How MAVI enabled Athena Club to streamline a sustainable accounting function for scale

Before Tushara Aradyula joined Athena Club as Accounting Manager, the company's finance department was a one-person team. The Head of Finance was deep in the weeds while still handling ad hoc tasks, and the accounting function was constantly being deprioritized as other parts of the business took precedence. The result was a growing backlog of transactions to chase and processes that needed significant improvement.

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When Tushara came on, a MAVI Senior Accountant was already on the team, brought in to help with a major cleanup. Tushara's previous staffing experience had been entirely domestic – Robert Half, Siegfried, CFGI. Working with MAVI was her first time engaging with international accounting talent, and she had real hesitations about time differences and language barriers going in.

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Those hesitations dissolved quickly. The MAVI Senior Accountant helped build reconciliations from scratch and streamlined processes – work Tushara described as typically expected from someone at a higher level. The cleanup changed how she thought about remote and international hiring.

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“I honestly don’t know where we would be without [her].”

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While Tushara and the MAVI Senior Accountant were getting the finances in order, Athena Club continued to scale. The company expanded to Walmart – and later Amazon – adding fluctuating order cadences and the nuanced invoicing procedures that come with major retail partnerships. Another set of hands became necessary.

When Tushara decided to expand the team, MAVI was the first call. She had already seen how the model combined high-caliber talent with cost efficiency, and she knew what she was looking for: an AR Specialist who understood e-commerce and knew their finance systems thoroughly. Not a junior-level hire to fill in numbers, but someone who could navigate the complexity and ambiguity that comes with the accounting function of a scaling company.

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MAVI presented candidates quickly, guided Athena Club through trial periods to find the right fit, and continued iterating until a match was clear. Within a week, Athena Club had its new MAVI AR Specialist.

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"In the past, a lot of things just lived in people's minds rather than on the page. Having the two MAVI Talents on the team has helped all of us have more bandwidth to actually document processes and make sure that this is a sustainable team – thinking of longevity rather than just being focused on getting things done."

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With two MAVI professionals on the team, Tushara and the SVP of Finance and Strategy now have the bandwidth to focus on business priorities rather than operational accounting – with confidence that the SOPs are documented and the processes are holding.

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“Having [them] be able to do some of the brunt work that normally we would assign to [a staff member] has really taken a lot off of my plate, off of [our SVP of Finance and Strategy’s] plate, and made it so that we can really focus on the strategic [side] of things rather than just the operations of the business. The [two MAVI Talent] have made the ops of accounting so much smoother than it’s ever been, and it’s clearly felt by everyone here – not just the finance team.”

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The quality of both placements has shaped this outcome. The MAVI Senior Accountant proactively identifies where procedures can be improved and implements her own tested systems rather than waiting to be directed. The MAVI AR Specialist has fully owned Athena Club's payment and invoicing tasks for two key retailers, taking the lead on tracking warehouse orders and troubleshooting issues as they arise. Both professionals have integrated into Athena Club so thoroughly that they communicate independently with contacts across the company to get their work done.

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"They're really thoughtful about how they approach their work. They tackle their issues and bring them to leaders with solutions already in mind – a quality often only seen in higher-up positions."

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The financial case has been equally clear. Two high-skilled, US-caliber accountants at a fraction of what equivalent domestic hires would cost – and that ROI was central to the original decision, and to why the relationship has continued.

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"From a cost perspective, this is much more affordable than us hiring someone either full-time or part-time here. That has been extremely helpful and a big part of why we chose MAVI to start with, but also have stayed."

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Tushara's summary of where things stand is the simplest measure of how well the model has worked.

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"The team we've built out now – I really hope I don't lose them anytime soon."