always ‘improved’ – not just by price hikes alone. If collecting money from debtors were improved by 3 days, then there would ‘X’ reduction on bank overdrafts and hence extra income to the firm etc.

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