While in school, Mayur was looking at doing engineering. Some family members advised that he should look at chartered accountancy. On finishing his 11th standard, he went over to meet the principal of Ness Wadia College. The talk went on to the surname Vora, which is a typical baniya community one. The principal’s comment was: What can brahmins teach baniyas about business? So Mayur decided to do Arts, albeit the liberal variety. Ended up at Fergusson College, taking Literature, Math and Economics, where he divided his time between science and arts department. In the arts section of 110 students, there were only 10 boys. Most of these ‘outstanding’ guys, intimidated by the gender skew, preferred to be outside the classroom. College, anyway, was between 7:30 to 9:30 am, with the rest of the time being spent at Hotel Vaishali. The group of 10 learnt much more at Vaishali than at Fergusson. Mayur still considers Vaishali his real alma mater. With the exception of one, after their retirement, the gang of 10 is back in Pune. And interestingly, this group has done much better in life than Mayur’s IIM Bangalore cohorts.
IIM Bangalore happened immediately after Fergusson. His interest in entrepreneurship continued to develop at Bangalore. His IIMB term paper was on how to grow the family business with less capital. The late 70s were times of financial and political stress. Only 70% off the MBAs at IIM Bangalore got placed. And those who had the misfortune of getting fired, did not find jobs for a long time. Mayur in that sense was lucky, he got recruited at campus by Voltas. To celebrate, he got married at 23. And at the ripe old age of 24, was already senior manager at Voltas. Things seemed to be set for a comfortable corporate cum family life.
Cut to 1983 in Panchgani, where Kishore bhai, Mayur’s uncle who ran a strawberry jam business, turned 50. Kishore bhai decided 50 was a good time to retire – and made an offer to his nephew, Mayur, to take over the business. The business wasn’t too attractive, but Panchgani was. Mayur moved office from Ballard Pier to Panchgani. In retrospect, Kishore bhai never retired. At 87, Kishorebhai is still hyper-active at the Poona Blind Men’s Association – where he has been secretary from the time it started.
The food business started off its life as Vora products. It was a partnership firm. Kishore bhai had issues with his partner – and was not sure whether the Vora Products brand would come to him later. So it was decided to start a second brand. Mayur came up with Mahabaleshwar Fruit Products. The acronym Mafpro was very similar to Mafco, the Maharashtra government undertaking, involved in food products. Hence the Fruit was deleted, leaving it at Mahabaleshwar Products or Mapro. For tourists, the acronym stands for the huge variety of fruit products that the company makes: Mango, Apple, Pineapple, Raspberry, Orange.
The theme of the talk was entrepreneurship. Mayur Bhai started by asking the audience: What is the most addictive thing in the world? Most of us guessed that he is letting out the company secret – sugar. Sugar is not just addictive, it’s possibly a narcotic! But Mayur’s villain number 1 was not sugar, it was salary. Most of us don’t become entrepreneurs because we like the regularity of an income on the 1st of every month. Fortunately, ours was a mostly deaddicted audience of entrepreneurs, as at 1600 hrs on a Friday afternoon, the rest of the world was busy earning its salary. Mayur’s first advice to budding entrepreneurs: For the first 5 years, plow back all your earnings into the business. Keep personal expenditure to the minimum. He quoted his own example. One of the interesting gifts that he received on his marriage, was a khata book. His wife actually used that book to record household expenses. After a year of marriage, they realised that 70% of their expenditure was on heads like travel and social costs. The shift to Panchgani eliminated most of these costs. A corollary to this advice: Keep home finances separate from business finances. This insulation makes life much simpler. Don’t splurge on celebrating business success at home, or lament about business failure when you come home. Your home lifestyle needs to be independent of how business is doing. In 5 years, his business was giving Mayur more than what he would have been earning at Voltas. The story continued for the next 30 years, with Mapro growing year on year, non stop. Today Mapro is a Rs. 200 crore business, and the number one taxpayer in Satara.
Mapro’s business is a simple one. The only 2 ingredients that go into its products are fruits and sugar. The dual challenges are to maintain consistency and quality. Sugar content in fruits vary with season. And the idea is to add as much of extra sugar so that the product continues having a fixed percentage of total sugar, and therefore a consistent taste. Most of the product development at Mapro has not been revolutionary, rather they have adopted a kaizen based evolutionary approach. When it comes to procurement of fruits, food companies are the buyers of last resort. Farmers get their highest realisation for fresh produce sold in urban markets. (Incidentally, Mapro has tried its hand at fresh fruit, but failed.) But sometimes because of weather or logistics problems the produce is not able to reach these urban markets. This is when farmers come to Mapro. He believes that the role of food companies is to reduce wastage and farmer losses; not necessarily increase their profits. Mapro never says no to any farmer who lands up on their doorstep with produce.
Mapro’s approach to quality is to make products with the highest fruit content. This has its disadvantages. The fruit tends to get oxidized over time. Also, because Mapro uses relatively less sugar, it implies less preservatives. So their products, at times, turn brown with oxidation. Perfectly edible, but not very good to look at. The retail shelf replacement rate runs a high 6%. But that is a cost that Mapro is willing to pay, to reinforce the customer belief about Mapro’s high quality. On a personal note, what disappointed me is the lack of the company’s effort in sustainable packaging. An FMCG company is the antithesis of sustainability, because sustainable living requires you to eat local and fresh, and preferably unpackaged. I am still trying to find answers to this conundrum. But I am sure that when we do come up with answers, Mayur would be listening.
The philosophy of simplicity also extends to Mapro’s management style. At the age of 40, Mayur decided to go back to school. He and Air Deccan’s Captain CY Gopinath joined a programme for practicing international managers, conducted by McGill University and IIM Bangalore. He recounts a visit to the wing making factory of Airbus at Lancaster, as part of this program. Chatting with people on the shop floor, they found that most of the work was done by teams. And surprisingly, teams with no visible leaders. Mayur came back to Mapro, and implemented this philosophy at Mapro Garden, the restaurant cum retail outlet, next to the Panchgani factory. Mapro Garden caters to 40 lakh visitors a year. Single day traffic can be as many as 37,000 visitors. Surprisingly, even with this stupendous volume, they now manage with no managers. The Garden is managed totally by sales staff, who are typically lads from the surrounding villages. This can be done, because the village lads are seeped in the Mapro culture. This is also why the company does not work with franchisees, as it’s difficult for a franchisee to get this Mapro sanskar of respect.
He ended by narrating an incident about two schools. Panchgani has a lot of boarding schools. Many years ago Mayur had gone to St Joseph’s, a girls convent school, to give a talk. After the talk was over, the girls pestered him to arrange for a visit out of the school. He agreed to the pestering, but the condition was that he would take them to a village. The next day, the girls and two of the nuns of the school, trooped out to this village. They reached at 10 o’clock, only to find students on their way back home. Being a village school, all students went home for lunch. There were seven girls in the class. Each of them took along 4 of the convent girls to their houses. After they came back, all girls attended the class together. The urban girls were impressed. On their return, they told their school principal that the village girls were better than them in every subject, other than English. A decade later, one of these girls, who had gone on to do her graduation from UK, visited Mapro Garden, along with her boyfriend. She met with Mayur and was curious to know what happened to those village girls. They decided to go back to that village to find out. Out of the seven girls, three had gotten married and left the village, three were doing domestic work in the neighbouring town, and only one had gone on to college! We are, what we are, because of circumstances. Never underestimate the intelligence of someone who is less educated than you are.