Ep. 64: Rohit Thakkar - The Business Partner as a Co-Pilot

Contact Rohit Thakkar:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carohitthakkar/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Mitch: (00:00)


Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch
Roshong. And today we're going to hear about the popular topic of
business partnering. Adam spoke with Rohit Thakkar, finance
business partner at Adobe to define the role of a business
partner and explain how you can guide the business with strategic
decisions. So now let's head over and listen to the
conversation. 


 


Adam: (00:35)


So Rohit, how has the business partner's role become a navigator
or copilot for finance in the organization? 


 


Rohit: (00:43)


Yeah, it's a great question. So think about it this way, the
traditional roles within finance are changing and evolving and
one such role is that of an FP&A which is evolving, you know,
into a finance business partner profile as well, from just a
traditional FP&A a partner who was supposed to, you know, do
reporting for the business. Now we are looked upon and rightly so
should be the trusted partner for various business organizations
that we support to succeed in this profile I'm absolutely
convinced of being a friend. Now as they say a friend is not the
one who is, you know, has been the longest with you, but who can
be relied upon to keep various, you know, various teams grounded
in expectations, show the true and fair picture and who can
manage to tell the right business story and bring the right
business conversation into context. Navigated by definition. You
know, if you go to a dictionary you will find the definition
itself by means that who can direct the course of the ship by
using various instruments and devices. Now in a corporate setup,
that role, the ship becomes a corporate, the corporate becomes
the ship. The route is the direction we are heading to and
finding ways, on where we want to reach that instrument and
devices are, you know, the final business plans and the financial
plans that we are talking about. And we develop through the
course of, you know, our journey into the financial planning. Now
a critical role is that, you know, it entails a lot of work in
joining various dots within the organization. I'll give you an
example here, we undergo extensive process of planning exercise
that requires us to understand the overall market opportunity. It
actually starts with, you know, understanding that time of the
market. So, you know, time is nothing but total available market.
So we need to understand as finance business partner, what our
overall market opportunity is, you know, we need to have an
extensive analysis and understanding around how much penetration
do we have in those markets. Where do we stand?Where do we want
to go? What kind of a product fit that we have in all those
markets? What are customers? What kind of needs that we are
trying to address with our products? What is our competitive
landscape? Now that's where the actual financial planning
activity should start. From finance business partnership point of
view. Now it's easiest said in like two or three sentences, but
it really requires a lot of work, you know, do analysiskind of
get into the surveys and you know, get the survey results,
interpret those surveys. And you know, I tried to create customer
segmentation for your own products within the organization. So
the second thing, you know in this product, you know in this
roadmap is you know, understanding about the product roadmap is
very important. It's essential for the business partner to
understand the vision of the product managers and the business
unit. It is important at this time also to factor in what it will
take to realize the product goals during thisexercise of what we
call you know the planning exercise or the partnership. It
becomes important as next logical step to understand and work
upon our pricing and packaging. That is where a close
coordination is required.= with another dot in the matrix
organization like say, Adobe, to work very closely with the
product marketing management teams. We chart out our plans
aroundt how much unit, how much do we want to drive, how much are
we going to generate and achieve those targets R.ealistically.We
need to chalk out plans around how we want to market the product.
Suppose, you want to grow a product by say 40% in Iran. Now how
many units should expect to sell? What kind of efforts would be
required by say, you know, various other teams like web sales
teams.go to market team, phone teams, partnership teams, that we
will need to materialize and achieve those targets? Now joining
these dots across organization and ensuring that various parts of
organization understand their financial contribution
responsibilities and in turn leadership signing off, giving them
a priority to execute two plans is the most critical role as a
finance business partner. 


 


Adam: (05:37)


So you've really kind of shown how finance becomes that business
partner to the whole business, how it connects to each little
section and that kind of goes to guiding the whole business. So
what does that finance business partner's role when it comes to
developing something like KPIs? 


 


Rohit: (05:54)


Yeah, it's a fantastic question. You know, let me kind of, you
know, define what actually the KPI is. You know, KPIs by
definition are those indicators that organizations should choose
very wisely to reflect the actual performance. And they should be
forward-looking. Theyshould be something that should be
measurable, right? So, you know, it's super important for us to
not just get bogged down by the financial KPIs, but to understand
the relevance and the need of business KPIs. So business KPIs
ideally should be forward-looking, especially in a matrix
organization, you know, like, like Adobe. We tend to, you know,
drive over planning activities by data key metrics, DCI. So what
that stands for and it, you know, you can find that in six Sigma
literature, but wedefinitely practice that is who's going to be
the driver? Who is going to be there approver? Who's going to be
the contributor? and do we need to keep informed when it comes
to, you know, informing the reserves? So it becomes super
important for us in matrix organization to ensure that we are
able to derive responsibility assignment metrics as well from the
Nike exercise. Now rule of finance is to sit across the table,
bring folks from all across the organization and work to create
those KPIs, to understand the role for themselves in setting up
those business KPIs. Now we cannot just set up the
financial  KPIs and say that, you know, we can't be the
monitor and say that, okay, go get the results for us. We need to
be super practical and understand what kind of business KPIs we
need to drive to get to our financial KPIs. Financial KPIs, so
there's a circular reference if you have to, you know, think
about it this way. There is a circular reference between
financial KPIs and business KPIs. At one end you have financial
KPIs, which are kind of a derivative of the business KPIs and on
the other end, you know, think about that financial KPIs should
be influencing your business KPIs as well. So I'll give you an
example on one of the key financial forward-looking metrics that
we definitely look for in the subscription business. That's
the  ARR, theannualized recurring revenue. That's considered
to be much more forward looking compared to the revenue or the
top line. Now the role of finance business partner actually goes
beyond setting up this financial KPI. Think about it this way, it
is kind of similar to ...