Geetha Ramachandran is an FP&A change agent. She helped transform FP&A operations at GE Healthcare and Cummins (“When I walked into the FP&A at GE Healthcare, and I saw the close was eight days, my approach to things is usually I don’t take things just on face value or just because someone has been doing something a particular way).”
Geetha has since swapped supersized companies for startups, most recently leading FP&A at fast-growing businesses including SimpleTire. In her current role as Head of FP&A at New Jersey decor company, Triangle Home Fashions, she continues to propel FP&A as a “co-captain” in the business.
In this episode Geetha reveals:
- Her career journey from PwC auditor to equity research to GE Healthcare
- The CPA in India and why the pass rate is only 10%
- Key FP&A achievements including shrinking number of days of closing from 8 days and spending more time on value added activities
- How to better establish KPIs for departments aligned with business goals
- Presenting KPIs for improving warehouse efficiency at Triangle Home Fashions (pick and pack time, average utilization, inventory turnover, SKUS meeting minimal sales threshold)
- The challenges at multinational manufacturer, Cummins, integrating four companies and restructuring the finance team at a time of low morale
- Doing FP&A at company as fast as Simple Tire vs more mature business
- Her approach at Triangle Home with inventory levels purchased during COVID
- Lessons from two decades in business partnering
Follow Geetha Ramachandran https://www.linkedin.com/in/geetharamachandran201/
Glenn Hopper:
Hello and welcome to FP&A Today. I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Today we have the pleasure of hosting Geetha Ramachandran , a seasoned finance director with over 15 years of strategic expertise in financial planning and analysis. Geetha has worked with Fortune 500 companies like Cummins and General Electric and Medium to large private equity backed firms across various industries, including manufacturing, e-commerce, healthcare, and distribution. In her current role as director of FP&At a PE-backed firm, Geetha oversees key financial functions, including FP&A treasury and analytics. Throughout her career, she has demonstrated a remarkable ability to drive profitability and performance through business, partnering and collaboration with cross-functional teams, she’s known for challenging the status quo, proactively identifying risks and opportunities, providing strategic recommendations, and leading high performance finance teams. She has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Superstar Award and Commercial Excellence Support Award from General Electric, a nomination for the most valued person award from Cummins, and the President’s Award from M&G Health within six months of joining the organization, Geetha holds a chartered accountant degree and a master’s degree in finance. Beyond her professional accomplishments, she is a trained Indian classical music singer and enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking, biking, and traveling with her family. She lives with her family in New Jersey. Geetha, welcome to the show.
Geetha Ramachandran:
Thank you, Glenn. Thank you for having me on the show.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, really looking forward to talking today. I gave the intro there, but maybe could you take us through your career journey and highlight some of the, maybe some of the key milestones that have shaped your approach to finance and strategic planning.
Geetha Ramachandran:
I started my professional journey at PwC India as an auditor after completing the chartered accountancy degree in India. I was there for about a year, and then quickly realized that finance is where my heart is. So that’s what brought me to the US to pursue a master’s degree in finance. And then after graduation, I joined a boutique firm as an equity research analyst. I would say this was a great starting point in my career because as you know, in equity research, we are looking at a company not only from a financial perspective, but also studying the company from a business perspective, regulatory perspective, capital structure, and then benchmarking the company against so many other companies and studying the whole industry. So this initial role, role as an equity research analyst help my understanding of the business dynamics and how everything comes together.
After staying five years in this role, I joined GE Healthcare, leading commercial finance in an fp a role, and I was supporting multiple business segments. I stayed with GE for a couple of years and then joined Cummins, another Fortune 500 company again, leading multiple business segments in a commercial finance role across multiple LLCs, I would say, between these two organizations which are large and have a complex landscape. I had a great exposure to the operational intricacies because I worked very closely with operations. So at Cummins, there were 55 service branches throughout the region which I was supporting. And similarly at ge, we had 31 pharmacies across the nation, and I used to work very closely with operations Six Sigma and all the other teams to solve actual business problems. From an FP&A standpoint since my days at Cummins, I have been heading in medium to large sized organizations backed by PE firms.
And again, in addition to the traditional FP&A, I have taken on a wide gamut of responsibilities to support strategic planning, be it pricing strategy or establishing KPIs for different departments, heading analytics and trying to automate a lot of reports helping with ERP implementation and more. The one thing I would say you know, that is common thread across all of these is that I strongly believe FP&Ais the co-pilot or the co-captain who works very closely with the business unit heads, and has the joint responsibility for steering the organizational ship.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that point. I want to delve into that a little more, but actually, you and I were talking before the show, and I don’t think I realized the, the chartered management accountant in India. That is, so, you know, we have the CPA and and and CFA exams here, but we were talking about it, it’s a very complex exam. Could you tell me a little bit about that? ’cause I think for our US audience and for maybe, maybe outside of India that like we may not, a lot of people may not realize how, how much goes into that
Geetha Ramachandran:
In the CPA degree or the exam that we have in the US we typically have four papers, right? In India, we accomplish the chartered accountancy degree over a period of three years. And we have level one, level two, and level three, and it gets more intense as we go to level three. And it covers everything from cost management to financial planning, to hardcore accountancy, risk management, auditing, taxation and more. And the interesting thing is, in order to successfully pass the exam, you have to also complete a three-year internship program with large organizations typically like PWC or KPMG, and go through those rotations so that you have exposure to the different areas. So you get the both the practical experience and the theoretical experience. And, and another fun fact I would tell you is that the passing rate is less than 10%. So, so many people apply for it, and it’s considered one of the hardest exams in India.
Glenn Hopper:
Wow. And that’s, you know, I think that’s such a great approach. And actually the, you know, the, the pass rate alone to get through it, I think that is one of the best signals that you’re ready for a, an advanced role in FP&A that could be out there by, by having that. And I think about, I came up through hardcore FP&A finance, and I thought, you know, I, I, I thought for a while about doing the CFA exam, but I thought, yeah, but I’m mostly in, in corporate finance now. And I already had an MBA, and then I went and got a master’s in finance, which is fine and helpful, but I always felt like the accounting part of the job was something that I was, I had to learn on the go, and I was not an expert. I was a finance guy, not an accounting person.
But to be able to combine those at an early stage in your career, that gives you the full rounded picture of, you know, not just the reporting, but also the forecasting and all that. So that was very interesting. And I, that was a fact I didn’t know before before we talked, so I thought it’d be great to share that with our audience who may not have known that the detail there. You talked a little bit about what drew you to the field of finance, but, you know, going through the hard work to get where, where you are, where you were when you started your career and now being more seasoned in your career, how has your passion changed over the years and, and sort of as you’ve applied in, worked in different areas?
Geetha Ramachandran:
Like I mentioned, I started in accounting, you know, after graduation with the master’s degree in finance, between equity research and fp and a, I was involved in a lot of analytical work and hardcore modeling. Accounting really has helped me have that solid foundation, and I think it’s a key to do your job well from an FP&A standpoint as well. But over the years I have completely learned that FP&Ais all about moving the needle and making that change. You have the power to influence business decisions. I would say, for example you know, that that has been my focus and that’s why I between GE Healthcare and Cummins, for example, some of my key milestones has been shrinking the number of days of closing from eight days to four days so that we can spend more time on value added activities. That’s one example, but there are many more. Like I, I have been instrumental in turning around branches, which were experiencing a negative operating margin at Cummins, looking at them in a detailed fashion and collaborating and partnering with the different teams to actually steer the ship again in the right direction. It’s all about how you can add value to the business as an FP&Aperson. The analytical models and the accounting foundation is a great starting point, but that’s, you know, after completing the, those, the real work begins.
Glenn Hopper:
I love the way you say that because I always think, you know, I, I’ve done fractional CFO work for a lot of years, and it, nine times out of 10 when I come into a company, the first thing we have to do is clean up their chart of accounts, get that foundation right, of the accounting, because you can’t do, you know, you have to have the accounting foundation before you can do good forecasting. You have to identify, you know, you have to be sure you’re measuring appropriately and have everything in the right accounts. And then once you do that, mm-hmm, you can, you can build from that. So I definitely see that. But I think that what we’re seeing, and I, the role has evolved over the years, so that now you are, you’re not just looking in the rear view mirrors. It, it’s, it’s table, it’s beyond table stakes.
It’s the very basic is you have to have the accounting set up, but now where we’re adding value to the business is being able to take that data and do analytics on it, and do forecasts and, and drive it forward. And I think that that’s been, that’s how the role has evolved since the stone ages when I, when I first started in it. But I and now I think I’m seeing more and more in FP&A, it’s not just about financial metrics, it’s about you know, sort of company-wide metrics and what you’re measuring. So thinking about where you are now, so you’re at a kind of a mid-sized PE backed firm right now, right? And are you with, with your KPIs and metrics, are you, I know you’re primarily looking at financial, but do you own other metrics kind of across the company too, or, you know, what, what are you looking at and, and how do you use those metrics to, as you said, to kind of help drive the financial performance of a company?
Geetha Ramachandran:
So financial metrics is just one piece of the puzzle, right? I have established KPIs in my current organization as well as my past organizations for almost every single department. And before we delve into the specifics I just want to mention two or three important points related to KPI for the listeners. One thing is that, you know, before we start establishing KPIs for different departments, it’s very important to align those KPIs with the strategic goals of the organization. We should know where, you know, the c-suite and the board members want to take the organization and then align these KPIs to their vision. So that’s one thing. The second thing I would say is that a lot of organizations like to have a long list of KPIs, but my approach is slightly different. I like to be laser focused on, say, three to five problems that that particular department is facing, and help turn around and fix those problems and, you know, understand the business drivers underlying those KPIs.
So I prefer less, do more when it comes to KPIs. And then the third thing I would say is, again, based on my past experience, there have been a lot of times you establish these KPIs, and then halfway through the year you know, you, because you haven’t gotten the team’s buy-in, or because everybody’s not agreed on the methodology, the definition, and all the other things that goes into it, people just use that as an excuse to walk away from the KPIs. So it’s very important to get the buy-in of the different stakeholders and, you know, emphasize reemphasize over communicate when it comes to you know, establishing the KPIs. And now getting into specific examples. So for example, in my current organization, we are an omnichannel e-commerce company which has both manufacturing and distribution aspects. So right now we are trying to improve our warehouse efficiency.
And some of the KPIs that I’ve established for the warehouses that we have across the state is measuring them on average pick and pack time, how much is the warehouse utilization? How are you fulfilling the orders, both in terms of accuracy as well as the time you take, obviously the inventory turnover, stockout rates. So that’s one area. We have the product design team, and we have more than 15,000 SKUs, and we have also been introducing a lot of new SKUs. So the big question for us as an organization is, are these SKUs meeting the minimum sales threshold within a year? How are we doing on new SKUs versus existing SKUs? What is the market acceptance rate? How, how are we doing in terms of design to production rate and so on, being in the e-commerce business as one of the channels. We also focus on customer metrics like LTV, cac ROAS because we spend a lot on promotions. So these are different metrics you know, and again, we focus on three to five metrics for each department and then track them, measure them, and more importantly, try to move that needle on the KPI, so that they help the financial metrics ultimately. And we are not just reflecting backwards, but being proactive.
Glenn Hopper:
I love your approach to that because I think, you know, a few years ago when businesses started to really get a handle on some of this data, and then dashboarding became a lot easier, whether it’s Tableau or Power BI or whatever tool you’re using for the dashboarding, just because you can put it in a dashboard doesn’t mean you should, but I think people got just kind of blown away with how cool these dashboards were. And you could build ’em straight in your ERP, you could use other software to do it. So then it becomes like, when you see, when you’re driving down the interstate and you see billboard billboards, you just see so much information that you’re not taking it in. Exactly. But by getting to those three to five, if you identify the ones that are not just, we’re, these are our numbers we’re reporting, but this is also a lever we can pull to actually impact something in the business.
Other nice to have stuff like, I’m not, I’m not saying don’t track it, but if you’re walking into your management meeting with you know, 90 a, a 90 page deck of metrics, people tune out after a while. But if you, you’ve got your key metrics that you’re focused on that can tell people, here’s where you act, and this is the impact it’s gonna have, because you have the historical data to show. Yep. You know, look, if we reduce our SKUs for these non-performing ones, we’re we’re gonna be able to reduce our inventory costs. You can see a tangible result from it. So that’s, that’s great advice and well stated. You also talked about reducing close time, and it’s, that’s another thing that I always saw in coming into a client. Like, it seems like I’d always show up at a client, and it was a typical 30 day close, and I thought, and this is, you know, SMB space, so a 30 day close, it’s like, well, that is almost worthless.
If you’re not getting your financials until 30 days after the month ends, you’re, you know, you’re just getting a report card and there’s nothing you can do on it at that point. So the importance now really is more towards that super fast close which increases the pressure on when you have to have everything in. And I know there’s tools out there that are supposed to accelerate close and, and all that talk about what’s the, I guess a two part question here. What do, what do you see as the tangible benefit, the impact of going from eight days to four days in a close, and then trying to get people that much more efficient? What were some of the challenges you faced when you were, when you were working on reducing that close timeline?
Geetha Ramachandran:
So I would say that when I walked into the FP&A at GE Healthcare, and I saw that, you know, the close was eight days, my approach to things is usually I don’t take things just on face value or just because someone has been doing something a particular way, I would first learn how they have done it, but it doesn’t mean I have to do things the same way. So just because GE has been doing it as an eight day close for maybe months or years, doesn’t mean we take it, you know, just the same way. So I brought a, you know, fresh set of eyes to look at the way we were doing close, and realized that there’s a lot of opportunity to simplify this process, streamline, automate, and even eliminate some of these processes. You know we also, when I also went deeper, I realized that we don’t have to wait till, you know, day zero and day one to start working on the close process.
A lot of these can be front loaded and then we can true up at the end of the quarter. So you know, those are some of the areas like reclass, entry, standard journal entries. You know, those are some of the things which I worked on with the team to shrink the days. But I think the biggest win was not these, we had so many different systems at GE. So we had Cognos from a reporting standpoint, Hyperion from a global reporting standpoint, Citrix, and then SAP as the ledger, these systems were not talking to each other. So a big chunk of time was spent by the FPA team just reconciling the numbers between the systems. And that took a good two to three days because they would never, invariably never tally. So at the product level, if you have to match the price, the volume as an example, then they would spend hours you know, looking at the discrepancies, deep diving, trying to match it, and going to different departments to get all of that squared away.
So I created a business case listing all the implications of spending this long hours, how much time we are losing from you know, know, reporting upwards and the lost value the manner was lost, all of that. And after creating the business case you know, once it was approved, we kicked off this project in with it with controllership and involving other teams to see if there’s opportunity to automate you know, the data between the systems and make them talk to each other so that we could spend more time on value added post-close activities, rather than just spending all our time on close eight days is a loss. You lost almost like one third of your month just closing the books. So I kicked off the project, and then over a period of eight months, we after many iterations, we were able to successfully make the systems talk to each other with the help IT and controllership teams.
And that was huge win. This recognized as best business practice once that happened, because we were finishing our close in four days. To answer your second question on how that so two ways, one, internally it helped our organization, again, we ha we are able to re reflect quickly on how we have performed the past month. And then we are able to forecast, you know, the next few months for the year and again, focus our attention on where the problem areas are for the business and add value. That’s one. And second, from a corporate standpoint, they were very happy because obviously they take our reports and consolidate and take it to the next level, right? For earnings for, from investors standpoint and all of that. So it was a win-win for both of us. I would say
Glenn Hopper:
There’s a theme here that you and I talked about before the show too. All the work that you had to do in order to shorten that close time. We deal with this a lot, especially when you’re coming into a new situation. And if, whether it’s a turnaround or just, you know, making the department better there’s work that needs to be done outside of finance, and it’s work that we’re not necessarily initially <laugh> early in our career trained for. So working with IT and doing automations. But then when you were at Cummins, you had another challenge that’s a little bit outside of the box of maybe what, you know, when you’re taking your finance and accounting courses in college that you’re not necessarily prepared for this, but you had to when you came into Cummins, you worked on integrating four companies and restructuring the team. Walk me a little bit through that process and if you’d done anything be like that before and kind of what were some of the challenges you, you had to overcome there? So,
Geetha Ramachandran:
Interestingly this was a very complex situation just to give the some backgrounds for the audience. We were four different LLCs that merged together to form one large region. And each of these LLCs had four different business segments, and we were all in the same businesses and were acquired by Cummins to form the larger east region. And I had been promoted to lead the four FP&A teams across the four LLCs. The buzzword in the organization was standardization. As soon as we, you know, came together and the merger happened, the two main challenges that I faced in an FP&A leadership role was one, strong resistance from the teams and push back for the change. The processes were easy to deal with, the people were the hardest part for me to deal with in terms of change management.
And the second thing I would say that given the merger situation and also to add fuel to the fire, the, the four LLCs and the teams were geographically at different locations. So the morale was really low, and there was a lot of uncertainty on what’s gonna happen next, whether we are gonna lose our jobs, you know, who’s gonna get which piece of the puzzle, all of that. The way I would tackle the situation was, first thing I did was to spend time with each of the FP&A teams and establish that strong relationship. So start having both face-to-face interactions by meeting them offsite as well as lot of virtual meetings where we would spend time just talking about you know, their best business practices. I would spend the time to learn about their strength, their weaknesses, what has worked for them, and getting to even know them personally.
So all of that, you know, started slowly help me in building those blocks. The second thing I would say is that post merger in order to achieve that organizational goal of standardization, I had a vision that each LLC should no longer be responsible for just FP&A for their LLC. But the way I wanted to reorganize the team was that each FP&A team will be responsible for one business unit across the four LLCs. So that made sense, but it was very important for me to get the buy-in, of the fp a teams. And so to get, have a stake in the ground and increase the accountability, I let them come together, brainstorm and decide on which business units they want to own. So that way they feel they have you know, a voice at the table, they can decide amongst themselves which business unit they wanted to own.
That worked very well. They went back and forth and finally decided on the business units. And then over the next six to eight months, there was a lot of interaction between the four teams because they had to understand the nuances and how things were done differently in other LLCs, how we can map all of them in one way, how we can do budgeting forecasting in one way, what’s different between LLCA versus B versus C. And so on the third thing, I would say that this was not the only changes that was happening within the organization. Our reporting format had changed. We had new BI tools introduced. So I took the lead in some of those areas created working files, let the team went through a lot of training with them to bring them all on the same page and help us move from point A to point B in the roadmap.
And the last issue, which was low morale. I worked a lot on building team bonding exercises, bringing the team to offsite meetings so that we could have lunches together, together, spend time together, getting to know each other at least over the next six to eight months. I would say you know, the process was smoothened at the end of eight months. It was initially hard, but all of this really helped our team. And then the fact that each team now owned one business unit helped them, again, focus in that area over the next two years, and they all became strong business partners supporting the VP operations for their businesses. And we as a team became a high performing team.
Glenn Hopper:
I guess the theme here to me is, you know, I I think about in your career, the stuff you’ve done, and I think those of us who’ve been doing FP&A for a while encounter stuff like this where what you had to do there with restructuring the teams, that’s not intuitive information. You have to have, you know, sort of a strategic mindset around it. And I think about a lot of us when we go into finance and accounting, like if I wanted to go into management consulting and you know, look at these kind of restructurings, I would’ve focused my career on that, and that would be what I do. But it’s almost <laugh>, you, you have to still do, you have to still do all the FP&A tasks, but at the same time, you’re restructuring this team, you’re working with it for automations, you’re rolling out new tools and everything.
So it’s, again, this is when you get to the real world, you study one thing, but then you have to actually go and, and be a manager and, and, and do these things. And I know, you know, some people come up through the MBA ranks and maybe they’ve taken some courses on it, but even then, that’s not your focus every day. So thinking about these additional challenges, whether it’s working with IT and restructuring and building the teams and dealing with change management, and it’s, I think about the kind of personalities who go into finance and accounting, normally, we’re a lot more comfortable with getting into our spreadsheets, building models, making journal entries, you know, all that kind of stuff, versus having to deal with change management and people that are oppositional to whatever plan you have in place and trying to get buy-in and everything. So for, I’m thinking particularly about our, our younger listeners who maybe haven’t experienced something like this before. What kind of advice would you have to these early career managers? Maybe it’s someone when they’ve just moved into their first management role, moved from being an individual contributor up to managing a team and their, and their task with non-financial projects like this. What, what kind of advice would you have for them?
Geetha Ramachandran:
That’s an interesting question, Glen. Yeah, I started somewhere as well, right? And I would say that the first thing is we have to be open to new challenges, like you said, in finance. We love getting into the spreadsheets and working within our teams. We are very comfortable with that. But the moment we have to collaborate with different teams then people start getting uncomfortable. So I would say have that growth mindset where you’re willing to get out of your comfort zone and take on these challenges because you never know what doors they will open. And secondly, I would say as you go up the hierarchy or the ladder, this is going to become the norm. So this is only setting the stage for that and prepare you for that. That’s one. The second thing I would say is that being in finance, I like to take a calculated risk.
So the way I would approach these projects is I would always seek mentorship. So I will always look for someone, you know, in these kind of projects who’s extremely experienced. He may not be a, a person directly involved in this particular activity or project, but someone in the organization with whom you can brainstorm ideas in a non formal setting or, you know and then you can get constructive feedback. You can ask questions. So it’s very important to seek that mentorship and feedback, because sometimes they empower you, they push you beyond your limits. So that has helped me. And the third thing I would say is business partnering and collaborating. So the moment you’re comfortable with different teams, then the, it feels like a larger finance organization. You are comfortable sitting with the operations team or say the Six Sigma team as much as you are comfortable sitting and talking with finance folks. And the way I would say you can start off is start having lunches with people in the operations team, or set up time to understand what they do, how they do, what are their pain points. All of that has really helped me be comfortable across board you know, especially those initial days when I was learning to take up these non-finance projects.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, and I think that’s the maybe one of the biggest benefits that’s come out of the whole business partnering thing, because that’s, you know, that’s a, a recent idea of, of the business partnering where the finance folks are actually embedded within the organization. And it, you can foster those relationships more, and you start to understand it. I think, again, finance used to be, we were kind of in this ivory tower of we’re just reporting the numbers. It doesn’t matter what the widgets are, we’re, you know, we’ll, we’re the bean counter or whatever. We’ll, we’ll report on anything. But when you are embedded with the business units, you start to understand their needs and their, you know, what they desire and, and then start to see kind of holistically how it all fits together to drive that financial performance. So, and the side benefit is you get those relationships. So when you are trying to restructure and do something like this, it’s easier to get the buy-in from the other business units.
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You’ve been manufacturing, e-commerce, healthcare, distribution had a lot of different roles in those. And obviously each of those industries has, they have their own KPIs and metrics that are important to them, but would you say there’s some commonality, regardless of which industry you’re in, of, of what kind of things you’re looking at and FP&A, or are, is it more about the differences just because the, the nature of the businesses are, are so different?
Geetha Ramachandran:
Great question, Glen. Just so this often comes up, even during my interviews, I have worked across four industries, so it often comes up in interviews. What do you bring to this industry or how will you bring your skills from another industry for the viewers? I would say that at the heart of it, FP&A is the same no matter which industry, I don’t care whether you are selling drugs or whether you’re selling home goods. As long as I understand the business, the industry, the drivers, your pain points, and have that strategic thinking, the analytical skillset I’m able to collaborate with the different teams, have that technical proficiency, all of that, you can help any organization. Having said that, if you look at it from a different lens, there are a lot of differences, I would say, when you go from one industry to another.
Just to give examples from my own background, at GE Healthcare, they were heavily focused on R&D expenditure and I would say regulatory compliance, linking the financial outcomes to patient outcomes and satisfaction. At Cummins on the other hand, being in distribution business, we were focused on logistics customer satisfaction, benchmarking all these 55 branches against each other and looking for operational efficiencies in an e-commerce business, like I mentioned, it’s very centric around the focused around the customers. LTV, you know, retail is very fast moving. So these organizations have their nuances and industries also have different things that we have to learn. But I would still say that there are skillset that is easily transferable from one industry to another. For someone looking to jump from one industry to another, where they can start off is learning about the different industries, networking with people on LinkedIn as well as offline, and asking them what keeps them going in that particular industry, what’s exciting, what are the changes, what are the, you know, who are the leaders and laggers in that industry? Understanding the landscape is the key. And then the remaining skillset, like I mentioned, communication skills, all of those go a long way and will be helpful to be success in any industry.
Glenn Hopper:
And thinking of that, I know, you know, you’ve been kind of a, the fast growing e-commerce area to these other businesses. I want to talk briefly about doing FP&A in a company that’s growing as fast as when you were at Simple Tire. Like the being in the startup world. When you’re at a successful startup and you’re starting to see that hockey stick where you’re, you feel like you’re constantly playing catch up, like that environment is a lot different than, say you’re in a more mature business that maybe is, is much later round of funding, or maybe they’re PE backed at that point, where it’s more about just squeezing out marginal efficiencies. But trying to do fp a when you’re on that super fast growth trajectory is is is, it’s like that old saying of, you know, building the airplane while you’re flying. So I maybe a little bit of insights into how it was when you were running FP&A there,
Geetha Ramachandran:
To give you some background, this organization was growing really fast, and in two years they had doubled their sales and we were forecasting they’re gonna quadruple their sales over the next couple of years. Because during Covid time, a lot of people were ordering everything online. So it really helped their e-commerce business takeoff. And with that growth that we were projecting, you know, from my standpoint it was very important to focus on the tools, the technology and the talent necessary to support the scaling of the organization and the pace at which they were growing. And obviously everybody was focused on the top line, but there was a couple of areas where I wanted to focus. So I’ll give you examples in terms of technology. I created, again, business cases where they were asking, management was asking a lot of questions.
How can we expand into a new market? How can we introduce these new products because they are growing, but we didn’t have the tools in place to support and give them those real time data analysis. So we, I started investing in tools like Power BI and also made a recommendation for Adaptive Insights. And once we put both of these tools in place, it was a game changer for us because we were able to get real time data that enabled us to then optimize our decisions, be it shipping, optimizing our shipping strategy our rebates collecting rebates from manufacturers and dealers by being on top of our game after collecting the real time data and doing analysis on it to adaptive insights where I was able to get cashflow on a daily basis. So cash forecasting is obviously the key for these organizations.
And maintaining that liquidity, paying those debt obligations, all of that was very critical for us. And especially with the growth trajectory, it was important for me to have that visibility to cash almost every day so that we would know where we would want to invest the money. Are we doing okay? So the technology and the talent to support the technology was the key. Another area I would say from a risk standpoint was that, again, the focus was on the top line, but no one was vetting the new customers that were coming to our company. So this increased our risk for, you know, customers not paying us on time, hurting the cash conversion cycle, and some of them even going bankrupt. So I worked on creating robust credit rating for private companies, internal rating, and then relied on external vendors for credit ratings for public companies.
And then my team would periodically review them, and then we would decide whether we have to extend credit or claw back on it, depending on their payment history and financial health. So it was very important to invest in these different areas as an example, to support the growing organization. The third thing I would say was obviously in, in more mature organizations, we create one budget and we stick to it. But here, things were growing so fast that I would be doomed if I just stuck to one base case scenario. So scenario planning was you know, something I had introduced within the organization. And again, we made use of these tools, like Adaptive Insights and Power BI to create those different scenarios. What if we invest here? What if we grow here? All those different scenarios so that at least we know that we have a bandwidth to play, you know, within that range.
Glenn Hopper:
And another theme that I see, and you, and you led the show with it, is that kinds of stuff that you’re talking about delivering is not just, it’s so far beyond just reporting, it goes back to what are the metrics we’re measuring? Where is something where we can actually have an impact? So in what you’re talking about there, it’s, it’s financial planning and analysis, but it’s the, it’s help helping see how FP&A is way more than just reporting that it’s actually driving the business, as you said. And I think another area when you were at triangle Home Fashions, this is one that seems like it can be, I mean, there, there’s so much cash tied up into inventory and inventory management is so difficult because it’s just the, the logistics and all the moving pieces and understanding, you know, your MinMax inventory levels and all that. Yeah. So I think that there’s, there’s such a, if you can get the reporting right on that, you can show a really good return on investment of your time into being able to, you know, keep inventory levels where they need to be, and also avoid being choked on it. Could you walk us through what your approach was at Triangle and how you were able to drive the inventory levels and, and make it more efficient and reduce costs there?
Geetha Ramachandran:
So when I joined this organization you know, they had purchased a lot of inventory during the covid time because again, there was an increased sales to support that. We had purchased a lot of inventory and we were on the verge of having excess inventory in all our warehouses from a short term perspective. What I did was work with my team to create a robust promotion models after factoring various things, be it, it eight stock versus non eight stock discontinued SKUs versus current SKUs, new SKUs versus existing SKUs, fast moving, slow moving inventory, all of those factors. And then we, we came up with recommendations for where we can give heavy promotions to get rid of some of the slow moving stock. We also, as an organization did auction sale and, you know, various other things like bundling the products to get rid of the stock.
However, I realized that this is an issue, we, which is something we could even face repeatedly, right, going forward. So the two things that I did was, one, bringing the different teams together sales marketing supply chain, all of them together so that they are not making decisions in silos. It’s very important to communicate the demand forecast on time to supply chain so that they can then decide on how much inventory we need to have, how much we need to stock, all of that. So having that periodic rhythm and then communicating and everybody being on the same page was the key. Another thing that I saw was that all of the analysis that we were doing was in Excel. So across 15,000 SKUs, we are deciding how much optimum inventory to have everything was in Excel. So that can only take you so far.
So again, investing in technology is the key. There are so many demand forecasting tools out there today, and one we liked was SAP Integrated Business Planning tool. Because what the tool can do for you is, is magical. It can take your historical sales factor in market conditions as well as seasonality and then come up with a demand forecast. And then you can even build scenarios and change some of the variables if you want, and then ultimately come up with an optimized level of inventory that you need at the skew level. So we invested in a tool almost a year ago, and we have seen the benefits of the tool. Since then data is available real time. We have not faced stockout issues or excess inventory issues as much as we used to fa face back in the day. So a combination of these have really helped. And the last thing I would say is building the relationship with suppliers is also something we have been working on, because that is the key to ensure that we are able to get those flexible schedules, delivery schedules. So all of this has really helped us.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. That’s great. And it’s, again, it’s not just reporting, it is having a real impact on the business. So that’s great. And I, because I, I really like your, your approach to FP&A and your diverse experience. I think I, I kind of wanna just jump into a little bit on leadership and personal development and, and pick your brain a little bit on what advice and guidance you might have for people starting out in FP&A. And so I’m thinking about what are the critical skills that you believe are essential for success in finance and accounting? And I’m, I’m thinking lasering in on roles that involve strategic planning and organizational leadership.
Geetha Ramachandran:
I would say that technical skills is a given, and almost everybody starts off having an MBA degree or a CPA degree, or, you know, some form and kind of combination of those. But on top of that, I think if I were to focus on a couple of skills, one would be problem solving skills. We have to go with the mindset of not just turning in a report and being in that, being like a hamster on the wheel, just churn in reports and giving us, giving the budget, giving the forecast, but understand how we can actually solve business problems, work with the different teams, and I would say give your inputs, but also, you know, make things happen. So move the needle, come up with actionable insights when you come up with reports, not just turn in, you know, the financials. So that’s one piece. The second thing I would say is that, you know, the thing that I learned over the years is business partnering is extremely important to be successful in FP&A, we have to work with different teams learn a lot about the business.
So business acumen and business partnering go hand in hand. First you learn about the business, and then you contribute and help the different teams and work very closely with them. You have to be spending more time with the operations team than with the IT team, all those cross-functional teams so that we actually know what’s going on in the business and can add value to the business. And then apart from this, there’s a whole lot of skillset that we need like negotiation skills leadership skills, agility, adaptability being technologically proficient given the number of tools we have at our disposal. So yeah, the whole gamut of soft skills along with the hard skills
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>. Yeah, and it’s, and, and it, and it’s a lot, but it, you know, again, I love your approach to it, and I’m thinking to move beyond just your basic finance and accounting and, and reporting and all that, like getting that mindset early. And I don’t know you know, what your approach has been or how you sort of got yourself on this trajectory. Is it do, is there, if you look back, is there someone in your career that maybe was influenced you early on? Or it could even be, you know, it could be a mentor or a book or an experience you had that really kind of opened your eyes to the, the path forward in FP&A.
Geetha Ramachandran:
Actually, my interest in finance and business stories goes a long way back. My father was an avid follower of the stock market and used to read newspapers a lot. I spent a lot of time reading newspapers, watch the television, and we used to even discuss, you know, some of the business stories, you know, break it down. And he used to explain the financial jargon to me. So that sparked my curiosity. I was always interested in knowing how different organizations work, what does borrowing mean, what does lending mean and all that, that, that is long back. And then later on, once I got into equity research and FP&A, I was always fascinated by how different companies operate. What is it that, you know, differentiates great companies from good companies how do small companies grow? So that curiosity is very essential, and you need to have that fire in your belly to excel and actually help the organization by adding value. We all have that basic financial skills. That’s what it takes to, you know, be a successful fp and a professional, I would say.
Glenn Hopper:
Gotcha. and I feel like we could go on forever, but I’m, I’m looking at our time here and this, it has just flung by, but so I want to, I wanna jump ahead a little bit here. I’m a, an AI geek, so normally I love to dive in on AI, but we’ll, we’ll save that for an another episode. But I do wonder, because you are using so many technologies out there, and because I know you guys are in the early stages of researching how you might be able to incorporate AI, but what do you, if you’re reading the tea leaves out there, what do you see as the biggest kind of opportunities and challenges for finance professionals and for the industry over, like, say the next five to 10 years? And it could be, you know, we know AI is gonna be a disruptor. We don’t know how there’s other technologies out there. It could be the accounting shortage worldwide, right Now that there’s fewer accountants coming in, what do you kind of see the future of our profession looking like? In the short term?
Geetha Ramachandran:
AI has obviously been a major disruptor. And before ai we had big data and tools like Power BI and Tableau that provided us great volume of data. However, as finance professionals we have to spend a lot of time separating the weeds from the plants and then the plants from the flowers. From an AI standpoint, I would say that it’s great. It’s for finance teams where we are now seeing streamlined processes like order to cash or accounts payable. Everything can be automated end to end, at least, you know, these are taken care of. Now we are seeing AI helping us you know, even in areas like pricing strategies, scenario planning, demand forecasting. So we are having more tools at our disposal which is going to help all the FP&A teams and organizations become more efficient more accurate when it comes to forecasting and is helping them go up the value chain.
So you, again, are focus more on the strategy, the planning rather than being caught up with the day-to-day activities. So these are some of the wins I would say, looking at AI I would say from challenge perspective even though it’s being talked about so much not all medium to small firms have adopted them. So we are still in the research change management, again, introduction of a new tool like AI upskilling to learn how to understand these tools is the key. Those are some of the, the challenges. And in addition to those, cost is another big challenge. Data security and governance are, these are some of the areas I see as challenges, at least in the initial few years until it’s widely adopted by many organizations.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, great points. What I really am seeing is an SMB space. So I think, you know, if you’re an enterprise level company, you’re gonna have the resources, you’ve got a dev shop already, you’re gonna be building stuff. But I really think for SMBs, you know, for the vast majority of businesses out there, we are kind of gonna be at the mercy of waiting for the, the software providers to integrate it into what they’re doing. We’re not gonna build out our own AI shop. And I think that that’s driving a lot of the kind of fear of missing out that people have of how are we gonna do this? We don’t, I, I don’t know, AI from IT you know, <laugh>, it’s, yes. So it’s, it is gonna be a challenge, but I do expect we’re gonna start seeing more and more generative AI sort of integrated into the software that we already use, and hopefully that makes it more accessible to, to a lot of businesses. We’d like to talk a few minutes about the personal side of things, and I know that you, outside of work, you’re a, you’re a, a trained Indian, classical music singer, and I know that you’re really big on outdoor activities, and with the working, I, I can feel your pain with working in PE backed companies, <laugh>, it’s it’s a very busy place to be. How do you find time to balance your, your hobbies and your work and be able to sort of, with everything you’re, you’re doing, have that work life balance?
Geetha Ramachandran:
So, Glen so I’m, I not only have these hobbies, I’m also a working mother, so I divide my four quadrants of life as a work my family health and then my hobbies and social life. And I think in the short term you know, anyone would be okay if this equilibrium is disturbed because there are times we have to, you know, give more to work or more to our health or family. But in the long run, I try to maintain that sanity so that, you know, I can achieve success in both professional and personal life. And what’s sticked for me so far is the flexibility. You know, so I try to associate myself with organizations which are willing to offer flexibility, and that is more and more the case post covid. So there are oftentimes where I would step out at four o’clock and would not be available till eight, but I will jump in from eight o’clock to 11 o’clock to do whatever is necessary.
As long as you can give the core hours, I don’t think anybody cares. So the second thing I would say is that I have been fortunate to have really good bosses, and I’ve learned the hard way that you have to choose your boss and not your job. So I take a lot of time during the interviews to ask a lot of questions about the company culture, the management style, and also research offline before taking up the job offer and will join an organization only if their values align with my thinking. And the third thing I would say is having an outcome oriented approach. So both for my teams as well as while managing upwards, I strongly believe that it doesn’t matter whether you are in moon or Mars, as long as you can deliver the results. And that’s the same philosophy I have for my team. And you know, I, when I talk to my boss as well, I tell him that, you know, no matter where I am, I will deliver, but I should not be counted for the hours I’m clocking. So, you know, a combination of all of this, you know, has really helped me, you know, maintain that balance. And I’m still here in FP&A so far, <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that’s great. And I loved what you brought up about the quadrants and, you know, you’re gonna get a little out of balance at times, and that’s understandable. If, if it’s during budget season, it’s gonna be shifting towards work. If you have a big event in your, in your family and in your children’s lives, it’s gonna shift ideally to the family at that point. And I always think of it as a pendulum, you know, you’ve got, and, and because I’m, I’m simple. I only have the the two ends of mine, but it’s just, here’s work and here’s here’s your home life and you know, it’s gonna swing in either direction, but you’re looking to have it, you know, towards the middle. And if it swings really far one way, you’ve gotta make up for it by swinging, swinging the other way. And it’s, it’s, it’s a constant balance, but it sounds like you’ve done a great job with it. So
Geetha Ramachandran:
I do feel at times that I’m walking that tight rope without any net at the bottom. <Laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. <Laugh>, it’s time for our favorite question of the show. And that is, what is your favorite Excel function and why
Geetha Ramachandran:
It’s hard to pinpoint one, but I love pivot tables. Soe especially given the volume of data we are dealing with in order to quickly slice the data and, you know, zone in on the area that you wanna focus that’s been my favorite. And of course the functions, different functions of yeah excel with long formulas to get what you wanna, but I mean, I, I don’t know if this will be the trend going forward. We have so many new tools coming our way, so we might not have to write those long queries and formulas in the future.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. Very curious to say, you know, copilot and Excel is supposed to be just around the corner. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there and then, but to your earlier point, if you’re spending less time writing those long formulas and building these models, then you can spend more time actually adding the value. So I, I see that as, as fun as, you know, those of us who grew up doing stuff in Excel. Yes. And as much as we love to show off our really cool models with our slicers and whatever else we put in them, it’s gonna be great when we can actually focus more on the outcomes rather than the method that we had to do to get there. So, great, great points. Finally how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about the work that you do?
Geetha Ramachandran:
I’m active on LinkedIn, so that’s the best way to reach me and would love to connect with the listeners and the viewers. And I have my email address on my LinkedIn page as well. If somebody wants to shoot me a note, always happy to help and exchange any ideas on FP&A.
Glenn Hopper:
Okay. Well that wraps up this week’s episode of FP&A Today, and a big thank you to Geetha Ramachandran for joining us and sharing her extensive expertise and fp and a gha. Your insights on career progression, industry specific strategies and leveraging technology and finance were incredibly valuable. And I wanna thank you again for being on the show.
Geetha Ramachandran:
Thank you so much, Glen. It was my pleasure.
