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MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha

Have A Happy 1

ON OCCASIONS, it seems like yesterday when we launched CFO India. But on others, when I think about all that has happened - and continues to happen for each issue - it feels like a lifetime! Despite its myriad challenges, the journey is a happy and fulfilling one - made possible by many of you who are reading our 1st anniversary issue...

It is therefore, I believe, the right time to say thank you – to our well-wishers, our Advisory Council, the untiring design team, contributors, and our advertisers - each one critical in us reaching this important milestone. We hope to remain deserving of your support, goodwill and candid feedback to achieve bigger and better things going forward.

As we put together the personal stories and shared lessons of our ‘CFOs turned editors’ – something struck me. Those that get ahead, but more importantly ‘feel’ successful, always deliver beyond the call of duty. Whether it is about learning new skills to step in for a missing colleague or taking ownership for their organisation’s success – every story suggests an individual with commitment, perseverance, an openness to rolling up one’s sleeves, and finally living with integrity. Timeless values with timeless outcomes – easy to say, very difficult to live by.

Pass your values on to your colleagues, peers and youngsters – and you would have done more than your fair share for a lifetime.

In an environment where one is engulfed by stories of ‘leaders’ who short-change their people, employees, shareholders, and bosses (actually pretty much anyone who is available) these stories were a very welcome dose of oxygen.

I hope you continue to lead by example, inspire and demonstrate what is possible while living an honest life!

Thank you and here’s to our next year together...

EDITORIAL EDITOR: Anuradha Das Mathur MANAGING EDITOR: Dhiman Chattopadhyay ASSISTANT EDITOR: Anoop Chugh CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Bennett Voyles DESIGN SENIOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Jayan K Narayanan ART DIRECTOR: Binesh Sreedharan ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR: Anil VK SENIOR VISUALISERS: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha SENIOR DESIGNERS: TR Prasanth, Anil T, Suresh Kumar, Joffy Jose & Anoop Verma DESIGNER: Sristi Maurya CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER: Subhojit Paul PHOTOGRAPHER: Jiten Gandhi THE CFO INSTITUTE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Deepak Garg NATIONAL HEAD: Bindu Krishna MANAGER: Shreya Pilani ASSOCIATE: Priyam Mahajan SALES & MARKETING V-P SALES & MARKETING: Naveen Chand Singh NATIONAL MANAGER (SALES): Pranav Saran (+91-9811777113) NATIONAL MANAGER (EVENTS & SPECIAL PROJECTS): Mahantesh Godi (+91-9680436623) NATIONAL MANAGER (ONLINE): Nitin Walia (+91-9811772466) ASSISTANT BRAND MANAGER: Arpita Ganguli CO-ORDINATOR (AD SALES, MIS, SCHEDULING): Aatish Mohite SOUTH: Vinodh Kaliappan (+91-9740714817) WEST: Sachin N Mhashilkar (+91-9920348755) For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS SENIOR GENERAL MANAGER (OPERATIONS): Shivshankar M Hiremath PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE: Vilas Mhatre LOGISTICS: MP Singh, Mohamed Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh OFFICE ADDRESS Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd Kakson House, A & B Wing, 2nd Floor 80 Sion Trombay Road, Chembur, Mumbai- 400071 INDIA. Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh.

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SUBSCRIBER SERVICES: Call +91-11-45069999 VISIT CFO INDIA’S WEBSITE www.cfo-india.in

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Fraternity’s voice This is a unique magazine and perhaps the only one of its kind catering to the CFO faternity in India today. Your articles are not only interesting to read but also informative and thought provoking. The real reason I enjoy reading it because there are so many senior colleagues in the industry who share their views on key issues through your magazine

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IT IS BEING TALKED ABOUT AS THE ‘2 PER CENT SOLUTION’. WILL MAKING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY MANDATORY FOR INDIAN COMPANIES, WORK? BENNETT VOYLES

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PC ANOOP

N PARIS’ RIGHT BANK, a few hundred meters away from the Parc Monceau, a lush remnant of a guillotined aristocrat’s private pleasure garden, the secretary of India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs, R Bandyopadhyay, sat in his dark hotel suite and worried about social instability.

India Inc. is growing rapidly, but hundreds of millions of people still live far outside its manicured campuses. It is not a situation that can continue indefinitely. Right now, Bandyopadhyay says, perhaps 5 to 10 million people are direct stakeholders in the corporate sector, but to create more stability, that number needs to be “10-fold or 20-fold” larger.

“Unless more and more people feel that they have stake in the development of the corporate sector, it cannot continue to grow,” Bandyopadhyay said, during a recent official visit to the city.

To encourage more companies to get involved, the ministry recently proposed a rule that every company with an annual turnover of Rs. 1000+ crore spend at least 2 per cent of its profits on corporate social responsibility activities.

Supporters of the plan argue that many companies have earned this coercion. In a 2009 survey of India’s top 500 companies, Karmayog, a CSR advocacy group, gave no company its top rating for social responsibility, only 13 firms its second-highest highest grade, Level 4. A total of 128 firms earned a 0.

“Lack of pro-active steps by corporates

and industry associations to voluntarily come forward and contribute…resulted in the government’s proposal to make some level of CSR mandatory,” says Vinay Somani, founder and trustee of Karmayog.

However, some critics of the plan see it as a reflection of public sector weakness as much as private. “I think the reason why there is even a discussion about this is because what has happened in India and many other countries: a lot of the people just do not trust business houses and they do not trust the government either.

They are trying to find a third alternative,” says Aneel Karnani, an associate professor of strategy at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

BAD IDEA Opponents are not convinced that forced generosity is the best policy. Even the finance director of Tata Sons, reputedly the most open-handed company in the country, is not sure. “I think it is a rather awful idea,” says Ishaat Hussain.

Although the Tata Group has been giving away money for over a century (as the old Tata ad slogan famously put it, “We also make steel”), Hussain argues that social responsibility is something a company must have in its DNA, not something that can be forced from the outside. If the impulse isn’t genuine, the response won’t be either, in his view.

“People will find all sorts of ways to pass off business expenditures as CSR,” Hussain predicts.

OCTOBER 2010

11.10

CFO INDIA

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Your voice can make a change: Share your view point on what’s happening in the community and your feedback on the magazine at cfofeedback@9dot9.in or editor@cfo-india.in

FORCED CSR

ARTICLE ON PRIVATE EQUITY

It is a well-known fact that many business houses ignore their CSR responsibilities. One hopes that participation in CSR activities will be voluntary as it also contributes to the goodwill of the brand.

However, when all else fails, making it mandatory may become the obvious option. Nonetheless ideally companies need to wake up to the benefits of CSR and take steps on their own instead of being forced to do so.

— Rajesh Mohan, Chennai

Excellent coverage! Over the last few months you have chosen relevant and interesting topics to write on. I have one request though. Can we have a well researched article on Private Equity and Venture Capital funding in one of your forthcoming issues?

— Ashok Dhamankar, Head - Finance & Accounts, National Collateral Management Services Ltd, Mumbai

THOUGHT PROVOKING The magazine is looking good and I sincerely congratulate your team for putting together a very good issue. The subjects chosen are thought provoking.

— Robin Banerjee, CFO, Suzlon Energy, Pune

PASSIONATE CFOS It is heart-warming to see CFOs revealing their lighter side apart from their number-crunching abilities. The profile of Charanjit Attra of ICICI Securities was good to read. A guitar-strumming CFO sounds far removed from the suit-clad executive. Keep up the good work of bringing alive CFOs as real people who have done exceptionally well.

— Radhika Jain, New Delhi

MORE PEOPLE STORIES PERFECT TIMING The cover story of CFO India’s October issue was brilliantly timed. CSR is indeed top of the mind for us. I will be happy to be part of your network and help make the magazine grow.

— Anil K Bansal, CFO, Cocoberry Retail, Gurgaon

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CFO INDIA

NOVEMBER 2010

Most of the stories in CFO India are good to read. However, sometimes a few features get rather technical with too many charts and bar graphs.

As a reader and a young finance executive, I would like to see more people-centric pieces, perhaps ones where you interview CFOs who have successfully turned around their company’s fortunes or who have braved the odds to succeed in life.

— Rajesh Bhattacharya, SAIL, Kolkata

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since it began its journey, has been a magazine of and for the CFO community. When we started planning for the first anniversary issue, the decision was unanimous – why not make it an issue ‘by’ CFOs as well? We therefore asked many of you who have walked this journey with us, to tell us about the ‘firsts’ in your life. As Wipro’s Suresh Senapaty said, “The allure of the first is special.” Over the next 70-odd pages, CFOs and senior corporate leaders from across sectors and Indian cities have written about their colourful and exciting experiences on subjects as varied as their first year as CFO, their first M&A experience

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or their first finance job. Many have mentioned roadblocks and how they overcame challenges while others have mentioned key takeaways or lessons learnt from the experiences.

This is indeed a collector’s issue, one which, apart from providing a great read to all finance professionals and those interested in finance, will also help those who haven’t faced some of these situations yet, to pick up valuable tips.

Turn the page: Happy reading!

—Dhiman Chattopadhyay

* The views expressed in the articles are personal and not necessarily those of the companies the writers represent.

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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t was May 2, 2006. I had just stepped down as CFO after having spent 12 years handling this role at Infosys. It had taken me one year to convince people that I wanted to step down and now the D-day had arrived. As soon as I got to office, I had calls from the media and they asked me how it felt to govern the HR function from the finance one. I said, “so far when somebody walked into my room, I saw them as the Net Present Value of a future stream of revenues. Now I will see them as individuals with aspirations and hope, of accomplishment, who need empathy and understanding from me and whose challenges I need to solve.” I also said that I am a changed person and I can handle this activity well. I felt and do feel now that if you are a good manager you can handle any activity even if they are as distinct as finance and HR. Later I had a meeting with the HR team and the leadership. They were slightly uncomfortable and unsure with me as their board member. They had seen me in the role of the CFO, the official bad guy who tries to deprive them of the large wage hikes they always recommend and who somehow wins all arguments. One of them asked me, can we trust you to champion our cause? I said, “yes, try me out.” It was indeed an interesting day. I asked for lots of data in the meeting and said we need to be objective in our decision making coupled with an open, transparent, empathetic attitude.

I remember that day well even now. About four and half years have passed and I have realised that handling the HR function is a very complex task. People are moved by emotion, they respond to personal engagement and want openness at all times. They want answers to their questions and need honest, straight

WE THE PEOPLE He says handling HR has taught him to be patient and listen to others.

YES WE CAN Initially when some colleagues asked him if a finance person could handle HR, Pai said: “yes, try me out”.

answers. It is a tough job as you need patience, a great ability to listen and to be available at all times. I also suddenly felt a greater responsibility. As CFO, I was responsible for the financial integrity of the corporation. Now the careers of 125,000 people are my responsibility, their aspirations and hopes need to be met, and they have diverse needs, especially if you have people working globally.

One needs to understand legal issues globally, the global dynamics of business and local cultures, and have an ability to communicate effectively. It is certainly more complex than being a CFO. The horizon too is very wide and enriching.

Overall, this has been a great learning experience and a job where you can make a tremendous contribution to society and make the lives of people better. I am glad that I made this move as I feel I am a much better person today than I was 5 years ago. It has been tough on me as I had to subdue my ego all the time, resist the temptation to win every argument and suppress an aggressive demeanour. Also the job is so far from the public view as CFO, when bankers met me all the time, the media wanted my views on everything under the sun, investors asked to meet constantly and you were looked at with interest and had a sense of power. Today all this is gone, the glamour is gone, you do not travel to meet investors any more and you are just another manager. It certainly has made me a more humble person.

But there is a lesson for all of us here. You make the journey alone and ultimately your conscience is your judge. Performance is the only reality and if you perform in any role, you will always be successful.

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CARICATURE BY BINESH SREEDHARAN

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achieved my ambition of becoming the CEO of a large organisation 26 years after I started my career as a finance professional, as a management trainee. In those 26 years, I had been the CFO of both large and small corporates for around 18 years. My entry into the ‘corner office’ was hindered by a transitionery period of being the joint managing director with the previous incumbent still ensconced in that coveted corner office. I had already appointed my successor into the finance function and was clear that the new CFO would run this function and my role would be to provide guidance only if he asked for it. I found that I had time on my hands since the company continued to be run by the managing director. I therefore spent a substantial amount of my first year outside the finance function monitoring and running the subsidiaries, which had been started by me and were located in different parts of the globe, in businesses as varied as software, home finance, fertilizer inputs and seeds.

That was my first year and due to its transitory nature, does not count for the purpose of this article. In the next year I became the MD, completely outside the finance function. Manmohan Singh had recently become the Prime Minister of India and an article in one of the newspapers advised the PM to let the Finance Minister do his job while he focussed on running the country like a CEO. Interestingly, parallels in that article were made with four finance professionals, who had moved into the corner office in the recent past. One of the names given was mine and to a certain extent, I was kicked since it captured my own line of thinking. When you move out of the finance function, you move away from your comfort zone into a new uncharted world, where you are dealing with people who know far more about their function than you know about it. This is the period during which you re-assess your capabilities (not as a func-

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TOP VIEW Sethy says it took him six months to grasp all technical aspects and manufacturing fundamentals, when be became the MD

NEW LEARNINGS It takes time to get people to believe they can be led by you, says Sethy.

tional head), as a leader who has to lead, guide, work closely with teams while remaining humble on the one hand, but be driven and passionate on the other. However much one has been involved in the business as CFO, the evolution to a CEO takes time. Success and recognition does not happen overnight. It takes months to hold your own and get people to believe that they can be led by you. Added to all this, one has to maintain one’s credibility with all outside agencies including the government.

My first focus was on the technical aspects of the business. I spent hours with the technical services and production personnel. I appointed a corporate technical support officer and took him with me to the manufacturing facilities. I followed him from plant to plant, listening as he asked people to explain why the production plant had tripped or why a safety system in a particular situation was not followed. Many presentations were made to me. Initially they went over my head, but soon I started learning. It took me about 6 months to realise that I did not need to hide behind the back of the ‘corporate technical support’ and I could ask ‘stupid’ questions.

We all believe that when it comes to strategy, HR or marketing functions, we can use our half-baked knowledge to sound intelligent. But then we learn over a period of time that there is so much more to learn about these functions.

In the technical function, I learned and understood, on a conceptual basis, the production process, efficiency parameters and how plants are monitored. One cannot run an organisation without understanding its key drivers. I also realised that the unsung heroes of the corporate world are engineers. They save energy costs, improve capacity and enhance profitability as a natural process of their own learning.

All this learning happened during the first year. Since then I have never shied away from any business and any aspect.

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n 2001, as CFO of Carlson Wagonlit Travel, I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to take over as the acting CEO for 6 months, as a stop-gap arrangement, while the company was searching for a new CEO. During this period, feedback I received from the board was very positive, despite the mindset at that time that an accountant should not be at the helm of a company. By 2003, with the new CEO in charge, things were not working out as expected. The company was spiraling downwards in terms of performance and service. During his leadership we had lost 50% of our business, and our manpower attrition rate, particularly at the senior level, was as high as 50%.

I also felt it might be time to move on, and was offered a great position in a highly respected multinational company. It was an opportunity that was hard to let go of. I discussed the opportunity with my chairman, and although he understood my predicament, he was extremely reluctant to let me go. He didn’t promise me anything, but convinced me that he needed me more than the multinational company. I trusted my chairman, and agreed to stay on as CFO. It turned out that my previous track record worked in my favour, and within six months I was offered the CEO position.

Quite frankly, I was never expecting to take on the CEO role. To be completely honest, there was a huge fear factor in my mind. This was my one and only opportunity to prove myself as a CEO, as it would now be tough to go back.

Within two weeks of working as CEO, I overheard a senior executive from an airline say to one of my colleagues, “now that you have an accountant as CEO of Carlson Wagonlit Travel, when do they expect the company to shut down?” Little does he know, but it was these words that gave me the strength and motivation

POINT TO PROVE When detractors questioned his calibre as CEO, it made Gandhi determined to prove them wrong

TURNAROUND Over the past six years, Carlson Wagonlit has grown from a Rs 300-crore to a Rs 1000-crore company under Gandhi

to prove them all wrong. I was determined to turn the company around.

My first task was to win back the confidence of the team. In one of our first meetings I told them that within 5 years, I wanted Carlson Wagonlit to be Rs 1000-crore company in India. We were then at Rs 300-crore. That set the ball rolling to chalk out strategies for infrastructural changes, competencies, on how we could differentiate and capitalise on our brand. Despite initial doubts amongst some members of the team, eventually they all got to know that we were in for serious business. In due course, team motivation was on a high. They could see quick decisions being made, and witnessed positive changes in the company.

I personally feel that CFOs are well positioned to take on the CEO role. They are generally very balanced and are strong at evaluating options with strong commercial orientation. Evaluation, however, does not need to be a time consuming exercise. Quick decisions need to be made a priority. One should never feel shy of change, and taking hard and aggressive decisions. Also, you should never feel shy of learning from your colleagues. Another, important aspect for me, after having taking over this position, was to “unlearn my finance skills’, to the extent that I am not seen and perceived as a finance professional only. I made conscious efforts to spend equal amounts of time and energy on other important functions as well. This further gave me an opportunity to learn and understand the other functions as, even as CEO, you can’t be expected to know everything, in every discipline.

Over time, with sound leadership and a motivated team, we managed to turn the company around. The good news is that we not only succeeded in surpassing our target of Rs 1000-crore, but eventually hit the Rs 1400crore mark within those 5 years.

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or the past three or four years, I had this inner urge to step out of the finance function after spending 21 years within the confines of finance. In a way, you can say I wanted to go out and see the world.

I had been involved in business partnering in an advisory capacity for some time, and now I wanted to test the waters myself. In many ways I was lucky that my company agreed to my request to be moved out of the finance function.

I now had the job of running Philips’ lighting business!

The thing was, once I had taken the plunge, I realised I did not know where to start! My predecessor had started the business and run it for 15 years and here I was, a finance professional, aspiring to take the company forward.

I realised my job would now involve developing a strategy for the future, dealing with HR issues and understanding customer needs. It was a new beginning – I was encountering my team through a whole new prism. So many things changed overnight. I started meeting customers and listening to customer expectations. It struck me that customer expectations were different when it came to me because they knew I did not have a sales or marketing background. I realised that there was only one way to go about it: listen, listen and listen! And then analyse what you learn using logic. Do not try to think like a marketing guy or a sales guy. It makes no sense to step into the shoes of someone you are never going to be! Build your own conclusions instead.

LIMELIGHT Ratnam has spent the last few months communicating with colleagues and understanding customer needs.

PLANNING AHEAD The new business head wants to speed up growth at Philips Lighting.

I admit I did have pangs of self doubt and anxious nights during the early days. A book that helped me during those times was “The first 90 days” by Michael Watkins. I realised that I needed to tell myself I could do it. The message was clear, “do not press the panic button after the first month if you find the going tougher than you expected. Have confidence in your ability and you will succeed. This was a message that I drilled into myself.

There were other realisations as well. While my responsibilities had now increased tremendously, it also struck me that from being the second-most powerful guy in the organisation (as a CFO), I was now on my own, in my own territory.

It has been four months since then and in these initial months I have started on my journey to learn the ropes. My first job was to change the mindset of the team and make them believe in me. I realised that I would have to communicate with them as much as possible and show them that I was capable of handling an entire business operation. It is work in progress, but I have started identifying the levers that can make or break the business. My next task will be to work these levers successfully.

Today, I know the business is doing well but I also know that I have to accelerate the pace of growth to take the company to the next level.

I will have to listen to people and learn more about the business as I settle into my role and involve all the stakeholders in the journey to greater glory.

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CARICATURE BY BINESH SREEDHARAN

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hat strikes me as more interesting than my first finance job is how I ended up with my first finance job. I qualified as a chartered accountant in 1974, but was not quite sure about what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up getting a job offer from SB Billimoria & Co, in their consultancy division. For my first assignment, I was posted in Bhilai, Chattisgarh.

Of all places, this was one place I did not want to go, so I promptly left the company.

I, later, cleared the probation officers test at State Bank of India. I was offered a job but was, unfortunately, posted in the remotest corner of Orissa. At State Bank, I was told that I could not change my circle as it was like a cadre. The prospect of spending my life in remote corners of Orissa did not seem exciting, so I let that go also. After having done my schooling in Orissa, where, in those days, even ice cream and coke, were a rarity, I certainly did not want to go back.

At that time, these were fantastic offers. My family was distraught because I had given up these plum offers on a whim, without any other options in hand.

I eventually ended up at BHEL as a junior executive. On my first day, I was asked to report to a senior management executive. I reached his office, appointment letter in hand, and was told to sit down. No welcome… no introduction.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was curtly

BEGINNER’S LUCK As a new CA, Bawa rejected two great offers because they were in small towns, before he landed a job in BHEL

BEEN THERE...

Before he joined TV18, Bawa worked with a PSU, a midsized firm and even started his own practice - gaining valuable experience

introduced to another employee and sent on my way. I was surprised with this type of work environment… and was not thrilled.

Over time, however, that senior executive became my best friend at BHEL. From a learning perspective, it was a great experience. Getting involved ( even though you were just sitting with your mouth shut) in the commercial aspects of the business gave me great exposure to how large deals are negotiated.

I was later seconded to the head office to be a part of the account finalisation team. At that time, accounts was a primarily manual process, allowing me to develop very strong accounting fundamentals. This proved to be invaluable throughout my career in finance.

After a few years, I started my own practice, but quickly realised that this also was not my cup of tea. I decided to get into the private sector.

I decided not to go for a big corporate and get slotted on single task, but decided to join a midsized firm. Although it may not have looked good on a CV, I gained exposure and experience in all aspects of finance - be it debt financing, capital raising, taxation, excise duty, income tax, etc.

It was a fantastic learning experience, which proved crucial to developing my skills to head the finance function.

During my early career, I may not have been clear about what I wanted to do, but I was certainly pretty clear on what I did not want to do.

And that, I think, worked in my favour.

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y first finance job ended up teaching me a lot more than finance! It taught me a bit of geography, helped me brush up my Hindi and in hindsight, was a brilliant introduction to the way 90 per cent of India lived and worked. I got my first job as an executive in the accounts department at SRF Limited and was promptly posted to Ranchi. This was way back in 1989.

The job was in the factory at a place called Ratu, in Ranchi and I would be reporting to the deputy general manager, finance. In the first place reaching Ranchi was tough in those days.

A lone Indian Airlines flight touched down in Ranchi everyday and it hopped, skipped and flew on a Delhi-Lucknow-Patna-Ranchi route.

There was no public transport (for that matter no transport) and power cuts were the order of the day. Luckily for the first year I stayed in a company guest house. My problems were compounded however, by the fact that I knew little or no Hindi. It took me some months to realise I was getting cheated because I did not know the difference between “ded” and “adayi” (1.5 and 2.5).

My job description included signing on bills, documenting accounts and also a bit of costing. There was a team of about 15 people in the accounts department but few had any defined job description. Office would start sharp at 8.30 am and often carry on till late. We worked on Saturdays and sometimes even on Sundays .

This is not to say work was not fun. I am still in touch with my first boss and another colleague who is now in Australia. There were many exciting moments in my first year. When I joined, I did not know computers and passed all bills manually. Audit used to take 6 months to complete. You can imagine how tough it was when within a few months of joining, I was asked to get working on MIS and business

GEEK BY FORCE When his lack of computer skills was exposed, Natarajan’s boss forced him to learn Lotus software.

WONDER YEARS Nats, as he is known among friends, says he looked just as young when he joined SRF at 22. He was 16 when this was shot!

plans. My colleague was an expert in Lotus 123 (Excel had not been created yet). With my limited knowledge I remained an onlooker as my ‘expert’ colleague did the job for me. My boss realised this and sent this colleague on work to Kolkata and told me to do the work alone, forcing me to learn the software. There was no power back up in the factory and computers were not connected to any auto power back-up system. We had UPS though, but the machines were slow. Once when the power went off and I was saving my work, a computer room employee switched off the UPS. I panicked since I knew we were to submit the business plan to the Delhi office in less than 48 hours and I hadn’t saved the file! Fortunately my boss had told my colleague and kept a back up. That day I decided to always keep a ‘back up’, whether in the form of a file, or a person!

Another issue that surprised me at first, before I took it upon myself to change the perception, was the attitude of my colleagues in the accounts department. They pretended to be the sole protectors of the company’s fortunes and were rather unfriendly to colleagues from other departments. Matters came to a head when during a workers’ meeting, the union president asked employees whether they had any issues. All complaints were directed against the accounts and cash payment sections. The president looked at me and asked if I could resolve the problem. I agreed, without knowing what I was getting into. It took days for me to convince them that it would be to their benefit to be friendly to co-workers. At the end of the first year, I got promoted as a senior executive and was given independent charge of MIS and business plan divisions. At the end of the next year, I became an assistant manager, in charge of finance and accounting.

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CARICATURE BY BINESH SREEDHARAN

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veryone I suppose, is a little nervous in their first job. But imagine, as a freshly minted chartered accountant, walking into your first finance job at one of India’s oldest business houses, only to realise that you would have to lead a team of 60 people, many as old as your father and almost all of them belonging to a powerful workers union.

If this is not an example of baptism by fire, show me one! I was over the moon when, after turning in a good performance in my CA finals (I had an all India rank of 11) I landed a job in Voltas at its New Delhi Regional office. This was the summer of 1984, when the world was young and I was a sprightly 22.

The pre-job induction experience was a lot of fun though. Over 70 management trainees including CAs and MBAs from IIMs gathered for a three-week induction programme in the luxurious Sea Rock hotel in Mumbai. We felt proud and important, meeting the top brass of Voltas and the Tata Group and religiously assembling at the hotel lobby in the evenings to catch a glimpse of the famous actress Rekha, who used to come to the gym.

Soon however, we were facing the real thing.

In the New Delhi regional office, it was a huge department of 60 people in accounts alone. As a fresh CA, I was placed above the supervisory staff who were directly responsible for the clerical staff.

So my first big challenge really was managing 60 people, where many of my subordinates were as old as my father. Worse, I soon realised that the staff was highly unionised. In fact the president and the secretary of the union were from the accounts department!

Initially the going was tough. The level of automation was basic and punch cards were used to

LUCKY BREAK A purge in his firm saw Sayal become the head of finance in the regional office

TATA DAYS A younger Sayal during his days at Voltas

FILM BUFF Thanks to his Voltas induction, Sayal saw Rekha up-close

add data by semi-trained ‘punch operators’. Data processing was done at outsourced computer centres. Telex machines were used to send the monthly flash to the headquarters with the line disconnecting many times in the process.

Soon I had become a jack-of-all-trades since the unionised staff would not perform any other role than the one assigned to them. For example if the cashier was on leave, I had to personally distribute cash. There were veiled threats as well. Once to show their anger against Rasna being served to staff (as against a normal cold drink), the union members dropped the drinks on the floor!

The real big challenge though, came when certain irregularities made the entire top finance brass of the company travel to Delhi to investigate. Heads rolled and all of a sudden I found myself as the head of the regional office in the accounting and finance operations.

When I look back I feel I could overcome the various challenges in my first job because I believed in being hands-on, working hard and always taking ownership of and responsibility for my actions. I think I became acceptable and popular with the staff once they realised I gave them the respect they deserved and I genuinely wanted the best for them. Come to think of it, I was perhaps one of the very few managers who was given a send off party by the union.

At a personal level my first job taught me the value of perseverance, respect and professionalism. At a professional level I learned the importance of something as basic as a bank reconciliation in good governance frauds and as complex as of revenue recognition in multiple element contracts.

My biggest lesson: to have a hands on approach in any job you do.

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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will always remember my first experience with the corporate world, simply because there was never a dull moment in those initial years as we tackled one challenge after another – a genuine test of character.

My stint with PVR began in December 2001 when I joined the company as a manager in the corporate finance department. Prior to PVR, I had done a stint at a corporate finance consulting company, but this was my first real stint in the corporate world. Cinemas were not even perceived as corporate entities way back then. Many people asked me if I was sure of my decision. Some friends even jokingly asked if I was going to sell tickets, cola and popcorn at the theatres.

But I was very clear. Having worked with Ajay (Ajay Bijli, MD of PVR) earlier on a separate assignment, I was completely enamoured by his vision and conviction to transform the way people look at cinemas and entertainment in India. Though I was sure that the journey ahead would be exciting, I was not sure what would lie in store for me.

The company had a Joint Venture with Village Roadshow of Australia when I joined, but soon the foreign partners decided to walk out and shut down their international operations. We were a small company with 13 screens in Delhi and a balance sheet size of Rs.30 crore at that time. It seemed the sky had fallen on our heads!

The biggest challenge was to figure out how to fund the next round of growth for the company in the absence of financing.

The first set of shopping malls in the country were set to arrive and we had signed up to open multiplexes in these locations. The next 18 months were the most challenging times of my career when we had to raise money quickly to fund the expansion. I along with my CFO, spent most of our time on the road meeting prospective investors and selling our vision and story to vari-

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SCREEN PRESENCE At PVR Sood played a key role in the company’s rise as a national player in the multiplex industry

ON A HIGH In 2004, after successfully getting two financial institutions to do their debt financing, Sood takes a ‘snow’ break.

ous private equity funds. Cinemas were still perceived as an unorganised industry. Investors had questions around black marketing of tickets and about how cash collections would be managed.

However, we were able to address all these concerns and our experience of working with international partners in the early stage of the company helped in demonstrating the robustness of our processes and systems. Finally, ICICI Venture came on board in 2003 as our partner with a first private equity investment in this space.

The next big challenge was to go to banks and institutions and convince them to lend money to a sunrise industry. Since we did not own any real estate (all cinemas were on long term lease), banks were apprehensive about lending in the absence of any real collateral.

All we could promise was good cash flow generation from the business to meet the debt repayment and interest obligations. I know this sounds very basic today but at that point of time, the banking system was not so evolved.

Bankers typically did not understand any cash flow-based financing and were focused purely around collateral-based lending.

Thankfully, after a year of hard work and presentations to senior management teams at most banks, we managed to get ICICI Bank and IL&FS on board to do the first round of debt financing. Since then we have worked with all leading nationalised, private and foreign banks.

I took over as CFO in PVR almost three years back. We have a Rs 600 crore balance sheet today. But those moments are still the most challenging and treasured in my professional career. Those were the first stepping stones for us to evolve into the organisation that we are today. At a personal level, those initial months helped me tremendously in shaping my outlook and approach in finding solutions to new business challenges.

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et me start by acknowledging that

by God’s grace, I have had a smooth and wonderful career spread over 34 years. Almost all assignments given to me were handled without much difficulty and, looking back, all those tasks look small.

Writing about the first big challenge actually means going back to the 1970s, which is in line with the popular trend in films and the fashion industry today.

My first big challenge relates to what we did in the late 70s, the start of my professional life. I had joined DCM Ltd. in 1978 as a management trainee after doing my MBA and was placed in its chemical and Vanaspati unit in Delhi, DCM Chemical Works (DCMCW).

The Janata Party government had taken over and had forced companies like IBM to leave India. Some Indian companies had entered the IT field and had started launching micro and mini computers. These machines had a lot of limitations.

The corporate world had just begun exploring how to make use of these new IT developments.

In those early days accounting was thought of as the first field where new technology could be beneficial. The DCMCW management also decided to exploit it seriously.

A core team comprising our IT head and two accounts personnel (a Chartered Accountant and I) was formed to take this forward.

Today, I can say that participating in this team right at the beginning of my career was the best thing that could have happened to me.

This experience, besides teaching me technical skills, became the basis of my attitude towards

THE LOYALIST Jain’s career at DCM spans 32 years - an achievement many can only hope to emulate

DCM’S ‘IT’ MAN As a young management trainee, Jain was instrumental in computersing DCM way back in the late 1970s.

all future projects.

The team decided to envision the accounting and MI system for the unit almost on a zero base with no restrictions of time and resources.

Discussions were held with team members and all other stakeholders. The key element emphasised during these discussions was ‘dream’ people should dream about what they would like to see. Based on these, we decided to implement an Integrated Accounting System (IAS) for the unit with the following characteristics:The original transactions would happen manually – primarily because the technology available at that time did not permit online transactions.

The transactions documents would capture all possible information to meet requirements of internal and external agencies.

The transaction would be captured in the central computer in the shortest possible time.

Once a transaction was captured, all subsequent work would be done on the computer, based on common information.

The practices – terminologies, definitions and process across various uses would be made uniform to have a common language across the unit.

The financial MI at different time intervals would be on the same basis and from the same source.

Initially, there was skepticism and anxiety among employees regarding the new ‘IT infrastructure’, but eventually when people saw the benefits, a great deal of excitement was created within the organisation. It was a good start to my career, as this exercise strengthened my transaction fundamentals immensely.

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he biggest challenge I faced in my professional career is not quite ‘financial’ in nature, though it did stem from a financial crisis of sorts. It was a challenge to literally save my life and my career but more importantly, an experience which nonetheless taught me more than one valuable business lesson. Around 20 years ago, I took up an offer with a Oman-based trading firm. The first shock came when, after being interviewed, I was suddenly told that my first posting would be in Taiwan (Republic of China). Those were days when very few people in Taiwan spoke any English. The company was involved in parallel imports, which meant I had to be nimble-footed, quickly create a good network in an alien land and source items from the right places – a very tall task for someone who spoke no Taiwanese or Mandarin. Moreover, I soon realised that as CFO, if I and the company had to survive, I would need to run the show myself, though I had a boss, my managing director, as an advisor.

Thus I became a quasi-MD – looking after the purchases, sales and finance of the company.

The company was reeling under huge losses and had serious cash flow problems. Because of the nature of the business, they had also borrowed from non banking channels often at interest rates that were as high as, hold your breath, 1.4 per cent per day!

I ran the firm for 12 months and managed to ease some of the cash flow problems by streamlining operations and bringing in financial discipline. It taught me how to prioritise my work and do basic due diligence before taking money from any source. In those 12 months, on at least two ocassions, I was face-to-face with the local mafia. My biggest challenge, however, came not during the job but when I was trying to quit. In those days, to leave Taiwan, you needed to make an exit visa application, which

FEATHER IN HIS CAP

A winner of many CFO awards, Bookwala, an expert on the Direct Tax Code, has been with Capgemini for over 13 years

ANOTHER TIME...

Bookwala’s experience as CFO of a firm in Taiwan could well be the plot for a bestselling novel

had to be signed by your MD. The company was in the midst of a family war, with the two brothers who owned it in the process of dividing their empire. I also found out from my sources that they had planned to borrow large amounts of money from the market in Taiwan and then wind up the business and disappear rapidly, probably leaving me holding the can! I had to literally plan my escape. I booked a round-trip air ticket to India, left some of my clothes at my apartment, decided to forgo one month’s salary and officially went on ‘leave’ to visit my family in India. I was sure my MD would not let me go if she found out I was planning to quit. (In fact, the Omani chairman himself came to Mumbai to convince me to return to Taiwan).

The whole experience, however, taught me many valuable business lessons, most important of them being: always have a plan B! There will be times when you will reach dead-ends or a well formulated plan will fail because of unforeseen developments. Only those who have a back-up plan succeed in such tough times.

It also taught me how critical it is to plan your cash flows. If one is not disciplined, then the cost of funds will be too high and the business model will fail. The very fact that I was able to generate surplus cash showed that the business model was sound, but due to bad financial discipline, it was not able to survive.

On a more sombre note, the way I tackled my work in those 12 months helped me mature tremendously and sharpened my management skills. It taught me how to run a company and get business even when your company moves from one liquidity crunch to another. Working with banks and, sometimes, non-banking channels, also brought home to me the importance of documentation during any financial transaction.

Finally, I learnt how a vast network often opens new doors for you.

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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oming as I did from a non-finance background, my biggest challenge by far was when I was asked to take over the role of the Chief Financial Officer at Apollo Tyres. Having built my career in the field of sales, marketing and strategy, I was naturally apprehensive. The role of a CFO of a multinational, high-growth company was something that I understood at a conceptual level but I feared it would take time to come to grips with the ground reality. And if that was not enough, I also landed the role right in the middle of our transition to IFRS and GST. The icing on the cake? Within weeks of my taking over, the global financial crisis of 2008-09 broke out.

If you think this was the end of my troubles, think again! My immediate task on taking over was the financial closure of an international acquisition that I had initiated in my prior role.

The end of 2008 was not the best of times to be looking for funds and every time potential lenders heard it was for an acquisition in Western Europe, the telephone lines would go unnervingly silent. At the same time, we were working with the target company’s management to convince the works council of our financial stability as an organisation, given the difficult times they had had with the earlier shareholder.

The company that we were seeking to buy had been taken over by another a few years earlier.

Soon after that takeover, unbridled expansion by the parent company in its own home country led to the group being saddled with an inordinately high debt structure. The parent company’s troubles also led to a situation of great difficulty for our target as all expansion plans were frozen.

Given the experience with the previous acquir-

CRISIS MAN Sarkar became CFO of Apollo Tyres right in the middle of the global meltdown but steered the ship with remarkable skill

YESTERYEARS The St Xavier’s, Kolkata and Lancaster University alumnus moved to Apollo from Xerox, where he specialised in sales and strategy

er, it was only natural that any potential shareholder be viewed with suspicion, both by the local banks as well as by the employees. Long were the hours spent in meeting management and other employees to address their concerns, as also to seek the support of the local banks. At the same time, we had to secure our own sources of finance to effect the transaction.

It is at times like this that the true worth of your team comes to the fore. With patience and perseverance, my colleagues chased down all our sources of finance. Given our strong balance sheet and excellent track record, in normal times we would have put together the package within a day. But those were hardly normal times. Nevertheless, within a week we were able to secure the commitments of all our lenders and put forward our offer to the sellers.

The very fact that our offer was fully financed and secured with bank support helped to a great extent in securing the deal for us against competitors who were not able to demonstrate the same kind of lender commitment. It also gave the target management and employees a great deal of confidence in our solidity and ability to make it count under pressure. Further, it generated a goodwill bank that stands us in good stead till today.

For me, it was a lesson in how much of our function is built on trust and relationships.

Being thrown into the deep end at the outset was perhaps the best indoctrination for me in one of the most important aspects of the CFO role, that of fund raising. Today I remain ever conscious of the trust that our various stakeholders repose in us, in the form of financial and emotional capital, and the responsibility that we have to keep that balance well-tended.

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CARICATURE BY SANTOSH KUSHWAHA

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hen the folks at this magazine asked me to write an article on My First Big Challenge, I was actually a trifle confused. Isn’t life full of firsts?

After some soul-searching it was apparent that the first big challenge I faced in my career was, in hindsight, actually a small step towards becoming a manager but a giant one towards becoming a leader and to me the latter is decidedly more important. The year was 1993. The place – a dusty north Indian town, complete with its civil lines, clock tower and M G Road. I was a wetbehind-the-ears accountant dispatched from the corporate office on my first field posting after the mandatory stint in internal audit.

Having grown up in Kolkata and joined one of the blue-chip “boxwallah” companies, this stint in the so-called boondocks was one I was treating with some trepidation. It was, so to speak, a stint that was going to make a “man” out of the boy I was at the time. I was supposed to take over as the assistant commercial manager, effectively the second-in-command in the finance and accounting department of the factory. The department was manned by 40 clerical staff – unionised personnel who, though knowledge workers, were nonetheless treated as “workers”. The trouble was that there was an incumbent in the position who was, shall we say, being asked to seek opportunities elsewhere. Consequently, no one except my boss and I knew what I was really there for – a rather delicate situation for a greenhorn to be put in.

The Head Clerk was “Panditji” – the bada babu – respected (actually feared) by others in the department. A mathematician by training, he was still a few years shy of his retirement but had been passed up for promotion to “management”. He had scant respect for the current incumbent and took it upon himself to treat me with equal disdain. I found this disconcerting

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SAY CHEESE: A St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata alumnus, Misra joined WNS after stints at ITC and Mphasis.

SUMMER OF ‘89: Misra, when the world was young, just before he started his first job.

LIFE IS GOOD: The WNS CFO likes letting his hair down and smoking a cigar once in a while.

to say the least. No doubt he was great at his work and reliable, but his attitude was bordering on insubordination.

I decided to wait for an opportune moment but as luck would have it, I did not have to wait long. While closing the books the following month, something went seriously wrong with the system and, for once, I saw Panditji at a loss.

Unknown to him, and everyone else, I had been spending nights in the office teaching myself the system – it was relatively new to the company, so finding teachers was difficult. That is when I discovered the virtues of the “F1” button.

Using my new-found skills and after pulling an ‘all-nighter’, I was able to solve the problem that had him vexed – but only he and I knew how it had been done. The next day I called Panditji into my office, shut the glass door and proceeded to have a “man-to-man” chat with him. I could sense the rising curiosity in the department as no one had dared have this kind of a chat with Panditji – or at least had not lived to tell the tale!

To my pleasant surprise Panditji was open, honest and receptive. He admitted that he did not respect some of my predecessors but that I had earned his respect by pulling him out of a hole while leaving his self-respect intact. I resisted the temptation to gloat and become a hero in front of the entire department, but the respect I earned was worth a lot more. Also, seeing the new equation Panditji and I had established, the rest of the department also started looking up to me. Word soon spread about how the new kid had helped the seasoned campaigner and overnight things changed for me. My position as the second-in-command was cemented. The official announcement followed soon after but by then I was well on my way as the “saab bahadur”.

I learned that day the true meaning of the old adage that respect is commanded and not demanded.

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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uring the initial years of my career at ICI Limited, the standard refrain reserved for finance executives was “what do you understand of the outside world, you guys are very inward- looking.” I would sometimes bring up this issue with my friends and seniors in the finance team and wonder aloud how we could find ways to understand the customers view and be a part of this ‘real world’ that the sales and marketing team was always boasting about.

My opportunity came one fine day in 1998 when my boss told me he was recommending my name as the new general manager of our Joint Venture company. At that time I was the ‘controller’ of the very same business. I was thrilled! This was my chance to show all those skeptics that a finance guy could also run a profitable business.

However, soon that initial euphoria evaporated as I realised that the world from a GM’s chair looked very different from that of a controller’s and that making and selling commercial explosives was very different from sending regular MIS reports to your head office.

Colleagues who would have agreed to my diagnosis of a problem in my avatar as controller now were difficult to convince, though I was the boss. Soon I understood that to earn the respect of colleagues, I would have to come down to earth and add value to their jobs rather than just preach. I set myself a new goal: to make my team greater than the sum of its parts.

We put our heads together and figured that the best way to achieve success was to get everyone aligned to a common objective with common rewards. We brainstormed to arrive at the top 10 objectives for the year and to ensure that we never forgot about it, we had our ‘Big Hairy

MR FIXIT As CFO of Pidilite since 2008, Batra has played a key role in the growth of brands such as Fevicol and Dr Fixit

IN THE HOT SEAT This photograph was clicked soon after he became a GM at ICI Ltd

MEMORIES: 1998 The alumnus of South Point School, Kolkata, enjoys some time off work

Audacious Goals’, or BHAGs, painted on boards at several prominent points in the factory. Now the entire workforce knew them. Quality of products and customer service, which received most complaints, became the talking point of a daily shop floor meeting that we started. Every morning the heads of each process would meet to discuss issues around quality and customer service. Sharing the problems helped us find solutions and fostered great team work. It became a regular exercise and was the source of several initiatives to improve productivity and safety over the next three years. My team set new benchmarks in quality, innovation, customer service, and of course, profitability. Incidentally, sales grew 50 per cent in those three years and profits doubled. The experience left an indelible mark on my career and made me confident of my abilities. I now genuinely believed that if I could successfully run a business like making and selling commercial explosives, no task would be unachievable.

Some of the key lessons learned in those formative years have stayed with me till date. I have realised that the customer is always right while meeting and hearing all stakeholders is key to formulating direction and setting goals.

It also taught me the power of team-work, to respect performance and to show little tolerance to indiscipline. I must say that my persona changed in those three years and from a person who would always look to take on a job where success was more or less guaranteed, I had transformed myself into somebody who was happy to take on new and risky challenges.

I am truly indebted to my former organisation and more so to my superiors who saw this capability in me and took the risk of giving me the opportunity to prove them right.

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CARICATURE BY BINESH SREEDHARAN

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y first year as CFO was when I came on board Gillette in 1987, when it had just begun its Indian operations. Soon after, Gillette acquired Sharpedge Ltd, an Indian company that was jointly owned by Escorts and Hindustan Lever, and which produced the famous Erasmic brand of safety razor blades and twin blade systems.

The first responsibility or task given to me as CFO was to ‘Gillette-ise’ Sharpedge. Being a multinational company, Gillette had several international requirements which needed to be complied with, including standardisation of reporting and budget processes, tax compliance, etc. My first reaction was that I needed to ‘Gillette-ise’ myself before I could even try to ‘Gillette-ise’ Sharpedge. This of course, was easier said than done.

Internationally, Gillette, at the time, was using an ERP system known as Fourth Shift and a Hyperion reporting tool. I was the first person in Gillette India to even use a computer at work! This is genuinely another area that I am talking about.

I was, and continue to be, a firm believer in the dictum that you must dirty your hands, at least once in your lifetime, by doing things on your own to develop a solid understanding of your discipline.

I ended up creating the entire computer-based

CUTTING EDGE Back in the 80s, as CFO of Gillette India, Varma created an automated costing system for the company.

THEN AND NOW Varma during his days as CFO of Dabur, a company where he worked for a decade.

budgeting and costing systems for Gillette India.

This helped me immensely to understand Gillette’s international systems and processes. Doing this also provided me with practical knowledge that has served me well throughout my career.

To my surprise, I got to know, quite recently, that the costing systems I put in place then are still in use, almost 20 years later. This is a matter of great pride for me.

My stint with Gillette was also the first time that I became a part of an operating management team. This exposed me to the concepts of teamwork and adaptability… competencies that are normal now, but were evolving at that time.

I was with Gillette for approximately 12 years, then joined Carrier for a couple years before joining the Dabur Group where I was working as CFO till August 2010. I have since taken over as Director Finance at PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt Ltd. Having been a finance professional for close to four decades and a CFO for over 20 of those years, I have been witness to the changing role of the CFO over the years.

Fundamentally, the role of the CFO in the 1980s was focused on accounting, MIS, processes and related areas. Today, these have become a lower level secondary role for the CFO, but, as far as I am concerned, these remain equally important.

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NOVEMBER 2010

CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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started my career in Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited soon after it came into existence with the nationalisation of the erstwhile Burmah Shell Group of companies.

Given that the company was embarking on an exciting phase of growth and the fact that I was getting an exposure to diverse areas of operation, it was an easy decision for me to make my career in BPCL. I had an opportunity to work in diverse and very interesting areas of finance both within the company as well as the Indian oil industry.

My core responsibility of finance was in safe hands given that an excellent team was handling various facets of the function. I had therefore decided that the customer – both internal and external would be on the top of my agenda for the first year, when I took up this position. I was literally on the road visiting key markets and trying to understand the needs of the customers.

With five distinct businesses in operation, customer needs were quite diverse. What the different segments of retail, which was the biggest business, needed was different from the needs of the lubricants business. The time spent was invaluable in terms of understanding emerging trends in the Indian oil and gas industry.

One of the immediate outcomes was the realisation that the technology platform available in the company could be leveraged to derive a competitive edge. With technology being a part of my portfolio, this was an important deliverable.

As such my first year as CFO saw a detailed plan being evolved listing areas where businesses could be supported by the Information Technology function. With SAP R-3 having been implemented across the organisation, an elaborate Business Intelligence framework was developed to provide decision making support at all levels.

With the retail business opening up to competition, there was a need to support the launch of key initiatives in the area of automation of retail outlets, augmenting the system of out-

HANDS ON Time spent on the field helped Joshi realise the potential of technology to grow the business

HEYDAYS A much younger Joshi clicked at work by his BPCL colleagues

WALK THE TALK Even back then Joshi believed in meeting customers directly

let maintenance and optimising the delivery schedule to outlets. Plans were drawn up and pilot programmes were run successfully in my first year as CFO. The efforts put in were very successful and helped BPCL set benchmarks in the industry.

On the financial front, one of the key challenges in the oil industry has been the efficient management of funds. Even prior to becoming the CFO, this remained one of my main priorities. However with the Reserve Bank introducing mechanisms like Electronic Fund Transfers and subsequently Real Time Gross Settlement, there were ample opportunities for achieving efficiencies. Work was initiated in this area which finally culminated in large sections of BPCL’s customers especially in the retail business migrating to the RTGS platform. At the same time BPCL commenced the process of making payments to its transporters using the same technology, so that they received their dues without delay. Over the years, BPCL had developed a reputation for being amongst the first in the industry to adopt new technologies with the implementation of the SAP R-3 ERP being the latest example. With a view to leverage the company’s strengths in this area, a plan was initiated to build a dedicated in-house team to support the use of these technologies. The team, with their expertise and experience, has since gone on to provide innovative solutions both internally as well as to outside customers both in India and abroad.

In retrospect, the first year as a CFO was one which was immensely satisfying and personally enriching. As I look back at my career in BPCL and in particular my tenure as CFO, I feel privileged to have contributed to the efforts in building the refining capacity from 6 Million Metric Tonnes (MMT) to the current level of 30 MMT, laying the foundation for the company’s entry into the upstream exploration.

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NOVEMBER 2010

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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could either write a long narrative on this subject or summarise the complexity of the situation in three words ... India, CFO and media!! There are common words that describes each of these â&#x20AC;&#x201C; dynamic, vibrant, evolving, compliance driven, regulated, ever changing. Those first three words however, aptly describe my job: the CFO of a media company operating in India. The first year was many moons ago but I can still recall the feeling with which I approached the challenge.

With a professional degree in hand and some seven years of working in diverse industries and finance roles, I was fairly confident of cracking it and doing a good job. There were many firsts during my first year, experiences which taught me lessons that are still relevant.

In the initial months itself, I had my first brush with tax issues, having worked mostly on the financial planning and strategy side earlier. This is where I learnt the biggest lesson (and most CFOs dealing with tax authorities will agree with this): just because you think you have taken the right decision, taking business consideration and law into account, do not expect the tax authorities to agree with you.

Oh they will, eventually. They must follow the law but to come to a common meeting point may cost time, money and effort spent on litigation! So the mantra that I now follow for all tax decisions, was learnt in my first year: do what you think is the right thing based on business requirements, based on the right knowledge of tax and transfer pricing laws. Follow the law in principle and take the decision that

SETTING IT UP Dhupar was given the freedom to set up the finance function and also look at HR policies

TIME OUT This photograph, clicked earlier in the decade, has Dhupar relaxing during a leisure trip, away from work.

works for the business. Let the consultants not scare you with tax exposures because no matter what you do, there is always a chance that tax exposures will happen, in which case, you will be challenged. In my expereince, this is particularly true in the case of international companies as well as for industries like the media where regulation is still to catch up with advancements in business and technology.

I consider myself very lucky that I was also thrown into a start-up situation here and so, had a dream run in dealing with various issues. I had to decide whether to outsource the finance function or set up a team, take a call on accounting and ERP software, set up policies and procedures for finance as well as on the HR side, revamp the entire supply chain, review compensation polices and retirement benefit plans. What helped me were the support and a fair amount of independence that I received from my line manager so that my role was not restricted and one could look at the entire business and make an attempt to improve operations from both a best practice and a cost perspective.

I did not get boxed in and I think that really helped me understand various areas of the organisation. An important lesson of life was also the value of building relationships and winning the trust of various stakeholders. This knowledge and experience helped me at a later stage to break barriers between different functions, divisions, entities and countries to set up a combined business support team in India across BBC.

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CARICATURE BY RAJU GUPTA

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he year was 2003. I was just 33 when I suddenly found myself in the hot seat, as India CFO of one of the most prestigious sportswear brands in the world – Reebok. It was a matter of great honour and pride for me especially since I knew that I was stepping into the big shoes of my previous boss who left Reebok on a strong financial footing.

Hence, the expectations from me were high and I was supposed to be perfect from the very first day.

I decided to take it up as a challenge instead of worrying about expectations. I chose to focus on the much talked about but difficult to achieve task of balancing growth and profitability on a priority basis.

The premium sportswear market was in its infancy in 2003. Further, high import duties and local taxes made it difficult to sell sports footwear and apparel at a premium. There was a relative absence of malls in the country and retailing was limited to high streets only.

Since there were not many national level retail chains in the country, we had to rely on small franchisees with limited funding capacities to partner us in our growth ambitions. We had formulated an aggressive and ambitious franchisee retail expansion plan for Reebok for the next three years, starting with the task of adding 100 franchisee stores in 2003 – a high run rate of adding one franchisee store every 72 hours.

This required me to take the lead in setting up systems and processes to manage risk through a

FUND FUNDA Bhagat ensured special rates from banks to help franchisees open many Reebok outlets

YOUNG ACHIEVER Becoming a CFO at 33 meant expectations were high from him, but Bhagat says this did not frighten him at all.

careful screening of potential franchisees while speeding up the availability of cheaper working capital facilities for them.

The process became more complex as most franchisees were either not big enough or were reluctant to run more than one or two shops.

Thus, with the planned 100 franchisee store expansion in 2003, speeds, adequacy and simplicity for the processes to achieve profitable growth became an imperative.

Own funding arrangements by the franchisees through their banking channels and their inability to borrow at lower rates would have slowed us down and made our growth quite expensive.

So we leveraged our banking relationships to channel financing facilities for our franchisees, helping them meet their working capital needs.

These special rate facilities were clean with substantial recourse on the banks themselves.

Thus, lower cost of funding through our banks meant that we ended up saving on our trade margins, thereby growing our profitability. As a result, the number of franchisee store additions in 2003 equalled the number we added in the previous five years of operation. It was truly a landmark achievement for the brand and laid the foundations for a solid profitable growth momentum.

It is often said: “do not rest on your accomplishments, build on them.” The partnership formula has worked since then as Reebok is now the largest brand in the premium sportswear industry in India with a presence in 300 cities.

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NOVEMBER 2010

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CARICATURE BY PRADEEP GUPTA

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y first year as CFO was back in 2003 when I became the CFO for all of GE’s consumer finance businesses in India, which included GE Money as well as the joint venture with State Bank of India -- SBI Card. All businesses were in high growth mode. It was a great learning experience for me - I will present a few here.

The diminishing presence of the COO in companies coupled with increasing pressures for accountability has indeed resulted in enhanced responsibilities for the CFO. One thing hasn’t changed – the expectation that Finance should produce timely and accurate financial statements. Only after the CFO has earned stakeholders’ trust in that area can he have the luxury of allocating resources to other tasks that create business value. Therefore, lesson # 1 – fix all impediments to your organisation’s ability to deliver credible reports before you invest in value creation. The technical, process and disclosure controls as well as having the best practices in Corporate Governance are a nonnegotiable.

What gets measured gets managed – but experience also suggests that overemphasis on a few metrics can create pressures to “optimise” a metric without actually having to perform or simply at the cost of some other metrics. Therefore, while on one hand it helps to focus on a few metrics, on the other, it also helps to diversify in order to create an effective & balanced performance management system aligned to the organisations strategic goals. Equally important, businesses and circumstances evolve requiring performance management systems to evolve too. Lesson # 2 – understand how customers and operating realities impact performance before you start influencing the performance management systems.

Taking risks is essential for profitable growth.

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THE CHANGE Over the years the expectation that finance would produce timely and accurate financial statements, has not changed, even as the CFO’s role has undergone a sea change.

THE LEARNING The diminishing roles of the COO had resulted in enhanced responsibilities for Manoj Naik as CFO

Becoming “risk savvy” is, as much about understanding the risk-reward equation associated with a business opportunity, as it is about the risks your organisation is not geared to manage. Distinguishing between rewarded & unrewarded risks and between rewarded risks one can or cannot manage is essential if the CFO has to become an advocate for good decisions and not just safe decisions. Lesson # 3 – helping “manage” rather than “avoid” enterprise risks is as important for the CFO as ensuring access to capital or simply having the right capital structure.

This is the information age – but information overload can paralyse. Understanding what decisions are required to be made and therefore what information is required for the same is therefore – equally important, making a business judgment on information is becoming as crucial as having the information itself. Therefore, lesson # 4 – prioritising investments in relevant information management and in critical talent retention is as important as investments in managing rewarded risks or in lowering unrewarded risks.

As organisations become complex & global, sphere of influence rather than span of control has started becoming an ingredient for success, particularly for the CFO. Building trusted relationships with key stakeholders within & outside the business is now becoming crucial.

Moreover, as uncertainty & regulatory complexity increases, CFOs are increasingly becoming point persons for communicating with all key stakeholders. Therefore, the most important trust building lesson from my first and many years as a CFO is that understanding, listening and communicating with the matrix of influence is fast becoming as important as it is to communicate with the BOD, the CEO and the finance staff.

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cared, confused but curious. That is how I felt when I was given the option to run a start-up footwear factory in Gurgaon nearly two decades ago. The combination of being just 29, working under the umbrella of a very large parent, Ballarpur industries, and a great boss in Gautam Thapar, made me say yes to this opportunity. It was here that I learnt my three most important lessons with regards to a start-up - a start-up needs good people, it has to deliver something customers want and it is a business that is often starved of capital.

What does good people really mean? Firstly, a start-up needs a few solid decision makers (including shareholders). It is the chemistry between these people that creates the energy, that in turn fires the organisation. You cannot write job descriptions for employees because you want them to work in a broad role and not within the confines of a description. I learnt the art of recruiting people through contacts. Before hiring them, I would sometimes meet them in social gatherings. It told me a lot more about a person than a three-hour-long meeting in office.

My next learning was about customers and their needs. The general perception is that startups are about great ideas. My learning is that the initial idea is no more than the gunshot which starts the race. We got virtually no business till we were marketing only men’s shoes. Once we retooled our factory around ladies shoes though, things started looking up. And when one German customer who wanted high heeled boots (which were apparently very tough to make without high-end machinery and which our compe-

LAUNCH LESSONS Start-ups need a few solid decision makers to lead the way in the first year, says Mathur

SOUND ADVICE The Aircel CFO urges all aspiring CXOs to work in a start-up if they find a good opportunity.

tition could not afford ) came to us, the factory began to look busy and the business thrived.

Business has to be continuously recalibrated.

This is more relevant today than in the past.

Just look at how Google started out and what it does today.

The journey to making a business grow is challenging to say the least. Money burns at a rate that can seldom be planned. If you really want to understand the cost of equity (which most managers in big organisations don’t) startups are the place to learn it. A culture sets in - money becomes the most precious thing in the company - people start competing for it.

Planning becomes sharper and supply chain becomes tighter. People start understanding the value of vendor credit. It is because of this that a culture begins to emerge - a quest for responding to customers’ changing needs. It is critical to retain this for continued success.

Will I want to go through the start-up experience again? Honestly, I really enjoy working in a capital intensive environment. My subsequent assignments have been with mid-size companies at an inflexion point of wanting to become giants: Idea Cellular just before it bought Escotel, GMR Group when it took over the Delhi Airport and at Aircel when it decided to go pan India from being a regional player.

The learning is immense and the environment very addictive. India offers far more opportunities than it did 20 years ago when I got the break. I sincerely urge all youngsters to take on an assignment in a start-up should they find a good opportunity. It is too good a chance to give up.

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he role of the CFO has undergone a sea change over the past few years – from number crunching accountants to strategic business thinkers. Business scenarios too are changing at a very fast pace and organisations have to keep pace with the ever changing, complex business scenarios to keep providing value to shareholders. The CFO plays a very crucial role in ensuring the same.

Many of these changes in fact, are happening so fast, they are forcing organisations to challenge traditional business models in order to become leaner, more efficient and responsive.

Nowadays, the primary objective of the CFO is to serve the needs of the CEO and the business managers – not just the regulators, auditors and the investors.

About eight months back I joined NetAmbit, an Indian financial services distribution company funded by private equity investors Bessemer Venture Partners Trust and Helion Venture partners.

In an organisation like NetAmbit which is growing at a scorching pace, there are many things to do for a CFO, from as basic as standardisation of internal controls and systems to cultivating relationships with investors and handling Mergers and Acquisitions. NetAmbit’s vision is to create one of the largest retail financial services brands in the country and I foresee a tremendous potential for me (as the CFO) to contribute to this growth.

My first year here has been full of exciting experiences that have been enriching and challenging. It is an ongoing process since I am yet to complete the first full year, but broadly I think the biggest challenges for me lie in four areas.

Managing & cultivating relationships:

HEAD START Pasari sees himself playing a key role in NetAmbit’s plans to become a large retail financial services brand

WAH TAJ! The Pasari family during a holiday a few years ago.

FAMILY FIRST Pasari with his daughters at home.

One of my major tasks at hand has been to establish good working relationships with investors and banks while managing discussions with existing and potential private investors as to how additional capital might be invested for the organisation to grow.

Driving Major Strategic Initiatives: In a growing organisation there are numerous opportunities at a strategic level that demand the CFO’s attention, like expansion of the business into newer areas and the development of an acquisition strategy to help fuel additional growth to enhance business performance and shareholder value. I see potential in this sphere as we scale up to the next level.

Ensuring Internal Controls: For a company with a reach in over 140 locations across the country, selling various types of financial products from insurance and corporate fixed deposits to loans and credit cards is truly a challenge. Over the past year we have tried to establish robust internal controls and processes so as to eliminate conflict and reach out to clients in a uniform manner.

Advising the Management : In a high growth company, the CFO is party to most if not all key decisions that impact the company’s performance. Be it new initiatives, tie ups, structuring the group’s shareholding pattern or interaction with external customers and business associates – I know I have to play a central role.

Somewhere I feel that the kind of varied work opportunities and exposure you get in a start-up is unparalleled, something you are unlikely to get when working in an established company or an MNC. Having worked in both MNCs as well as large domestic firms, I can tell you this from my personal experience.

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etting funds for a start-up is tough in any scenario and when it is a completely new concept that you are trying to sell, believe me, perseverance becomes your middle name. After spending several years working with large companies such as ICICI and IFC Washington, I wanted to do something new. I guess everyone takes one risk in life and this was to be mine. I liked the idea of a challenge and along with Manish Khera (who became CEO), founded Financial Inclusion Network & Operations (FINO) in 2006. We knew it would be a hard-sell since the concept of an online banking solution for bottom of the pyramid customers or the unbanked sector, was very new.

Our two biggest challenges in the first year were ensuring enough working capital and fine tuning the business model so that as CFO I had a sound plan when I met investors and customers, in this case, banks.

Having worked in large corporations prior to this, leading a start-up was a whole new world.

Getting used to economy class seats on flights was easy, but looking for hotels in the Rs 15002000 a night range, sharing rooms etc was slightly tougher.

But I enjoyed this since I realised that if I was to be a role model for the other employees, I had to lead by example.

The real challenge at hand however, was to get working capital. ICICI helped with a seed fund but we knew it wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go beyond the first few months. Banks were predictably reluctant in the beginning as some saw us as competition since we too spoke about reaching out to the bottom

START-UP PANGS Gupta spent the first year at FINO looking after HR and even sales, apart from his role as CFO

BANKING ON IT An ICICI Bank employee in his younger days, Gupta knew working in a start-up would involve hardships.

of the pyramid and financing them. My first task therefore was to build strong relationships and a good network with banks and clients.

Remember, this was a start-up. So I was also looking at HR and sales issues, recruiting people, helping the team with sales pitches and attending as many meetings with customers as possible. I also realised that to successfully launch a start-up you have to sometimes make your work your home!

In the initial months I found out that getting good people for a start-up is tough. No one wants to risk their career for an untried, untested entity. Raising capital is no easier. Believe me, we even had to take advances from some of our clients to facilitate business.

Today after five years, while working capital continues to be our big challenge, we are in a much better position. There are seven or eight large and small investors on board including nationalised banks and private entities. In our first two fund-raising efforts, we managed to raise US $ 15 million each time.

The biggest takeaway for me from those initial days was the realisation that when you start a company, you need to have not just a good story and a great business plan but you also need to identify visionaries who will buy your story.

I have also understood that while raising funds when starting off is not easy, it is far tougher to get investors for a second round of funding. You need to prove that you have lived up to the story you sold them a year or two back and unlike year one, you have to now show potential investors what you have done with the initial funding.

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etermination to tackle unexpected challenges, willingness to learn new skills and a lot of patience.

These are qualities that are expected of a CFO in a start-up. There is a common perception that the first and toughest challenge for a start-up CFO is raising capital. While admittedly fund raising is crucial, this is often not really the biggest challenge, primarily because the person promoting a start-up arranges for funding in the initial months. This initial funding is for the business plan and the management team in which the CEO or the promoter has the biggest role. In our case, for instance, we were self funded by the promoters for the first year.

I feel the major role of the CFO is getting the commercial engine rolling and putting in place processes and systems for the business to build up. After having worked at large business houses, a start-up is a perfect wakeup call. All of a sudden, you realise that you are no longer flaunting that ‘big firm’ tag and even simple functions such as meeting travel needs or booking tickets from a travel agency become a big challenge. Very few people are willing to extend the customary 15-day credit to a start-up. After having worked in environments where such things happen like clockwork, my initial reaction was one of frustration and irritation. In some cases, we also found banks and vendors sounding sceptical when it came to carrying out business on normal commercial terms.

Within the organisation, the first year was a tight-rope walk as far as setting up processes and attaining the level of flexibility that I feel a start-up needs, was concerned. It is a huge chal-

FIRST CUT Setting up procedures and systems was a big challenge in the first year, says Jain

RICH EXPERIENCE There were frustrating moments in a start-up atmosphere, but Jain says it has been a great ride so far.

lenge to have required processes and systems in place, ones which you feel are good for the business, when the team is already struggling to get business and execute it. It calls for a careful and delicate balancing act since you know that the whole team is going through a challenging external environment. The job of the CFO and the finance team is to facilitate matters. It called for making exceptions, actually making exceptions on a regular basis.

Lack of resources, the kind that established companies are used to, was another problem. In our case we acquired a running business with more than a 100 people and suddenly I realised I was the only person in finance, accounts, secretarial and the legal team!

So while I was looking at larger issues such as due diligence and valuation, I was also printing routine papers like resolution share certificates.

To me this was a massive challenge – inheriting a team of 100 people with very little manpower in the finance and accounts department.

This was especially so, since finance and accounts is one function which cannot stop even for a day.

In hindsight, it has been a fabulous learning experience. The satisfaction that one gets from overcoming tough challenges, is unparallelled.

Dealing with a variety of issues has not only made me a better finance professional but also helped me broaden my knowledge about allied fields and departments.

I also learnt that business continuity and earning the confidence of both team members and clients is essential to keep the business running while you initiate proper systems and processes in keeping with the company’s philosophy.

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here is an old adage in the world of finance: “profit is an opinion, cash is a fact.” I had always believed in this.

Yet the true meaning of the phrase really came home to me when we were a young company staring down the barrel at a possible liquidity crunch after a year of exponential growth. At Mindtree we believe liquidity is top priority followed by safety. Yield follows these two. In the first 18 months of our existence between August 1999 and March 2001 we witnessed huge growth. These were boom times for the dotcom industry and we raised USD 9.5 million for our start-up. In many ways, we were ‘cash rich.’

Then it happened. Unexpected growth put huge pressure on our capital which we had assumed to be more than enough just a year back. Over 80 per cent of our cost was run on zero credit – employee salaries and travel expenditure. Yet, most of our customers were given a long rope. They often paid us after 90 days. And as we struggled to meet this cash flow problem, the dotcom bubble burst. Suddenly we had more people than we needed and the latest infrastructure where big investments had been made, but no fresh growth. We knew we had to raise funds, and raise it fast. A decision was taken to re-structure the business and diversify into data warehousing and other areas. This though, again meant we needed fresh funds.

Luckily, we had stressed on enough liquidity to tide us over for at least two months. So when we approached banks and investors, we still had cash in hand. This meant, we were not desperate and could afford to meet more people, discuss matters calmly. I admit we were lucky, in the sense that funds came quickly and right on time. In fact we were saved by the bell! We

CRUNCH WISE Rostow says the key to financial safety is to diversify banking relationships and keep them all happy!

HAPPY DAYS The Mindtree CFO (R) is all smiles as he poses with a colleague, clicked at the turn of the millennium.

started raising fresh funds in April 2001. The money arrived in August. Barely a month later 9/11 happened and many funding sources froze all plans. Of course the goodwill that our founders and directors enjoyed and the brilliant networks they had, helped bring in the money. Still, I think the fact that we had a good track record and had liquid reserves, also aided our cause.

This period saw us face another big crisis. Our two main bankers till early 2001 were Global Trust Bank and BNP. In 2001 GTB collapsed and BNP, for reasons of their own, decided to change their strategy and be bankers only to the larger houses. Again, the fact that we had cash reserves convinced Deutsche Bank to give us a loan. We haven’t looked back since then. In 2001 we raised USD 14.5 million and kept a large chunk of it in reserve till 2007 when we did the IPO. The lessons I learnt from this experience are for a lifetime.

In the first five years, whatever money you raise, do not blow it up. Liquidity should be top priority for the CFO. Diversify your banking relationships. A large private bank, a smaller one and a PSU bank if possible. And keep all of them happy.

When you have money, everyone wants to give you money. Cultivate ‘foul weather friends’ instead – those who will aid you in need.

Nonetheless, you will need cash both during good and bad times. Get the money even when you do not need it.

Finally, I learnt that the world is tilted against small players. If you take a Rs 500 crore loan, the bank will send a top official to your office to discuss easier modes of repayment. But if it is a small matter of a crore, you might be visited by a ‘recovery agent’ instead!

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hat do you do when you get a call from one of your main bankers at 9.30 pm when you are sitting down for dinner, barely a week before you are launching a new facility for your company – informing you that the bank in question has just pulled the plug on you for no apparent reason? This is exactly what happened to us a few years back, when my then company was about to start a new facility.

I will not name the bank though I am tempted to do so. I remember that evening as clearly as if it was yesterday. Imagine my shock when this official told me the large loan they had sanctioned a few months earlier, ‘would not be happening.’ No explanation was given apart from “the moment things improve we will be happy to strengthen the relationship again.”

I was shocked. Didn’t they think about the economy and their own state of affairs when they gave us the loan?

Suddenly, at the eleventh hour, we found ourselves in the midst of a liquidity crunch.

Luckily for us, we had significant reserve funds and more importantly, we still had very good relations with some of our other large lenders, including those who we hadn’t approached for this particular venture. Admittedly these were tough times for the economy as a whole. But most of our other bankers behaved impeccably and agreed happily to reschedule loan repayment options. In fact they told us they were thankful to us because we were transparent, honest and regular in updating them about

BANK TO BANK When a key lender backed out, Ramu and his firm cemented a new relationship within a week

SAFETY FIRST A sports lover, Ramu believes in ‘protecting his castle’ by being upfront with bankers. “You earn respect,” he says.

any financial crunch, well in time.

When I look back, I am most proud of the fact that from a finance point of view, we had taken the right precautions to prepare ourselves for such tough times. Despite the shock, we fixed an appointment with a new lender, a large financial organisation, within the next few days. We met senior officials of that organisation and within a week, we had opened a new relationship. Imagine – a brand new relationship in the midst of a financial crisis!

Today I can laugh about what happened back in July 2009, but believe me we went through fire and hell during those weeks. I am thankful that we had a great track record and good relations with most of our lenders, because of which we came out unscathed in the end.

Needless to say, we haven’t gone back to the bank that ditched us. I know who is a fair weather friend now.

There were many other things that I learnt from the entire exercise. Firstly, I realised that during good times you need to choose your partners well. And during tough times, always communicate bad news immediately to bankers.

I also learnt that one needs to be prudent when facing a possible liquidity crunch. Your goose is cooked if you are on a weak footing when the crunch hits. The moral is clear: maintain a good relation with all your bankers, ensure you have a track record of being honest and transparent and finally – keep at least one large lender as a ‘super sub’ to fall back on if one of your first choice lenders disappoint you.

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eing in the business of fund management, any liquidity crunch affects our fund raising abilities and also the health of our portfolio companies.

Any mention of a liquidity crunch always reminds me of 2008 when the global financial system experienced its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. These were tough times, as institutional investors we were also witnessing a tight liquidity crunch. We knew from experience that during such tough months, institutions shy away from making long term commitments, specially to a risky asset class such as private equity. This means raising a new fund during a global meltdown becomes a nightmare.

Unfortunately, we were due to raise funds in a major way in 2008. As the crisis unfolded in the USA, we sensed that it would worsen and decided to raise the new fund immediately.

At a time, when most PE funds were restructuring their fund arrangements to deal with tax and regulatory uncertainties, we took a call, and decided, with the help and advice of seasoned tax consultants and lawyers, to retain the same fund structure, raise money from existing investors as well as new investors who had shown interest in the team in the past.

If you remember, 2007-08 was a time when it was fashionable to raise large funds of more

SMART STEPS Successfully warding off chances of a liquidity crunch in 2008 taught Vora the importance of planning for the future.

BE HAPPY Vora, an Art of Living practitioner, is remarkably calm in crises and loves a good laugh.

than $1 billion. We took a different route and decided to raise a smaller fund that would align interests better and not put pressure on the team to deploy the funds.

We closed the fund at one go and with commitments that were higher than what we planned. This was possible only because of the trust that we had built with our investors.

In hindsight, we took the right steps at precisely the right moment. The experience left a lasting impression on me and taught me three important lessons.

First, that one should always be proactive and try and anticipate what the immediate future may look like. It is easier said than done, but if you have your ears to the ground, you stand a better chance to act quickly and positively.

Secondly, I realised the need to strive for excellence in everything you do – good governance, communication, integrity and transparency take you a long way.

My third and most important learning was that to be successful one needs to build team work and relationships.

It is always ‘WE’ instead of ‘I’ and it is the trust that you build with investors, portfolio companies, consultants and everyone you come in contact with, help you move ahead and succeed.

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here is an allure about the first. The first of anything, be it the first car, the first house or the first kiss. With passing time, its attraction only grows stronger, as the memory fades out the unkind details and sharpens its desirable features making it personally more rewarding to recollect. In my professional life, acquisition and mergers are the most recent addition to the list of my firsts.

A decade earlier, I would have had nothing to discuss on this front. The first acquisition in which I was involved had a long ‘engagement’ period of eight months. We first acquired a minority stake in the business and after a positive ‘courtship’ concluded the transaction in July 2002. The company was Spectramind, the largest third party IT Enabled Services Company in the country.

Looking back, even with the benefit of hindsight, we could not have picked a better business for our first acquisition. At the turn of the new millennium, IT Enabled Services was the sunrise industry. In this new segment, Spectramind had all the ingredients of a leader – a topnotch leadership team, a marquee client list and a proven track record. In this nascent segment, our challenge was not just to identify the leader, but also to provide an attractive proposition to them, to join a larger family and realise their ambition, in a de-risked environment. We offered them a valuation, which made many heads turn. A frequent initial comment was ‘A good business. But, have you overpaid?’

RIGHT CHOICE Even in hindsight, Senapaty says Wipro couldn’t have picked a better business for their first acquisition

THE ROCK Senapaty has been with Wipro since inception, an association that has lasted over three decades

Our approach from day 1 was to go for superior quality and pay a fair market price. We believed, and we still believe, that a good acquisition is one in which everyone wins. The seller gets a fair price, the buyer gets quality assets and the management team finds a conductive environment for them to flourish. Our first acquisition showed us that our belief was well founded.

As we completed the five-year period post acquisition, we commissioned a study to evaluate it.

This evaluation gave us full marks for two out of the four criteria – meeting the financial targets used in valuation and the strategic objective of quick entry, cross selling to our existing customer base and improved competitive position.

On the other two criteria, the performance could not match up to our high aspirations. On the cost synergies front, we had overestimated the benefits unaware of the regulatory hurdles and unique requirements of the new business. Our post-merger efforts could also have been better.

Since then, we have acquired many more businesses not just in India, but all around the world.

Not just in the Information Technology domain, but also in consumer care and engineering, not just businesses, but also brands. As I look back, one question came up during our first acquisition for which we did not find an answer. Even to this day, I do not have an answer. Is there a better word to describe inorganic growth strategy? Acquisition seems too narrow to describe a multifaceted fusion of economic, human and social dimensions of businesses.

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aving completed 34 years in my corporate career, I had to really think very hard about my first M&A, since it was many many years ago. Over the last three decades as a CFO and CEO in several MNC and Indian corporations, I had the privilege of being associated, or closely involved with, nearly 50 or so M&A projects, big and small, domestic and cross-border, pure asset purchase as well as business acquisitions.

While at the early stages of my career, my M&A involvement was purely as an analyst in the support cast, my first M&A project as a leader came about during my tenure in PepsiCo – when as a CFO, I led several acquisitions of bottling companies, including the Dukes business. The first M&A I worked on in PepsiCo didn’t happen – but it left me with invaluable lessons for my future successes in the M&A arena.

Several things need to be considered during an M&A. The Target Fit : Target identification and determining the “target fit” is of utmost importance at the start of the process – not only does this bring about a clarity of purpose and alignment with the overall business strategy, but more importantly helps the M&A team to be on top of the whole process.

The 360 Degree Approach: A successful M&A requires a 360 degree approach encompassing all four dimensions – strategic fit, valuation, due diligence and negotiations and closing.

Importance of Value Creation: It is impretative that one focusses on value creation and not just integration. Far too often, we tend to overestimate the synergies and the resultant savings, which do not materialise. The synergy estimates tend to be over optimistic and are not in sync with reality.

Due Dilgence: This needs to be comprehensive. Many due diligence exercises tend to be

M&A EXPERT Ramasundar has played a key role in leading several M&A deals in his career spanning three decades

LIFE’S LESSONS His first M&A as CFO didn’t work out, but taught him valuable lessons

BEEN THERE DONE THAT People don’t plan to fail but fail to plan, says Ramasundar

financial analysis and evaluation of legal issues ( typically by accounting firms), but do not focus on business per se, in terms of industry, market share , growth potential etc.

Leave your ego at home: Very often, companies end up paying more because of the ‘have -cash-will-buy’ approach, especially in auction type M&A situations. As the old adage goes “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”, and hence there has to be a clear ‘walkaway’ price, at which point one has to have the courage to walk away from the deal.

Plan Well: People don’t plan to fail, but fail to plan. Nothing can be more accurate than this old saying in the context of an M&A. For any M&A to be successful, there has to be clear, time bound plan of integration with identified accountabilities, broken into sub-segments, such as 100 day plans. After the initial euphoria of closing out the M&A deal, most companies tend to forget the basic premise for the M&A and lose focus on the micro plans. Execution of the M&A, in my experience, is even more important than the exotic valuation and deal closing aspects.

These lessons are enduring in every situation and universal. I couldn’t close out the first M&A, because we decided to walk away at the final price being demanded. In hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened to my then organisation.

Despite enormous growth in merger activity over the last two decades, acquisitions that appear both financially and strategically sound on paper often disappoint the companies involved. Many times, the acquiring company fails to integrate the target firm smoothly and quickly enough, losing the chance to realise the expected synergies from the deal. In fact, more than half of all mergers and acquisitions fail due to poor integration.

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round the middle of this decade, having established a strong leadership position as a security solutions provider in India, we were looking to set up base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Initially we had a Joint Venture (JV) with a large Dubai-based security solutions firm. But thanks to the strict licensing policies in UAE, this project never really took off. In 2006 therefore, we were once again trying to establish a foothold in the UAE, and looking at the possibility of acquiring a local firm.

It was then that we heard about Unisafe, one of Dubai’s leading fire protection service providers. Our initial research told us they were a reputed firm with potential but had reported huge losses over the past few years. After a few meetings with the promoters though, we realised they had a great client network as well, something which would be an ideal starting point for us. Their big problem was a poor top management and promoters who had perhaps lost interest in the project. The asking price was not high, but the owners wanted their employees retained and client goodwill maintained. It was just what we were looking for – a perfect marriage.

Between January and July 2007, we made several trips to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, met the management and the employees and also did a thorough feasibility study about the demand for fire security services in the region.

As CFO, my major worry was the accounting process followed in the UAE. I was told accounting systems there had several grey areas. I was also concerned about the possibility of hidden liabilities. To minimise risk, I met officials of all banks that Unisafe worked with and made sure there were no bad loans. We also convinced the erstwhile promoters to retain some of their shares

GLOBAL DREAMS As CFO, Paliwal ensured there were no hidden liabilities in the firm they were acquiring.

DAYS GONE BY Paliwal, has led Zicom’s finance function for many years now, including at the time this photograph was taken.

and stay on as board members. This served two purposes – clients had a known face to deal with in the initial years and by keeping the erstwhile promoters on board, we negated any risk of hidden liabilities surfacing a few months later.

The next big challenge was getting a top management in place well before the deal was inked, so that the transition was smooth. K R Easwaran, an industry veteran and a senior colleague, was therefore appointed the managing director of the new-look Unisafe team.

In the end we were convinced that this was a win-win situation for us. Dubai and Abu Dhabi had (and still has) a massive demand for fire security solutions in its many homes, offices and malls. So the potential is huge. The company simply needed to be managed and guided well.

Our confidence and predictions were proved right within a year. We concluded the M&A deal in May 2007 and formally acquired a 49% share in Unisafe in July. At that point they had an outstanding order book of roughly 19.8 million AED (about US $5 million). By the end of the 2008-09 fiscal we had turned things around by generating revenues worth 65million AED (just under US$ 18 million). A four-fold growth in revenues in just over a year, is not a bad achievement by any means.

As Zicom moves to new areas as part of its business restructuring plans post the ZicomSchneider deal, I think my experience of 2007 stands me in good stead. There were two key lessons which I took home from the Unisafe M&A. First, that a CFO should ensure his or her company has genuine expertise and domain knowledge in the sector they hope to get into. Secondly before taking any concrete steps, always check market potential for the services in that country.

What is hugely in demand in India may not be so hot in another land.

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aving been an integral part of more than one M&A activity during this decade, I will take this opportunity to talk about what I have learnt from these experiences and therefore, what I feel any CFO should know, look out for and do when an acquisition or a merger looms large on the horizon. Any M&A activity is like a marriage.

There are certain facts about your spouse and in-laws that you know before you marry. The real challenge, however, comes when you stay together. Similarly when you acquire or buy a controlling stake in a company, you know their latest audited numbers and have a fair idea of people at the helm. What will make you stand out as a CFO however, is how you anticipate the undisclosed information, correctly assess the projected numbers and also have a practical idea about your capacity to achieve those numbers.

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With his acumen, the CFO is in the best position to commercially validate a deal and give his incisive inputs for negotiations. to an extent that deal the value can come down (if you are the buyer) or improve (if you are the seller). One word of caution though: Every CFO dreams of doing a successful M&A. It is almost the “thing to do”, the ultimate tool to achieve incremental fast-track growth for the organisation. It is of importance therefore, that the CFO takes every precaution to verify details before he tells the board or the management that the deal has his seal of approval. However, avoid the temptation of being the perpetual ‘naysayer’. At the end of the day we do not want to miss the deal just because a few papers were not readily available.

I still remember my first M&A. The deal was closed after a series of negotiations. Finally the day came to seal the deal. By the time lawyers on both sides agreed it was late evening.

It was Ganapathi immersion day in Mumbai.

But I was determined and chose to drive to the studio where the other party was waiting.

When I got stuck in a traffic snarl at central Mumbai, I parked my car and walked to the studio. Finally we executed the deal in a vanity van next to the studio.

F?G<:?#9@#HCAA?=#>9I;I HAPPY MARRIAGE An M&A is like a marriage, says Devarajan. And the deals he has been a part of, have all been ‘happy’ ones.

ENTERTAINED When not at work, the Reliance Mediaworld CFO enjoys chilling out.

FOOTLOOSE Being in the entertainment industry means Devarajan can afford to dress in smart casuals at times.

My biggest learning however, from the M&A deals I have been involved in is to always look out for hidden costs. This typically happens when one takes over a small company. Smaller, unlisted firms may sometimes operate differently but when a large entity comes into the picture it has to abide by the laws of the land and these come at a price. Minimum wages and taxes have to be paid, employee benefits given and legal matters looked into.

3H9#=??AI#<#>9=IBD;<=;J Talking about consultants, do we really need them? From my experience, a consultant need not necessarily be the first person you need to appoint when commencing an M&A activity.

Apart from the high costs involved, I feel CFOs understand their business well enough and are in a fantastic strategic position to view the synergy and the operational excellence one can achieve out of an M&A.

&?D<;C9=IHC8#7<=<E?7?=; Finally, once the deal is done and you start ‘living together’, relationship management is the key to success. Since CFOs are the first communicators, we have an important role: to handhold the relation to the next level and be a handson guy all through the transition period. The big challenge is to motivate the new partner and gradually acclimatise them to the new situation.

This is of great importance since my experience is that employees of the acquired firm often feel they are ‘outsiders’ in a new set up.

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ometimes, just sometimes, a bit of ignorance does you a world of good. In January 2006, the promoters of WNS decided to go public, or in other words float an IPO. We were told in January to jump into action so that we could launch the IPO in July. To cut a long story short, we successfully achieved our goal by launching the IPO in July in the New York Stock Exchange – the first Indian BPO to get listed abroad.

It was later that we learnt that the normal time taken for a first-in-an-industry IPO could be anything between 8 and 9 months, much more than the time we had to achieve our target. At that time however, we had no idea of such benchmarks and went about our task in all earnest, determined to succeed at all costs.

When WNS floated its IPO we, as I mentioned, became the first from India to list on NYSE. In that sense we were path breakers. The flip side to this though, was that there were no benchmarks to compare against.

For me, (I was then the Executive Vice President, Finance) the biggest challenge therefore was assisting the CFO in convincing potential investors about the viability of our plans, about the potential of a BPO to add value to any offshored project and finally about why they should invest in us.

The company’s senior management had a series of road shows where the business model of the BPO industry was explained along with its growth and profitability prospects. It took time, but it worked.

Those six months were also taxing for us per-

FIRST MOVERS WNS became the first BPO from India to get listed abroad, an experience Padalkar cherishes

LOOKING BACK Padalkar during her days at WNS. Nearly five years later, she is preparing for another IPO, in her current job

sonally. Often we lived in office with no weekends. The core team consisting of about four of us, along with some other colleagues, worked tirelessly for six months. Having dealt with the SEC, we felt equipped to handle any situation.

In hindsight, I think we, as a firm, could have planned it better and given ourselves more time. Also, because we had no previous experience about IPOs we realised much later that we had to now do a lot of analysis and projection rather than just presenting data. We would now be answerable to external investors and not just reporting within the family.

However, despite the odds it was an exhilarating experience and I remember the thrill that all of us felt when the IPO did so well on the opening day. We were fully subscribed and in fact the Green Shoe option was exercised as well, which meant we were oversubscribed.

I learnt many valuable lessons from the IPO experience. The value of strengthening your internal processes including corporate governance, well before you launch your IPO was drilled into me.

I realised that once you get listed you are accountable to your investors. So ‘no surprises’ should be the mantra. Be methodical and make sure you beat your business projection with a small margin. It may sound boring but responsibility to investors means you have to deliver time and again.

As a public company, the entire organisation has to work in tandem. All departments have to be well coordinated so that investors do not get contrasting messages.

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thought I knew what â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hard workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; meant!

Then, in mid-2009, we at Hathway decided to tap the market through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). It opened my eyes in more ways than one and changed my definition of hard work. I have to add, it was also one of the most professionally fulfilling experiences for me. The cable industry in India, compared to the USA and Europe, is at a nascent stage.

It was therefore natural for Hathway, being the dominant player, to contemplate tapping the market through an IPO to implement the process of digitalisation, develop our broadband infrastructure and reduce its high cost debts.

To observers an IPO is a lot about glitz and glamour. But behind the sheen, I learned about the tremendous amount of work and personal sacrifice that goes into a successful IPO. The process requires a core group of highly skilled professionals who must literally work aroundthe-clock for nearly a year. Therefore, one of the first steps to a successful IPO for me, was the formation of a seasoned, experienced team of professionals to make the IPO happen.

The selection of the investment bankers and the legal counsel was evaluated to ascertain the right level of experience, reputation and sophistication since they would play a key advisory role in the entire public offering process. My big challenge was to ensure that the team actively and enthusiastically engaged in the process.

The composition of the board of directors was the next important item in line with Clause 49 of the listing arrangement on Corporate Governance. Our board members finalised the independent directors well in time. The management team is critically important to the IPO process. A core team within the company was selected which comprised of, apart from our CEO, the best talents from the secretarial, legal, accounts and finance departments.

LEARNING CURVE The Hathway IPO made its CFO realise how much of hard work and personal sacrifice goes into an IPO

CAPTAIN COOL Mahadevan says the key to a smooth IPO is proper planning and getting a good team in place.

Once the team was in place, we established a plan for the IPO process with a basic timeline which consisted of compiling the financial information for the past five years, preparing the interim financial statement for the current period and getting the same audited. I made sure my team became an integral part of the whole process by regularly updating them on discussions I had with the core team. Apart from the financial data, we worked on the draft prospectus, created hype for the issue through domestic and international road shows, reviewed and answered comments and queries from the SEBI, - all of which was being worked out concurrently. It was very important for us to educate our teams that once public, the company would be operating in a fish tank, much more visible to outsiders.

As we dived head-first into the process, I needed to ensure the company complied with all the accounting standards mandated by Indian GAAP. Quarterly reporting with limited review by the auditors was to be an ongoing exercise.

The budgeting and forecasting process, general internal control systems and the internal and external reporting procedures were carefully reviewed to make certain that information was timely, accurate, complete and consistent. Furthermore, I wanted to make sure all our systems were scalable to handle growth.

We had a fully subscribed IPO in February 2010. Looking back I would say that the entire IPO process needs a very high level of involvement from the entire team, much more than most people think. A great IPO team and proper planning are the key to a smooth IPO. The most important takeaway for me however, was the realisation that anticipating and addressing issues in the IPO preparation phase itself will significantly increase the prospects for a successful IPO and ensure post-IPO readiness.

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ugust 12, 2010 was the grand pinnacle of MMT’s journey which started in 2000. This was the day, when following the NASDAQ listing ritual, the time bell rang for MMYT and we witnessed a record debut performance of our stock. It had been an exciting last few months and we couldn’t have asked for a better reward for all the work that went into first turning the company around to deliver business results and then going through a hugely intense IPO process. The IPO process started with a passionate debate to identify the most suitable listing venue. After considering all possible options, we decided to go in for a NASDAQ listing. Although regulatory, legal and compliance related overhead costs were there, it certainly seemed an appropriate decision, considering company valuation, investors’ interest and recognition for Make My Trip’s value proposition. US institutional investors and the US market in general have a greater understanding, appreciation and exposure to internet based businesses.

Having said that, a company’s track record and consistent performance over a period of time remains fundamental for the sustained stock performance in the long run.

Achieving this landmark was an outcome of our collective ability to combine vision and passion on the one hand and seamless planning and execution by the highly committed Project (Karma) Team on the other.

Thanks to the stellar performance by the core team as well as the external team members who worked on it, we managed to surprise the world by achieving our goal in a relatively short period of six months. It was truly a tough target but the

A GREAT TRIP Make My Trip ‘s decision to go for NASDAQ listing was a great decision, says Magow

TESTING TIMES Traversing ten cities in three nations over two weeks was a test of stamina and mental strength.

Karma Team lived up to the challenge and delivered with almost no disruptions to regular business related work.

So what really accounted for our success? I think there are three key things that went right for us.

Clarity of end goal: We were clear about the end goal in our minds, which helped us chalk out business strategies and execution plans accordingly, and advance implementation of the processes, systems and the corporate governance model.

Timing it right: We waited and chose to go public only when we believed we were ready fundamentally, in terms of size, scale, profitability and team.

Seamless planning and execution: In theory this was not rocket science but was challenging enough on the ground. Besides time management, which was not trivial in itself, managing professionals from different fields with strong views and sometimes big egos was by no means an easy task.

Roadshow, the last leg of the IPO, was a welcome break in terms of a role change and shifting gears to market our story. However, it was perhaps more strenuous than the earlier stages of the IPO process.

Around 90 face-to-face meetings in three different countries and 10 different cities over two weeks was a real test of physical stamina and mental strength.

The result however, made it all worthwhile.

We were happy seeing the overwhelming response from investors who believed in our story which we marketed with great passion.

Overall, I must say: it was a great Trip indeed!.

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popular policy in our company has been to offer a product, such as a pizza, free, if we do not deliver the product to a client on time. The importance of meeting deadlines can never be overstated but its true meaning came home to me during the time we were preparing for our IPO. While there are many ways to raise funds for an enterprise, raising of funds from the public through a public offering is a cherished dream for a CFO. It was in the middle of 2009 that I started working on this dream when I was given the opportunity to launch the IPO process at Jubilant FoodWorks Limited (earlier Domino’s Pizza India Limited).

I realise today that the exercise helped me become a better finance professional and cleared many misconceptions.

The journey started with the board appointing the Book Running Lead Manager (BRLM) and the legal counsel to the issue in July 2009. While the BRLM’s job was to sell the issue and raise money from investors, the legal counsel was assigned the task of preparing the “prospectus” and also to ensure that all legal matters were in compliance with SEBI guidelines. I had always thought the prospectus, being a sale document, would be created by an agency responsible for selling the issue. I was better informed now!

For me, the first challenge was to align with the statutory auditors who were to certify the restated accounts of the company for the last five years. These were testing times for my entire finance team. They had to not only ensure that normal work continued uninterrupted, but make certain that the redrafting of accounts took place within the stipulated time frame. When I look back, I feel proud that my team lived up to the challenge, delivering on time every time.

The speed at which things moved, to be honest, posed a big challenge, especially since I was

FOOD FOR THOUGHT Gupta says the IPO was a great learning experience for him and cleared some misconceptions as well.

JUBILANT! Memories of the opening bell ringing ceremony at BSE, the day the company went public, still brings a smile on Gupta’s face

the key joint coordinator for the whole process.

I spent many nights reviewing the agreements, the draft prospectus and coordinating all our efforts to make sure we met deadlines. I would be lying if I said I did not have anxious nights or felt depressed at times.

When I thought we had overcome one set of challenges, the next set landed on our lap.

Since Jubilant was the first company in the food service industry to get listed in India, we had no benchmarks to compare with in respect of company valuation and share price. With a lot of deliberation we came to the final issue price, agreeable to all.

But good things happen to those who work hard. On January 1, 2010, we received the final ‘in principle’ approval from SEBI. It was a perfect new year gift. Soon we were meeting key investors across India, Singapore and Hong Kong through road shows. We had one-to-one meetings with as many as 7 or 8 investors in a day. It sounds funny, but this was as much a test of our oratory skills as our financial acumen.

We also had meetings with analysts, brokers and the media in Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad. In the Ahmedabad meeting, the last of the series, our CEO and founders reposed their faith in my abilities and told me to lead the discussions. The rest, as they say, is history, We got listed on February 8, 2010.

I still remember the opening bell ringing ceremony at the Bombay Stock Exchange. While it was the culmination of all our efforts, we had anxious moments as we had no idea where our stock price would hit. We were relieved to see 30 per cent listing gains within 15 minutes of trading. The stock finally ended with about 60 per cent listing gains on Day 1. It was the beginning of a completely new phase for me and our company.

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f at first you don’t succeed then try, try again. Keeping this in mind, we at Persistent Systems relentlessly persisted with this mantra after our first application for an IPO ran into rough weather way back in 2007. We had come close to going public (in early 2008), when the market started stagnating and the Sensex dropped. A few months later in September 2008, we thought of reviving the plan, but before anything could really be fixed, the global financial crisis broke out with Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy. Things just went south thereafter and for nearly a year after ‘Black September’ there were no IPOs seen coming as market sentiment was severely affected due risk aversion.

However, we were already set and were working towards making our IPO dream come true.

Around October 2009, with the markets showing the first signs of life, we sensed it was time for us to strike. We had turned our business around by then and had shepherded our resources well.

India too was doing far better than most other economies.

In November 2009 we took the plunge, went to our Board and recommended that we go ahead with the IPO process. We received their approval in the first week of December with the formal appointment of bankers, lawyers and accountants. From then on, till the IPO, everything happened in a blur. We must have worked round the clock from the start of the process till April 2010, when we declared our first post IPO results.

We filed our Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) in record time: around 22 days after Board approval. There was no time to rest though, as we had to close the quarter (December 2009), go to the Board and immediately thereafter, prepare to reply to SEBI and prepare for the RHP. It was a mini-miracle, a result of tireless work by all teams, which got completed by the middle of February 2010.

ON THE BALL Ghonasgi says the roadshows were crucial in putting across Persistent’s unique story to investors

FAMILY MAN Ghonasgi, who has also worked with Wipro and Hexaware, relaxes with his wife and daughter during his Hexaware days.

In the meanwhile, all the paperwork needed by SEBI, interpretation of rules, and other semantics etc. were being addressed. The real big challenge for me arrived once we went through with the RHP. It was time to start our roadshows. We must have done two weeks of non-stop interaction with the media as well as potential investors. Our chief objective was getting across our special focus story: we were an Outsourced Product Development company, which was different from IT services.

We were the first company in our segment to go public, hence there were no real benchmarks, and the benchmark the market tended to apply to us was IT services. We had to be very strategic in our approach and on various occasions we had to take decisions on the spur of moment.

The roadshows were completed by the middle of March and with less than 48 hours to go, we were finally ready to have our IPO (March 17 to 19, 2010).

We had a successful IPO; amongst the most successful that was recorded in the last few years in the capital market, with an over-subscription of 93 times. We went public on April 6 2010, completing the entire process from Board meeting to IPO offering in around 100 days. It made all of us at Persistent proud when our IPO debuted well above our offer price (offer price: Rs 310 per share, debuted at Rs 400 on NSE) and ended the day on an even higher note.

In a nutshell, the IPO’s success was a team effort with various cross functional departments playing a significant role (and of course: the bankers, lawyers and auditors who worked tirelessly towards this goal). In the end, we were able to get the retail and institutional investors excited, and we left some money on the table.

We were also able to showcase our leadership position in the outsourced software product development services space, which was reflected in the resounding success of our IPO.

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A masterpiece, the ‘Gull-wing’ as it was popularly known since its launch in 1954, continues to remain a fantasy for many.

But, what has always set my pulse racing, is the roar of its 3.0 litre engine. Coupled with its striking performance, the Gull-wing continues to remain one of the most famous and instantly recognisable automobiles of its time. The low swung design, the subtle curves combined with the ‘signature wings’ make it appear nothing short of a beautiful bird in mid-flight. I was around 10-years-old when I first set my eyes on this automotive 80

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beauty and since then I have always wanted to own one or at least be associated with it.

By the time I had joined this job, the 300SL Gull-wing was phased out, and a successor was soon on its way - the SLS AMG. This 571-horsepower beauty tastefully updates the legendary 300 SL and has forever redefined the concept of automobiles for me. With Zero to 100 kmph in just 3.9 seconds and mesmerising sleek lines, the SLS AMG has to be driven to be believed.

It flawlessly takes forward the Gullwing heritage of design and performance.

Why drive a supercar when you can fly a SLS AMG? It gives you wings.

Uwe Jarosch has always been fascinated by the signature wings of the 300 SL Gull-wing

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The Seven series offers plenty of luxury and space for you to hold your team meetings in the car itself.

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Why I Love My Seven I HAVE been driving the new BMW 7 Series (730Ld) for the past three months and the experience has been exhilarating to say the least. It is the fifth generation of the seven series, a car that is completely revamped every seven years. Here are a few reasons why I love this super sedan.

Space

Luxury

The latest generation of the 7 Series is a little longer than the previous version - and all of this is used to increase space and comfort in the rear. After all, CFOs can do with some luxury and space at the rear. I can even have a team meeting! The bigger rear door and additional headroom, courtesy the redesigned C-pillar is another reason why I would call it my personal conference room.

The standard four-zone automatic air conditioning allows passengers in the rear to individually control the temperature. The seats in the rear are available with a massage function. Twelve massage bubbles and six rotation bubbles really help me relax. There are also two adjustable 9.2-inch LCDs in the rear for my entertainment.

Performance

Yes, this is as safe as a car can be. The safety gadgets installed ensure you would come out unscathed from any unfortunate incident. The crash activated headrests and airbags make me feel safe.

I drive 730Ld, known for its refined mill. Despite lesser horse power than the seven series petrol, I could still clock 0-100 in less than 8 seconds with a top speed of 245 kmph.

That is why I prefer driving it than being driven in it.

Safety

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Rohtang La: A sudden drop in the temperature, even in summer, can trigger winter-like conditions.

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The Gateway to Heaven

A memorable picture with my daughter and son on the road trip to Rohtang La

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MANY PEOPLE would not call it a ‘luxury’ holiday. But for me this one will always be special, that trip in a car, up the high mountain pass on the eastern Pir Pranjal range of the Himalayas connecting Kullu Valley with the Spiti Valley via the Rohtang Pass. Perhaps, it was the feeling of scaling the highest motorable road in the world (leading to Leh) or the sheer view of snow-capped peaks; Rohtang Pass has all the ingredients that make it a dramatic holiday.

The weather at Rohtang, the gateway to the Lahaul Valley, is harsh. A sudden drop in the temperature, even in summer, can trigger winter-like conditions. That’s the beauty of the place. I would take the liberty

of describing the pass as the gateway to heaven. After all it opens up to Lahaul Spiti, Pangi and Leh valley just as Zojila pass is a gateway to Ladakh. At Rohtang La one can get mesmerised by glaciers, peaks and the Chandra Tal Lake, which flows down to the Lahaul valley. Slightly to the left are the twin peaks of the Geypan.

One could make a stopover at Nehru Kund, famous for its natural spring that apparently cures ailments. Or stop for a photoop at the Rahla Fall enroute to Rohtang.

Or if you are really adventurous like me, visit the Rani Nala, a glacier, 40 kms from Manali from where you can only see snow around you – all year round.

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Skydiving, bungy jumping, white water rafting, jetboating, breathtaking helicopter flights New Zealand offer it all

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High Fives in Kiwi Land I HAVE a special place in my heart for New Zealand. It was one of the must-visit places I had in my bucket-list. Now, after traversing through the length and breadth of the country I must say it was totally worth the wait. Here are five places I visited and things I suggest you do when there!

Christchurch

Bay Watch

Give yourself two-three days to drive down the scenic south Island, cutting through mountains and past glaciers, tranquil lakes, raging rivers, lush rainforests and a magnificent coastline. Self driven rented cars are the most popular way to travel across the South Island.

It is like visiting the edge of the world. Gazing at the Pacific Ocean while standing on the white sand beaches of the Bay is a sight that is straight out of dreamland. I loved relaxing here on the sun-kissed beaches with a bottle of local Sauvignon Blanc watching dolphins play.

Auckland Auckland has a fabulous nightlife and is home to some of the country’s oldest vineyards. Must visit - Classic Comedy &Bar. 84

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The garden city is a replica of London. The business centre of New Zealand is probably the best place to live, work and do business.

Drive down South Island

Queenstown A trip to New Zealand isn’t complete without visiting the adventure capital of the world – Queenstown. From skydiving, bungy jumping, white water rafting and jetboating to breathtaking helicopter flights, Queenstown offers it all.

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A Multitasker at Work THERE IS a lot of buzz around various launches of Tablets and initially I was not sure whether a tablet computer could be a replacement for my notebook, PDA, iPod and Kindle.

However, after getting my hands on the iPad , I feel very excited about all the wonders it can do. The iPad is able to handle business and personal emails. Opening an attachment is as easy as it can get. Its touch screen can open and edit all office documents like Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the iWork application. I can connect to the internet through WiFi networks and it also has a 3G SIM slot (hopefully we should get a 3G SIM soon in India!). I have been ‘paperless’ now for a week and taking notes was never so much fun. It also connects to Citrix GoToMeeting and Cisco WebEx for me to have audio, web and video conferencing even when I am travelling. iBooks is one more experience which will blow your mind. Reading books and magazines is so easy with the touch experience of flipping pages and the HD screen resolution is second to none. In the US there are applications giving e-newspapers (like WSJ) and reading them is as good as the printed version except that with the iPad, you are contributing your bit to the environment. The only place where the iPad falls short is typing long text or emails where it is not as fast as a notebook and you do get tired typing on the touch screen after some time. However, overall it is an awesome device, well worth the investment.

“Courtesy the iPad I have been ‘paperless’ now for a week and taking notes was never so much fun,” says Ashar.

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At just 1.5 pounds and 0.5 inch thin, you can use the iPAD anywhere

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A Revolutionary Device

The high-resolution, 9.7inch LED-backlit IPS display on the iPad is remarkably crisp and vivid

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THERE IS nothing quite like the new iPad. It has changed the way I browse the Internet at home. Whether I am keeping in touch with friends or business contacts through Facebook or Linkedin, operating my online trading account, or just catching up with news and current affairs, the experi experience is novel. Also I am a big user of down downloads and mobile applications. At People Group, we run one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest mobile application stores. The experience of games and applications on the iPad is rich and I find myself spending a lot more time on the iPad. Though, I have not yet switched to reading books on the iPad yet â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I still like to read a book in the printed form.

Still, there is so much I can do with this gadget. The touch type helps me type ac-

curately and quickly, letting me compose and revert to mails quickly. What makes the overall experience all the more special is the brightness and clarity of the screen.

The high-resolution, 9.7-inch LED-backlit IPS display on the iPad is remarkably crisp and vivid. This makes it perfect for web browsing, watching movies, or viewing photos. Overall, it is slightly smaller than a magazine. At just 1.5 pounds and 0.5 inch thin, you can use it anywhere. I think more and more consumers will buy the iPad or similar devices in the near future. The USP of the gadget is it adapts itself to my Internet behaviour, instead of me working with a notebook or netbook where that gadget is optimised for business users first and then the social users.

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My Guide Book at Work IT IS quite amazing how certain books become your personal rulebook, something you can swear by. “Negotiation genius” is one such book which has always been my friend, philospoher and guide in difficult times. Every CFO has to make a few game changing decisions in his career – whether to strike a deal or not and if yes then at what price.

Negotiation is one skill every CFO must inculcate. Deepak Malhotra, an associate professor in the Negotiations, Organisations, and Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School and Max Bazerman, the Straus Professor at the same university, have penned the masterpiece, just in case you aren’t born with brilliant negotiation skills.

The book offers a toolkit of comprehensive principles, strategies, and tactics that help you execute each stage of the deal, from before the first offer is made to the final agreement. It turns out that a significant percentage of the million-dollar problems that our executive clients confront, have solutions that are contained in these initial chapters.

Because we develop the framework and the toolkit methodically, I recommend that you read Part I straight through in the order presented.

The most exciting part of the book for me is the psychology of a negotiation. As negotiators, we all make mistakes when preparing and executing negotiation strategy. After all, even seasoned dealmakers are human. The book builds on cutting edge research on the psychology of negotiation and decision-making. It distills theory into the practical tools you will need to avoid these costly mistakes, and to

The book has strengthened my resolve to execute sound negotiation strategy.

recognise and leverage mistakes when they are made by the other side.

I can never forget these lines from the book, “Genius in negotiation requires knowledge, understanding, and mindful practice. We can give you the first and help you with the second, but the third will be largely up to you.” Negotiation geniuses has strengthened my resolve to formulate and execute sound negotiation strategy.

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If You had a Day to Live

The book teaches us to live everyday to the fullest 88

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I HAVE no clue how I would react if I got to know that I am left with only 24 hours to live. And that is precicesly the plot of Jim Moret’s “The last day of my life”. While reading the book I realised it is not fear of the unknown but fear of the known that brings out the best in each one of us. In the book, the author asks himself some difficult questions - If you had 24 hours to live... should you finally forgive the one who hurt you the most and would you find the cour courage to apologise to the person you wronged?

Who would you remember as your life’s greatest love? Could you recognise what you are truly grateful for?

In order to find answers to these questions Moret starts living life, giving himself 24 hours to live! Trust me it is not a regular

life marked with depression, tragedy and self-doubt. Instead he grapples with one huge question: not whether to live but how to live.

The book teaches us to live every day to the fullest. The writing is inspirational to say the least, and anyone would come out mentally stronger after reading it. The best part about the book is the way it ends: that one day lived to its fullest makes the author determined to live further and he promises to live each day as if it were his last.

Reading the book made me realise how our only earning in a day is the connections we build with people and not the things we acquire. I would recommend this book not just to my peers and colleagues but to anyone who has ever struggled with self doubt.