Falguni Nayar - Building one of India's strongest brands through strategic planning and strong passion.

What makes a strong leader? What are your key leadership strengths are make the strongest attributes of success

I have had the good fortune through my professional career to interact with many business leaders. I spent many years in my corporate career with Uday Kotak as my mentor as well. Each of these leaders I interacted with had certain traits which I believe are critical – (1) building for good, that is, being honest and authentic in one’s dealings, (2) having a foresight into the long-term future and (3) having a strong passion for the business they believe in. I truly believe these are traits critical for any leader to succeed. Besides these, the way I have been leading Nykaa:

Having a very active involvement in the various aspects of the business – from overall business strategy to the critical blocks of our growth - new initiatives, technology, marketing, commercial strategy – all while guiding the culture of the company.

An agile way of work and an open-minded approach to decision making has led me to build Nykaa in a way early on which led the company to successfully adapt to the new external challenges and opportunities of the last two years.

An accomplishment that you consider to be the most significant in your career. What challenges did you face to reach to the success?

While leading investment banking at Kotak , I worked on many IPOs for Indian promoters whose vision and belief in their business truly impressed me. I decided to take a similar path, building something right from scratch, that could outlive me. I decided to do this through multibrand beauty retail delivered through ecommerce, which was a nascent industry at the time of envisioning Nykaa . As an experienced banker I was good at finance, legal complexities, negotiations but I had no experience in either beauty, retail or tech. Challenges like building a secure and scalable tech platform, the right operations and supply chain models and being inventory led were the things we had to do well right from the start.

I felt that existing concerns of scale as well as long tail availability of products in the market could be solved if we built the right business models with an attention to detail and focus on technology. Today, I'm glad I took the plunge into the unknown as we have truly had a significant impact in shaping up this industry as it stands today.

What is a role of leader in these challenging times? List 5 in order of priority.

Agility and innovative spirit: The last two years have shown that each business leader must build an organization that can quickly pivot its operations, company structure, business model – should the circumstances demand it. As the leader of a complex group structure, it is critical that I reinforce and mantain Nykaa’s agile and innovative strengths, even as we scale into a large organization.

Art of decision making: As a leader its critical to take calculated risks, find the right balance between ambiguity and structured, and be able to make data driven decisions.

Hire the right team and delegate, empower them : Every business leader must carefully select the first 100 hires who will help set the culture and business strategy for long term growth of the company. At the same time, it is critical to drive ownership within each team and individual so that every employee thinks and works like an entrepreneur.

Think long term: In the early years of Nykaa, we focused on laying the right groundwork for scale instead of overspending to inorganically grow our customer base. We take all decisions, big and small, keeping in mind long term sustainability of our actions and whether those actions will lead to short term quick gains or long term, efficient performance.

Detail oriented with bird’s eye view: Business building is detail-oriented work and a lot of small pieces come together to make it all run. One should be able to get into the minor details all while keeping a check on broader objectives