Lalit Ananth Chawla: Revamping The Finance & Accounting Domain With His Process-Driven Approach
Oremus is a comprehensive management service provider in the Finance & Accounting domain, offering Bookkeeping & Accounting, Payroll, Compliance, and Advisory services across multiple industries and geographies. It operates from its corporate office in Hyderabad, and other cities in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The firm provides end-to-end solutions in finance and accounting functions, allowing Corporates and Promoters to focus on core business without having to worry about their accounting and compliance. The services and working experience across geographies provide clients with a unique advantage of multi locational professional expertise.One of the main pillars behind executing this novel idea that provides collective solutions is Lalit Ananth Chawla, who elucidated the gap in the bookkeeping, accounting and payroll sector, and emerged with solutions to enhance the effectiveness of the work. Lalit’s team consists of experts who inclusively work towards becoming the most preferred comprehensive back-office solution partner in the areas of finance and accounting, compliance and payroll.
Lalit is a chartered accountant and has spent his time in consulting gamut for more than a decade. Lalit has associated and worked with many well-known corporate sectors for over a decade, which gave him insights and extensive knowledge of markets and how businesses work. Parallelly, Lalit spent his time working and mentoring startups to understand the intricates of how new firms function and thrive in the markets. With solid 360-degree experience from his previous work experiences, Lalit joined Oremus and started his tenure by structuring the finance advisory function and scaling it up. Over a period, his involvement grew to client initiations and handling of multiple corporate, management and finance projects, which pushed Lalit to level up within the company. Thus, with the support from the top management at Oremus, Lalit embarked on his journey of being CEO at Oremus.
In an exclusive interaction with the team CEO Insights magazine, CEO Lalit Ananth Chawla shared his professional journey and Leadership qualities that he has imbibed from his experience.
Describe the insights and experiences from IIM and how to apply them to your current role.
IIM Kozhikode had a great influence on my career and personality, which cumulatively shaped my ideologies to handle the role more holistically. IIM Kozhikode not only stresses the academic part but also extends similar importance to practical learning. This program helped me to understand certain Strategic and Functional level management aspects and the tools to build these strategies. This happened to me at the time when I was getting to the grips with the management role at Oremus and aided especially during the challenging times that evolved during the pandemic. These additional learnings and experiences helped me to change my perspective from and in addition to service delivery, to managing a business involving multi geographies.
Please also tell us about your management approach. As a leader, what guidelines and methods do you follow to lead your team?
Our mantra has been “Eliminate–Simplify –Automate– Delegate”. However, there are three main parameters that we constantly focus on and work upon.
The first one is, a Process-Driven Approach: As management service providers we constantly desire to work in a process-driven atmosphere.Given a new environment/ client, we work through the existing scenario, formulate, and formalize our service deliveries into a process-driven mechanism. This helps us in meeting our client expectations with transparency and focus.
Secondly, we focus on Customized Solutions: Our approach has always been towards problem-solving a situation and providing a simplified solution with automation to meet our customers’ demands and needs. Having provided a solution, we go back and formalize it as a process.
Describe the insights and experiences from IIM and how to apply them to your current role.
IIM Kozhikode had a great influence on my career and personality, which cumulatively shaped my ideologies to handle the role more holistically. IIM Kozhikode not only stresses the academic part but also extends similar importance to practical learning. This program helped me to understand certain Strategic and Functional level management aspects and the tools to build these strategies. This happened to me at the time when I was getting to the grips with the management role at Oremus and aided especially during the challenging times that evolved during the pandemic. These additional learnings and experiences helped me to change my perspective from and in addition to service delivery, to managing a business involving multi geographies.
Our approach has always been towards problem-solving & providing simplified solutions with automation to meet our customer's demands and needs
Please also tell us about your management approach. As a leader, what guidelines and methods do you follow to lead your team?
Our mantra has been “Eliminate–Simplify –Automate– Delegate”. However, there are three main parameters that we constantly focus on and work upon.
The first one is, a Process-Driven Approach: As management service providers we constantly desire to work in a process-driven atmosphere.Given a new environment/ client, we work through the existing scenario, formulate, and formalize our service deliveries into a process-driven mechanism. This helps us in meeting our client expectations with transparency and focus.
Secondly, we focus on Customized Solutions: Our approach has always been towards problem-solving a situation and providing a simplified solution with automation to meet our customers’ demands and needs. Having provided a solution, we go back and formalize it as a process.
And the third one stresses on Managed Services: We believe in creating a support system that meets our clients’ economies. We have a well trained and experienced set of professionals.
What are the goals that you wish to invest in and how do you plan to take them further?
Few are the critical goals that I would be inclined to work upon in the near to foreseeable future; primarily we are focusing on Technology: We understand the significance of technology in our domain of services, be it either in book keeping, payroll, or compliances. We are working on creating a unique solution utilizing modern technologies and developing a platform of our own.
Following that our focal point is the talent pool, we endeavor to have a dedicated training house with a focus on constantly training young talent to sharpen their accounting and financial analytical skills. Subsequently, we would focus on our footprint that focuses on strengthening our forward and backward integration in terms of both geographies and range of services and hence be able to provide a wider ambit of services to our clients.
We acquired a tax firm in the U.S in 2020 which compliments and enhances our services to our clients. Acquiring companies as we grow, we recently completed the acquisition of an accounting firm in the U.K.
What are the parameters that your teammates work to do their best?
Our team works on a solution-based approach. As a compliance or finance team, we come across various situations where we have issues or problems. To tackle this kind of situation we solely focus on solution centric approach in our consultancy. Assessing asituation from multiple angles gives us more clarity on the challenges at hand, thus, making it easy to tackle them and find a feasible solution on a timely basis.
Lalit Ananth Chawla, CEO, Oremus Corporate Services
Lalit is a Chartered accountant with over 18+ years of experience. He spent a decade with reputed consulting companies and has extensive experience in Assurance and Advisory where the clientele included large public entities and multinational corporations across sectors, both in India and abroad. His corporate experience includes working with a large corporate house in financial reporting, assurance, and strategy. Further, his experience also includes working with startups and providing strategic business and financial advice.
What are the goals that you wish to invest in and how do you plan to take them further?
Few are the critical goals that I would be inclined to work upon in the near to foreseeable future; primarily we are focusing on Technology: We understand the significance of technology in our domain of services, be it either in book keeping, payroll, or compliances. We are working on creating a unique solution utilizing modern technologies and developing a platform of our own.
Following that our focal point is the talent pool, we endeavor to have a dedicated training house with a focus on constantly training young talent to sharpen their accounting and financial analytical skills. Subsequently, we would focus on our footprint that focuses on strengthening our forward and backward integration in terms of both geographies and range of services and hence be able to provide a wider ambit of services to our clients.
We acquired a tax firm in the U.S in 2020 which compliments and enhances our services to our clients. Acquiring companies as we grow, we recently completed the acquisition of an accounting firm in the U.K.
What are the parameters that your teammates work to do their best?
Our team works on a solution-based approach. As a compliance or finance team, we come across various situations where we have issues or problems. To tackle this kind of situation we solely focus on solution centric approach in our consultancy. Assessing asituation from multiple angles gives us more clarity on the challenges at hand, thus, making it easy to tackle them and find a feasible solution on a timely basis.
Lalit Ananth Chawla, CEO, Oremus Corporate Services
Lalit is a Chartered accountant with over 18+ years of experience. He spent a decade with reputed consulting companies and has extensive experience in Assurance and Advisory where the clientele included large public entities and multinational corporations across sectors, both in India and abroad. His corporate experience includes working with a large corporate house in financial reporting, assurance, and strategy. Further, his experience also includes working with startups and providing strategic business and financial advice.