Marico’s founder and chairman, Harsh Mariwala, at Mint’s India Investment Summit and Awards 2025, shared some advice for young entrepreneurs on surviving in a highly competitive business environment with external factors like disruptive technology.
Mariwala highlighted three key points that any entrepreneur should keep in mind before entering an industry that will likely help them wade through their challenging times.
Harsh Mariwala’s Top 3 Advice for Entrepreneurs
Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firm Chairman Harsh Mariwala focused on the value of differentiation, the need for good talent and work culture, and good governance as the top three factors that entrepreneurs should keep in mind while running their businesses.
1. Value of differentiation: Mariwala highlighted that entrepreneurs should focus on being ‘different’ than others in the market to survive in a highly competitive environment.
“You have to be different in a highly competitive business environment. And that differentiation can come depending on the kind of business you are in,” said the founder at the investment summit.
He also addressed that the biggest disrupter is technology in business, so entrepreneurs can use that to make new business models and launch new products.
“But I think the key thing is to develop something different and, most importantly, test it with the consumer,” said Mariwala highlighting the importance of consumer insights (feedback) in a business.
Highlighting the need for consumer insights, Mariwala said the founders can do market research but it has a “lot of limitations” and advised the entrepreneurs that there is no shortcut to launching their product in the market.
“You can do market research, but market research has a lot of limitations. So I advise to all the entrepreneurs that there is no shortcut to actually launching their product in the marketplace,” he said.
“You treat that as a live market research. And when you prototype, you define action standards, you see the response in case of a consumer products, you look at the brand, packaging, pricing the product itself, and go on fine tuning that in your prototype phase, and go on changing. And once you achieve that action standard, you can roll it out,” said Mariwala.
2. Talent and culture: Mariwala also focused on how an organisation needs good talent and also needs to be good at empowering the people working there, which will motivate them to work and do a better job.
“You know, for any organization to grow, you will need to have a good talent. You draw the best of talent, actually. And I always have a principle that that person, and from the time I started, that the person should be better than me in that particular functional area. Because if the person is good, then you are actually you are empowering that person, because you will do a better job than you,” said the Marico founder at the investment summit.
He also emphasised that an organisation must have to ability to attract talent and also possesses the ability to retain the same talent which can only be possible if the firm has a strong culture within the organisation.
“And to that extent, you have more free time, you have very good talent. They also feel good. But you have to attract talent, and you have to retain talent. For retention of talent, you need to have very strong culture which will help retain talent. People should enjoy working in the organization,” said Mariwala.
3. Good governance: The Marico chairman also focused on the importance of good governance irrespective of the company size. He also said that he has seen businesses taking shortcuts and then destroying themselves in the area of governance.
“And then, finally, I think, for any entrepreneur, irrespective of size, governance plays a very important role. We’ve seen many lovely businesses getting destroyed because they have taken shortcuts in the area of governance. And if they start taking shortcuts, it will hit them at some stage, and it will put them back by many, many years,” said Harsh Mariwala.
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