Asif Masani has an inner belief that has guided his entire career. “Whatever I learn something, I don’t feel good if I don’t share it”.
This ethos has taken Asif on a journey to become an FP&A leader and author. He has just published his first book about FP&A, hit nearly 60,000 followers on LinkedIn and his daily advice has almost single handedly opened the eyes of Indian finance people to FP&A as a career. Unsurprisingly, his education-first focus has led him to lead FP&A (APAC and India) at e-learning company Coursera (which facilitates 7000 courses, and which set up its FP&A team three years ago).
For such a stalwart of FP&A only nine years ago Asif admits “I had never heard about FP&A before” until he landed on a role as financial analyst at Citi. He has since had FP&A roles at companies including Pfizer, and Great Learning.
In this episode Asif talks to Paul Barnhurst about his career journey:
- From audit at EY to FP&A
- How a struggle to find a job led him to become a top FP&A influencer
- The top advice for finance people to build their own online brand
- How he embarked on writing his new book, All About FP&A, a 220 page guide for those entering the profession
- How FP&A operates at e-learning provider Coursera a 4k employee company offering 7000 courses
- The importance of special projects driving value in FP&A at Coursera
- Core metrics which he tracks closely
- The evolution of FP&A in India
- The outsourcing of finance functions to Indian companies
- The biggest trend in FP&A in 2023
Watch the full show on YouTube
Follow Asif Masani on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
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Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today. I am your aka, the FP&A Guy, and you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP n a. We’ll provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything FP&A. I am thrilled to welcome today’s guest on the show, Asif Masani, welcome to the show.
Asif Masani:
Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you so much for having me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, we’re really excited to have you. So just let me give a little bit of a background about Asif and then I’ll give him an opportunity to tell a little bit more about himself. He comes to us from Mubai. He’s an author. He recently published a book about FP&A. We’ll have him talk about that later. He’s a chartered accountant. His day job is a manager at Coursera. He also has a part-time LinkedIn creator, author, trainer, many other things, and he’s had various different FP&A roles over his career. So Asif, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
Asif Masani:
Sure. Paul first of all, thank you so much for again having me, and I was waiting for you to have me on the show, I think for the last couple of months, and finally we made it happen. So thank you so much.
Paul Barnhurst:
We’re excited to have you. I’m really glad we get to have you on the show.
Asif Masani:
Amazing. So I started my career not in FP&A, so like most finance folks I started in audit. I spent about three years as an intern working with EY in Audit, and I really enjoyed it for the first couple of years while I was learning a lot working with different clients learning about different industries. But as time passed when I completed three years, three and a half years, I realized that I should try something new. So that’s the time when I wanted to switch. And I didn’t know about FP&A at that time, and I wanted to go into either valuation or investment banking. So I did a certification on financial modeling and started applying for jobs and valuation and investment banking but I could not get into it. And by coincidence, I got an interview with Citibank, which was an FP&A profile.
I’d never heard about FP&A before doing that interview. And I made it through that interview and then started there as an analyst. Worked there for about five years. 2019, I left Citi as an FP&A manager. Took a break for about a year, year and a half to do a couple of other ventures I wanted to work on. And then again, came back into FP&A, I think around 2020 after Covid. I worked with one pharmaceutical company called Pfizer. And right now I’m working with an EdTech company, which is Coursera. I lead the FP&A function for India in APAC at Coursera.
Paul Barnhurst:
Okay, great. Thanks for a little bit about your background, and I agree with you, it’s pretty typical for someone to start in accounting or auditing, sometimes investment banking or consulting. But most people don’t start their career right out of college in FP&A. Some do, but I agree. More common path is often that accounting background. So next question I have here for you. You have over 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. I know you recently hit that number. Congratulations. You also run your own YouTube channel. I think you have over 5,000 subscribers there as well as you have a website, FP&A professionals. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how you got started in creating content? How’d that come about?
Asif Masani:
I was in between jobs around in 2021 and I was finding it difficult to get my next role. So that’s a time I thought I should maybe build my personal brand on LinkedIn, start writing about FP&A on LinkedIn so that people, when they search me on Google or they search me on LinkedIn, they can know, okay, this person knows what he’s talking about, he’s applying for a role, he, he’s good at FP&A. So that was the primary reason I wanted to have a good personal brand visibility among employers. So that was a reason I started writing in 2021, I think year and a half back. But as I did that more, I developed more as a hobby and a passion. And I think by end of 2021 I knew that okay, I wanted to make this more bigger part of my life.
So that’s how I got started on LinkedIn. And once this happened I think it was about one year back December, 2021, somebody reached out to me on LinkedIn asking me to do a webinar for CS students were just newly qualified and they wanted to know about FP&A. And I did that webinar. That person who recorded the webinar uploaded it on YouTube. That YouTube video didn’t get a lot of traction initially in the first two, three months it was less than a hundred views. But somewhere around the three months mark, after it was uploaded it suddenly got like 3000, 4,000 views. And then people started reaching out to me on YouTube as well, on commenting on that video. So that’s the time I started creating more content on YouTube. It was very difficult to create both content for LinkedIn and YouTube along with my day job.
So what I figured out the best way would be to get content from other experts. So I started then interviewing. I started my own “All about FP&A” series, I think eight months back with Carl as being the first guest, Carl Seidman. And then I, I’ve continued that doing once a month. So I don’t do a lot of content on YouTube these days, especially in the last eight months. But I do a lot of interviews just like this one. So that makes it a little bit easier. I don’t have to create content, we just have to curate just plan an episode, and other people are actually helping me create that content.
Paul Barnhurst:
Makes a lot of sense.
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What advice would you offer to someone who wants to create content? Say they wanted to get started creating content?
Asif Masani:
I would maybe tell them a couple of things. First one would be to identify your audience and pick up one topic or one subject, which you can go deep in. So that’ll help you focus on one area. So that is definitely one. And second would be do it consistently. Don’t stop after two months or three months, do it consistently for at least six months and you are creating good content. You’ll definitely see the results.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thanks. Now that’s very good advice. Similar to what I give. Be consistent, find your voice, know what you want to talk about. I recommend generally niche down and find your area, like you said, your focus. So those are all good pieces of advice. And I kind of laughed when you mentioned, you know, got started, it was right, helping build your brand, find a job. I mean, when I got on LinkedIn, that’s really where it came from, was find a job and kind of build over time and somewhere along the line I found I liked it and kept building. So I think we have similar stories there. Also, similar with FP&A. I didn’t know what it is when I took an fp and a role, I don’t think most people do, coming out of college becoming a little more popular, and I know you’re doing a lot to help people kind of learn that FP&A is a good career path. And I think this is a perfect transition to your book that you recently published called All About FP . Can you talk a little bit, couple things. One, what is the book? I know it’s about FP&A, but kind of what’s the focus? Is it for people starting their career, senior people? What’s the focus of the book and what was the impetus for writing a book?
Asif Masani:
The reason for writing the book was exactly the point that we discussed. So a lot of people, at least in my country which is India, they don’t even know about FP&A, just like I didn’t know seven years, eight years back about FP&A. So a lot of people even don’t know that FP&A exists as a career. So there are job prescriptions which say finance manager maybe finance specialists or something like that. But no, it’s still very new, at least in where I am, where I belong. So a lot of people, if I ask, say 10 people who graduated in finance, maybe seven people out of 10 may not even know what FP&A is. So that is one of the biggest reasons for me writing the book. So at least people know what FP&A, and they have another option that they can aim for, maybe not immediately, but maybe at some point in their career. So that was one of the reasons. Second reason was also, I always wanted to write a book. This was there for the last, I think five years. And once I had some content on LinkedIn I figured out this might be the book I can write. So I already have hundred pages of content. If I can focus on this and I can maybe make it a book, which is 200 pages 220 pages.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Ma makes a lot of sense that you’d already done all that content. You’d always wanted to write a book. So why not write one about FP&A. Can you talk a little bit about first, how it’s been received, how so, how have sales gone, how have people asked about it? Just kind of what’s been the general feedback since you launched it? I mean, know I’ve heard some good things, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.
Asif Masani:
So it’s a very niche topic, so it’s not going to sell thousands or 10 thousands of copies. But because I think because of the people that are connected to me on LinkedIn, people who receive my content, people who’ve been receiving and reading my content for over the last one and a half year especially, it was received very well by them. I remember when we did a pre-launch in October, in the first day itself, I think sold about, I think in the first week we sold about a hundred copies.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great.
So people were waiting for it to release. And since then after that, I have been sell, it is been selling like five to six copies a day. So we must have crossed 300 400 right now.
No, those are good numbers. And right now it’s currently only available in India, is that right? Or is it available anywhere?
Asif Masani:
So the physical version, the hard cover version, or the paperback version I should call it, it’s available only in India. The Kindle version was just launched about three weeks back. So that should be available in most countries where you have Amazon access.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. Okay, great. So the Kindle version is available basically everywhere that you have Kindle and Amazon. So I’m curious, what was the hardest part about writing the book?
The hardest part would be to develop that habit of writing every day. So even though I had some content with me it still had to be refined. It still had to be outlined and put together in a way that it comes together as a book. So for even after having some bit of content I had to write about for maybe 30 minutes a day for around two and a half, three months between I think April to June that period. So I think the hardest part was the first 10 to 15 days where I had to force myself. I had to block my calendar for an hour every day, and I had to force myself to write 400 or 500 words. I think that was the hardest part, the first 10, 15 days, once I got over the first 15 days. So it became a lot easier.
And the second hardest part was the proofreading because, so once the book got ready I sent it to the editor. The editor came back with correcting all the grammar, and mistakes, correcting all, making the sentences look better. So once it came back it was the budgeting period. So it was around that August and September mid time. And the edited version was with me, I think first week of September. And I could not find time to read it. I could not find time to proofread it until I think end of September, first week of October, October because of the workload at office. And it was a budgeting season at that time. So finding time to proofread it, and I had to do the proofreading at least three times just to make sure that everything is okay. So reading, doing that proofreading three times was very challenging just because it was very hectic at work as well at that time.
Yeah, I know how difficult budget season could be, so I can imagine how hard it was to try to balance budget season and writing a book at the same time. Not an easy task by any means. So I admire you for sticking with it because that’s a lot of work. So congratulations on that. And as you mentioned, anyone who’s interested in the book, check it out. The Kindle versions available, go to Amazon just look it up all about FP&A, and you can find it there. So next question on the book, what would you say is the kind of key takeaway you hope people get from the book? If there is one thing you hope the readers take away from it, what would that be?
Asif Masani:
So let me talk about the audience first. So the audience of the book is people who are just starting out in FP&A or people who are in finance and don’t know about FP&A. So it’s for people to learn the initial concepts about FP&A. So that’s the book tagline as well. It’s called Getting Started with your FP&A journey. So the book is targeted towards them also, people who are slightly experienced maybe one or two years, but they need to comprehend it better. So just in case they want to appear for an interview, although they need know a little bit about FP&A, but they cannot comprehend it or they cannot articulate it in an interview. So I think a lot of people also buy the book for that reason. So it’s for beginners in opinion, one or two key messages. The book shares is on data and budgeting. So it covers the budgeting process. So one of the key chapters in the book is on the budget on creating a budget. So the key focus is how to create a budget from scratch for different areas right, from revenues to all the expenses.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. I mean, I think it’s definitely a book that’s needed in the marketplace, no question. I mean, I get asked from a lot of people how to make that transition into FP&A. You know, think of college students. Most of them don’t know what FP&A is. I have a friend here locally that teaches, he created a course for MBA students, a master’s course to introduce them to FP A, and he teaches it for the MBA program here at the local university. And I think it’s great because very few universities have those type of courses. I think a lot of people come out, I mean, almost everybody knows, okay, there’s corporate finance, there’s treasury, there’s accounting, there’s audit, there’s investment banking. But like you said, most people don’t even know there’s FP&A coming out of college. If you ask 10 people that just finished their chartered accountant, Hey, do you want to do FP&A? Most of them would be like, what is FP&A?
Asif Masani:
Yep.
Paul Barnhurst:
Right. So I think you definitely hit on a very important subject that people need. So speaking about FP&A, why are you so passionate about FP&A? What do you love about it and what keeps you working in FP&A?
Asif Masani
I strongly believe in finance. FP &A is one of the most happening profiles. So if you are somebody with a personality trait that doesn’t want to follow the rules, if you don’t want to do this same stuff in terms of the accounting cycle or be it following the checkbox approach of auditing or maybe being abreast with the taxation laws, which keeps changing. So if you are working in finance and if you’re not interested in some of those traditional roles that I just talked about, I think FP&A is a great option. And it was for me as well. It allowed me to use my skills, which I already had from accounting and audit, and also it allowed me to be a little more creative, which was not possible in those roles. So that’s the reason I like FP&A.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love your point about the creative, and I like to joke, I heard this on a podcast, I think once, and it said, if an accountant gets creative, this is the difference between FP&A and accountant. If an accountant gets creative, they go to jail. If an fp n a professional gets creative, they get promoted. And obviously not true tongue in cheek, but it’s that whole idea, right? FP&A is very creative, it’s very forward looking. Lots of assumptions where accounting is backwards looking, very structured, very procedural, as is auditing, as is tax. Yes, there are some creativity, sure. But it’s very different that FP&A, there’s a lot of understanding business and partnering and things that I enjoy that if you really enjoy those type of things in the business and the commercial, it’s a great place to be. For some people, it’s not right. If accounting and the structure and the procedure and that, you know, really tying everything out, then it’s a great place. It works for you. FP&A is not for everybody for sure, but I I’m like you. I really enjoy FP&A.
Asif Masani:
I have friends in auditing who are still in auditing and they enjoy what they do, and I completely respect that. So they are actually very passionate about beat, audit or taxation, and that’s completely fine. It depends on what you want to do in life.
Paul Barnhurst:
A hundred percent agree. I have a friend, an accountant I worked with, and I was trying to hire an FP&A analyst, and I asked him if he’s interested. He’s like, no, I already did that. That’s way too subjective and political. He’s like, I prefer accounting. I know what the numbers need to be. I know the answers. Don’t want to deal with basically making up numbers was his way of putting it. That’s what it felt like him for FP&A. I’m like, all right, well then you’re in the right spot. You stay where you’re at and I’ll stay over here in FP&A because you’re a great partner. I love working with you. Yeah, it was kind of funny. So exactly like you said, find your passion and stay there. So let’s talk a little bit about your day job now. We’ve talked quite a bit about the content creation, your book. Maybe talk to us a little bit about FP&A structure at Coursera, a little bit about how it’s structured and what your role is there.
Asif Masani:
Sure I’d love to cover that. So Coursera is a growing company. So it started about 11 years back. So we just celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. So it’s not a startup, not a very new organization, but also it’s not very established. It’s not been there for decades. It’s a little bit in between. So you do have a good FP&A team set up there, which has been there for about three and a half years. And also because it’s still relatively new in the whole scheme of things, three years is not a long time if you consider a business or consider a organization. So how it is set up is we have three business units. One is the B2C, which is the online platform where people can go and purchase courses and certificates. So they can do the course and certificates for free, but if they need to download the certificate they need to pay.
So that is the first business. The second business is enterprise side, where we sell enterprise licenses to big companies, which they can use to train their employees. And the third is online degrees which is tying up with premier institutes along the globe, the top most institutes in every different region and bringing degrees to students to different parts of the world. So those are the three business units. So it’s exactly set up that way. We have a small team working on each of these three business segments. And then there is a regional team. So there’s a team for each of the regions, and I am a part of that regional team. So there’s one person looking at India and APAC, that’s me. There’s another person looking at the EMEA region and there’s a regional team of four to five people. So there’s a detailed the regional teams, and then there is a corporate team which consolidates everything. So it’s about the 2022 people team, about 10 people in business teams like business aligned teams, about five, three to four people in regional teams about three to four people in corporate team. And then there are a couple of folks who are specialized in the budgeting tool. They are the admin for the tool that we use.
Paul Barnhurst:
That all resonates with me, very much similar to American Express. I remember, especially when I was in business travel, I supported the APAC, Asia-Pacific region and Latin America. We had someone free MEA, someone for the us. You had your corporate and then you also had some local sometimes that are helping support the business. A lot of similar things. We had the tools, people just on a bigger scale, obviously being American Express, right? Yeah. So structure’s pretty common. So in your role, how do you support the business? I mean, outside of budgeting and forecasting, what are maybe some of the things you’re responsible for? I know it varies by company. Is it mostly investment? You do a little bit of the sales commission type stuff. What are the kind of key responsibilities you have?
Asif Masani:
The budgeting, forecasting and reporting are the things that we do anyways, which is a part of your BAU (business as usual, or operations) or your monthly calendar. Apart from that we in Coursera have OKR driven culture. So OKR is objective and key results.
Paul Barnhurst:
Fact, actually speaking to that, real quick, if I can find it. This was the book first written about OKRs, Measure what matters. If you haven’t read it, just tell the audience. I really recommend it. Good book.
Asif Masani:
It’s Bernard Marr author?
Paul Barnhurst:
No, this one’s John Dor.
Asif Masani:
John dor. Okay. He
Paul Barnhurst:
Started, it’s Andy Grove who started at Intel. So it’s really kind of the history of where it started. There’s others who have written books about it too and how they used it, and also how Google talks about how Google, the Gates Foundation and some others have used it.
Asif Masani:
Yeah, so what I know, I joined this organization about year and a half back, but from what I know, it has been inspired from Google’s OKR methodology. So we’ve adopted
A lot of, yes. So Andy is the guy who taught it to Google. He used it at in Intel, Andy Grove, and he was one of the early investors at Google and he helped them implement it there.
Understood. Okay. Yeah. So maybe this book is one of the key underlying philosophies that we also follow. Yep. So it’s the OKR philosophy. So every individual or every team has an OKR. So apart from what you’re doing every day, every month, there are a couple of special projects that you are expected to drive, which might be inside your FP&A team, or it may also be outside. It may be a cross-functional project where you are working with different business teams to help them achieve a business objective. So usually there are two or three key results or objectives that you need to set every quarter. And then you need to also report during the quarter how you’re doing on them after the quarter, how did you do and what you learned. So that is one. And also we then report about this as well in what we call as the quarterly business review.
So once a quarter is done, we do report whatever were the highlights of that of the previous quarter. What were the low lights as in what didn’t go right or what were the mistakes and how can we learn from those mistakes? There’s a detailed business review that happens at the quarter, and then you also plan for the next quarter. So based on the forecasting that you do you also lay out a plan that you already, you have a plan which was done last year, but you again set the same OKRs for the next quarter. It’ll not be the same as plan, which was done maybe six months back. It might be very different. So again, you set your objectives and key results for the next quarter, and that again, the same process begins for the next quarter.
Paul Barnhurst:
And how have you liked OKRs? How have you found those work for you? Is that a method you enjoy? What’s your thoughts on using OKRs?
I actually love using it, and I especially believe if an organization grows fast it is one of the good ways to keep everybody aligned to the strategy, to whatever the vision that the CEO and the senior leadership has. So setting that in the OKR and that drills down to different business units, different functions, I think it’s a very good way to keep everyone aligned on the company’s mission and company’s whatever the objectives are.
I agree with you. We used it at one of my prior companies and I thought it was a good method and it can work really well when you have buy-in from senior leadership and everybody’s focused on key results that all roll up to really help drive the strategy, it can help with alignment and it can really help you to know how to focus your time because okay, I need to get this key result. I need to show, demonstrate that I’ve done that. And so it can help you focus. I think it’s a great tool. Do you have some favorite metrics you like to look at when you’re supporting a business? I know it’s going to vary some obviously business to business, but are there some key maybe financial or operational metrics that you always like to look at? Maybe kind of your go-to?
Asif Masani:
I especially like working with the marketing metrics. So my favorite metrics are all related to marketing just because I am also personally interested in marketing, and we do a lot of this on LinkedIn as well. So metrics like lifetime value of a consumer or the cost to acquire a customer or cost per click, all those type of metrics which are used in online advertising. So I love tracking those.
Paul Barnhurst:
Those are all really valuable metrics. So important today with so much of business being content-driven, trying to fill that top of funnel and understanding how are my dollars providing a return? Is it worth my time? And that’s always the challenge. We have a great episode where we’re releasing here probably in about three weeks, where we had the VP of marketing from Datarails and Christian Wattig from Datarails, and they talked about how marketing and FP&A worked together, and we discussed a lot of those metrics. So that episode will actually come out before this one. So if anyone’s listening, when I say it’ll be a few weeks, it have already happened by the time this episode’s released, but it was just a few weeks ago we had that conversation. So next question I have here is just kind of shifting a little bit. Can you talk about how established maybe FP&A is in India? And then a little bit what’s it like to be a practitioner in India and then maybe your thoughts of how that compares to the US or other parts of the world?
Asif Masani:
I can say in India, it’s been still evolving. So although it has been around since maybe 8, 10 years now. But as I mentioned earlier a lot of people still don’t know what FP&A is, and that’s very, very common. So in India, not a lot of profiles mentioned the description, job description as FP&A if they’re not big companies. If they are midsize companies, they would often advertise the job description as finance manager, accounting and finance controller, something like that, which will have some components of FP&A, but it’ll not be there in the headline. So people do not relate FP&A as a separate job description. Just like I don’t know if that’s true in the US which is different in bigger companies where they do have FP&A job designations, like FP&A analyst moves to FP&A senior analyst and then assistant manager, manager, senior manager, and goes to director vp. So larger organizations follow this, but most of the organizations which say they don’t call FP&A as FP&A, although they might be doing like 80% of the job of FP&A and finance business partnering. How about US?
Paul Barnhurst:
Yep. I’ll talk a little bit of my experience. So my experience with India and FP&A I’ll talk to that has mostly been where companies I worked for have outsourced it. So a lot of the work I’ve seen in FP&A from India is often very procedural. It’s very much, hey, preparing the reports, doing the standard stuff that you can productionalize, so to speak. And then a lot of the business partnering is managed in the US by generally more experienced FP&A professionals, where a lot of times the stuff we’re moving to India for cost arbitrage, labor arbitrage, is that stuff that is very standardized very early in the career type of work that you can train someone that’s just out of college a year or two to do versus that more experienced day to day business part partnering part of FP&A.
So that’s kind of my experience of how I’ve worked. Cause I’ve managed a few people in FP&A in India at American Express and at Solar. So I’ve worked quite a bit with FP&A in India for US companies. So my experience I’m sure is a little different, but when you talk about just kind of FP&A in the US, the FP&A job role is very common,. In startups, you don’t see it, right? We all know that. Mm-hmm. Startups generally have fractional CFO, it’s not till they hit a certain point. Typically if they’re venture backed, it’s usually say series C, series B, series C, that they really start adding that FP&A. Usually that first hire is a finance person that will do some FP&A, or a founder will do some of the budgeting, but they’re also doing controlling.
And you know, have at a certain point till you really add that team. I think most companies wait a little longer than they should. I had someone on the podcast that talked about that quite a bit, Casey Woo, who talked about just the importance of look, hire FP&A as early as you can. Cause it’s really now being seen more and more, especially in the US as a strategic function. And generally FP&A and business partnering are the same role where you go into Europe, they’re often separated in other places. You could still have a corporate FP&A kind of a commercial or a business FP&A. I’ve spent most of my career supporting the business. I’ve only had one role where I was really in a corporate role. All my other roles have been out in the business units.
And I like that I’m not a big fan of wanting to roll everything up and deal with all the decks and like, as I say, herding cats between all the different business units. I really like getting into the strategy with the business and partnering with them and figuring out how we achieve our objectives. So that’s a little bit of how I’ve seen it in the US and I think it’s probably more established, more common. It sounds like in India it’s still often done under controllership for a lot of companies till you get into the really big companies or you’re supporting companies that aren’t based in India. Is that probably a fair kind of assessment?
Asif Masani:
And on the outsourcing? Yeah, it’s a big industry. So especially banking and IT companies, I know most banks, you mentioned American Express. So even I used to work with Citibank, I started in a very similar role. So I started in what they call it a center of excellence. So what they do is centralize all their functions in one location. And it’s not just in India. They have two or three locations. So I know in city we had India, which is Mumbai, and then we also had Costa Rica. They were like two, three locations. So you used to get the benefit of both a lower cost so you could could have a lower cost base, and centralize everything so you can automate a lot of stuff and also get that time zone advantage. So if it’s a very large, big organization, they want to be working 24 hours, and the only way they can do it is have people working on different side of the world
Paul Barnhurst:
All make sense. And I’ve seen all of that. I know Citi, all the banks, like you mentioned, almost all of them have center of excellence in India that are doing various functions, whether that be accounting, APAR, FP&A, a lot of finance functions, they centralize there. In India, like you mentioned, getting the 24 7 hour support, there’s often some cost benefit as well. And it’s a great way to build that team and great way to start a career because you get to work in a center of excellence with a large company and see how a lot of things should be done. So shifting gears here a little bit, we just ring in the new year, can’t believe, or first week of the new year. So what do you see as maybe the biggest trend coming into 2023 for FP&A?
Asif Masani:
What I can see is what’s happened in 2022 that will continue to happen? So what you’ve seen as a trend in 2022, especially around use of technology and it better than most about tools and technology. So I think use of technology, use of a lot of automation, AI and machine learning driven processes so that people can get more accurate forecast, more streamlined data, real time data. So I think all those things happened in 2021, 2022, and those things will continue to accelerate. So that is one. And the second would be on the collaboration and the strategic planning side. So once all of these things are automated, FP&A will have more time and they already have more time to become that strategic partner or participate more on contributing to the business. The special project I mentioned at Coursera, those are all part of these strategic planning and adding more value to the business.
Paul Barnhurst:
So if I heard it, I would summarize it as two things, like you said. One, continuing to leverage technology to automate and streamline processes. Technology is an enabler. It continues to get better. And the second thing that does is it frees us up to focus on the value creation activities, the strategy, the partnering, and we’re going to continue to see that trend continue is we continue to automate and free up time. We’ll see FP&A a playing more and more of a strategic role. Is that a fair statement?
Asif Masani:
I think you summed it up very well.
Paul Barnhurst:
All right, perfect. Just want to make sure I understood you there. I thought I got it. So all right, now we’re going to get into some personal questions. We’re coming up near the end of our time and just have a few more questions for you. This is one we like to ask people. Can you talk about the accomplishment you are most proud of from your career? So if I had you in a job interview and I asked you that question, what would be your answer?
Asif Masani:
See, this might be very counterintuitive. So this experience is actually not from my previous job. So this was a break that I took after the Citi bankroll in 2019 to pursue different roles. So I thought maybe, let me try. At that time we had a new taxation system in India. So there was an implementation of a new taxation regime, which is called Goods and Services Tax Law which was very new. So I got interested reading about it around 2018, 2019. I thought, okay, let me try something outside of FP&A maybe I should try the new tax system that’s coming up in India. So I read a lot of books about GST and I set up a practice in GST in 2019 and after leaving the job at Citi, and it did well, I think I hired a bunch of people, it went very well for a year.
But then there were two things. One, I was not very happy doing that role. I was not, I was again getting that same feeling of what I got after working in audit for a couple of years. So I realized that taxation may not be the best thing I should be doing with my career. And I realize that maybe I should come back to FP&A. So I think that is something that experience is something that has taught me a lot of things. First of all, building your own team marketing. So when you are selling, you’re selling a taxation service to a client, you have to be very good at pitching marketing. So the things I learned there, I think that those are all things that are going to help. So I think that experience has been one of the best accomplishment, although it didn’t last long. And once COVID hit I had to actually decide to come back to FP&A, because I was working in the hospitality industry, and once COVID hit all my cash flow stopped just because all my clients were all hotels and restaurants. So that’s a point I decided to come back. But that experience was really, really good in terms of shaping me as a better professional overall.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a great experience. I appreciate you sharing that. And I totally could understand Covid hits. Yeah, hospitality. I’d worked in the travel and entertainment industry with American Express, so I understand that one. I joined at the end of 2008 as all the banks had cut all their travel budgets. We’d just gone through a huge recession. And I can understand I was fortunate to get in at the time, but it was a real challenge for us. Not obviously being a bank as well. We had the bank side and we had the travel side. So it was a difficult time for our business. And sometimes you just have to pivot, there things you can’t control that happen. But the learning, I agree with you starting my own business, learning how to sell, learning how to market, figuring out how to productionalize things. There’s a lot of value that you get beyond just what you’d get from a traditional FP&A role.
Asif Masani:
And that practice is still ongoing. So my dad retired early and he took over that and he’s still running that practice. So all those people that I hired, most of them are still working with my dad.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well, that’s great. Well congratulations on that. It’s quite an accomplishment to be able to keep that going. I know your dad’s running it, but still kudos to you for starting that business and now doing it again in more of an area that you have a passion. That’s great. So last couple questions here. We’re going to ask a personal question. This is one we ask everybody on the show. What is something unique about you? Something we can’t find online that you can share with our audience?
Asif Masani:
Something I don’t share a lot is my core values. So I usually work or decide upon working on a project or on a job, which are based on these core values. So one of them is learning and growth. So if I see that I will get an opportunity to learn and grow, I definitely would pick up that job or any project that I’m working on. And that may be one of the reasons I’m working with an education company, like Coursera. Other thing is I love sharing my knowledge. So whatever I learn I don’t feel good if I don’t share it. So if I keep it to myself, I feel that I’m not doing a good service to others. So sharing and teaching is another passion that I have. So I think those two things really sum up whatever I decide to do in future, it’ll be around those values and those things that I like.
Paul Barnhurst:
What, so your unique thing is really your core values drive everything you’re doing, which is great. I love that. And your core values is one, you want to make sure you’re learning. If you’re not going to learn from the project, does it really make sense? And two, you want to make sure you’re sharing what you’ve learned. So you want to be able to help others as well also make sure you’re learning and growing. Is that?
Asif Masani:
Yeah, and when I do that is, I realize when I started doing that, I don’t share this a lot, but I share this with people who I work closely with. And then I realize, okay, I attract a lot of people who are having similar mindset and similar objective. The time when you connect and you get good partners to work on with projects. So I think having this as a core value and being super focused on it, it has helped me a lot in terms of identifying good projects, also identifying good people to work with.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I hear you. Good people to work with is so important. And thank you for sharing that. Now you’ve just shared it with a thousand maybe 2000 people. So now everybody’s going to know about your core values. I appreciate you sharing that, and I think those are great that you have those. So this next question is probably one of my favorites, cause I love to see the diversity in answers. What’s your favorite Excel formula feature function? What’s your favorite thing in the Excel?
Asif Masani:
I think you will hate me for this but I have stopped using Excel. I’ve stopped using Excel for about a year and a half. So Coursera uses Google Sheets and I have transitioned from Excel to Google Sheets in the last.
Paul Barnhurst:
Booh. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.
Asif Masani:
And I hated it when I initially did that. I think in a year, year and a half back, I in fact even thought about quitting my job just because you’re not using Excel <laugh>. That was the first three months of using Google Sheets. But when I think from what I remember, when I used last Excel, when I used to use Excel last frequently, which was about a year and a half back, I was very I was very fortunate and I was very happy with the Xlookup formula. I never had to go back to the We lookup or index match. Although Index match is a slightly better function when you do modeling. But if I had to pick one, I would pick the Xlookup because I think it made my life a lot easier. Especially if I recollect when I used to do Excel maybe a year and a half back.
Paul Barnhurst:
I was a big fan of X lookup. I liked it. And Google Sheets is a great spreadsheet. I mean, it’s a good program. You can do a lot of things in as well in it. I mean, obviously Excel is the dominant tool out there and Datarails is a big fan of it because their platform’s built on it. But I think we can both admit Google Sheets has a lot of good functionality. I used it recently to build my kind of first model in Google sheets. I had to do it for a client that didn’t use Excel. And at first I was like, I don’t want to do this, I hate this. But you get used to it and you find it has its benefits. I mean, every tool does.
Asif Masani:
Yes, it does.
Paul Barnhurst:
So I get that and I’m glad you said X lookup. Cause I’m a big X lookup fan
Asif Masani:
And I do Miss Excel a lot. Sometimes when I have to do a really complex models and heavy models, which sometimes hang up in Google Sheets. I do miss Excel sometimes.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, it can handle more data. I mean, it’s been around 40 years, right? I mean, it’s the dominant spreadsheet in the world. There’s just no disputing that it’s the king still. So what advice would you offer to someone starting their career today in FP&Aa? I mean, beyond reading your book?
Asif Masani:
Mm-hmm.
Paul Barnhurst:
Plug for, I’m putting a plug in for your book there.
Asif Masani:
Thank you. Thank you for that. So
Paul Barnhurst:
What would you say?
Asif Masani:
Yeah, so right now I see a lot of people coming up and influencing a lot of young people and we are a part of it as well. So what I’ve seen from my interaction with your lot of young folks especially those who are starting out in finance, they believe that if they don’t get into FP&A in their first role that’s a failure for them and that is typically not, right. So my message to people are just starting out is if you cannot get into an FP&A role it’s all right. Get into any finance role, get into accounting, get into auditing, get into any role, which will give you some skills that you can later on use to transfer into an FP&A profile if you like. That’s the place that you want to be.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great advice. And I’ll add something to that. I don’t have an accounting background. I started my career writing contracts for the government, went to grad school, got an MBA in finance, did an internship more in IT. I was also doing a dual degree in information management. And then I got a role that it was called financial analyst, but it was really working in the business for nearly a year and a half. And I did some cash flow forecasting with it and then transferred over to fp and a. So no, it doesn’t need to be your first role. You don’t have to be an accountant. There’s a lot of paths to fp and a. You need to understand accounting. I think you and I can agree on that, but you don’t have to that background. So I think people need to realize today in the corporate world, your paths are going to take a lot of twists and turns. Rarely is it this nice straight ladder that you just climb. That’s kind of a myth almost today. So last question here. If people want to follow you, what would be the best way to follow you? How could they learn more about you?
Asif Masani:
So best way would be LinkedIn. You can just search my name on LinkedIn and it’ll come up. Or the second best way would be to go to my website, which is FPNAprofessionals.com. There you can find out all my content. You can also find out courses on FP&A, which I think are good ones. So if you want to check them out, you can go there as well.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Thanks for that. Awesome. And thanks for being on the show again. Congratulations on your book. If you haven’t read it, go look out to Kindle and download it. What about, see, give me the title again. It’s slipping my mind.
Asif Masani:
It’s All About FP&A.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. All about FP&A. I almost said, what about FP&A? I’m like, no, no, that’s not right. All about FP&A So again, thank you for being on the show and appreciate you carving some time out for us also. Thanks.
Asif Masani:
Thank you so much. I love this conversation and thank you for having me.