'Marico is not just my company'

Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of Marico, says he doesn't consider himself to be the owner of the FMCG major and talks about his journey as an entrepreneur

- MILIND SHELTE

Marico Chairman Harsh Mariwala, who comes from a business family, set up the consumer products business practically from scratch. Over the past four decades, he has not only built Marico into one of the leading FMCG companies in the country, but has also transformed what was essentially a family-managed business into a professionally managed one. Mariwala, who has seen the FMCG space transform over the past few years, says Marico views every disruption as an opportunity. In a candid conversation with Business Today's Global Business Editor Udayan Mukherjee, Mariwala talks about the learnings from failure, succession planning and what the future holds for the company. Edited excerpts:

Q: Harsh, if you had to assess your own career over the last four decades, would you be fully satisfied? Had you been told as a young man that this is how it will pan out, would you have grabbed it with both hands?

A: The short answer is yes, Udayan. But let me delve a little deeper in terms of what I expected from myself and how it all turned out. So, first of all, I am just a graduate; I have not done anything beyond my B.Com. Yet, at the very outset, I was absolutely clear that I was not going to work for anybody else. I had to run my own business. So, from that point of view, full marks; I never worked for anybody else. I joined the family business at a very young age of 20 and built this business of consumer products [Marico] virtually from scratch. It was completely a family-managed organisation. There were no professionals; there was no one to teach me, and we were not in consumer products to begin with, so I had to start virtually from the bottom. I had to travel to rural areas, appoint distributors-even stay with the distributors in small towns where there were no hotels.