From being the First kid in her family to finish high school, Swati Bagri began as a role as auditor at Deloitte (“I did what any 17-year-old smart kid would do. I just followed my friends”). At Deloitte she discovered a “love of finance” realizing it’s “what I want to do for the rest of my life”.
Swati cemented her FP&A career at some of the world’s biggest brands: Nestlé, Mars, Amazon, and Kraft Heinz. At these giants she absorbed and built a playbook to get from “good” to “great” FP&A. Behing the success of FP&A at these teams, she explains is 3 things: strategic planning and forecasting, technology and risk management.
In this episode Swati talks about:
- Finance transformation as a significant part of her role (the slippery term of “finance transformation” defined as the “effective use of technology to free up people’s time”)
- How predictive analytics was used at Nestlé from rainfall data, and the wider playbook of building financial models with consumers in mind
- Hyperinflationary markets like Turkey and Egypt and FP&A and the lessons learned
- Business partnering roles at Amazon and Nestlé and what I have learned about successful relationship building towards common objectives
- Co-founding The Strategy Story (including learning about Marriage insurance for wedding days)
- Start by Explaining the P&L and coaching non-finance folk
- War stories – annual planning cycles
- FP&A-led transformation at an ecommerce marketplace business and getting buy-in from senior management through a data story
- The power of podcasts to keep your at the top of your finance game
- Sky Jumping and my favorite Excel function
Connect with Swati Bagri on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/swatibagri/
Book a mentoring session with Swati at https://topmate.io/swatibagri
Full Transcript
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Our guest today is an accomplished finance professional with a remarkable career spanning over a decade. Swati Bagri is currently the regional FP&A manager for West and East emerging markets at Kraft Heinz in Dubai. She has had an impressive journey working with Fortune 500 companies like Nestle, Mars, and Amazon. As a chartered accountant and a passionate FP&A expert, Swati has navigated the complex world of finance across different countries and industries. Her expertise in commercial finance, business partnering and finance transformation has made a significant impact on the organizations she’s worked with. But Swati’s interests go beyond numbers. She’s also a storyteller at heart, having co-founded The Strategy Story, a platform that aims to simplify business strategies and share engaging stories. In this episode, we’ll dive deep into Swati’s career journey, exploring her key roles, challenges, and achievements. We’ll learn about her approach to FP&A, her strategies for effective business partnering, and her insights on the latest trends in finance. Whether you’re a seasoned finance professional or just starting your career, Swati’s story is sure to inspire and enlighten you. So let’s welcome Swati Bagri to FP&A Today. Good day, Swati. How are you?
Swati Bagri:
Hey, Glenn. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m very well, how about you?
Glenn Hopper:
Doing great. Looking forward to this episode. Well, I know we’ve got a lot we we want to cover here. So I guess let’s dive right in. You’ve had a really impressive career journey spending over a decade now, and, you know, from your early days at Deloitte, India to your current role. I guess I always like to know what initially drew our guests to the field of finance and, and how your passion for the area has evolved over the years.
Swati Bagri:
So that’s a bit surprising because my journey into finance began quite by chance being the first kid in the family to even finish high school. I wasn’t the first person. I didn’t have much of guidance on what career part to choose. So as a kid, I, all I could ever dream of was, you know, wearing a suit going to the office and making lots of money. And when the time came to decide what career to take and what to study in uni, I did what any 17-year-old smart kid would do. I just followed my friends. So yeah, so starting off as an auditor in Deloitte as well, I didn’t realize immediately how pivotal this field would become for me. But over the past 13 years, as I grew from my initial role as an auditor to my current position my love for finance has deepened significantly.
I mean, you know, just like to have a good financial management and build personal wealth and to protect that wealth, that knowledge of good financial management is important. I also feel similarly, finance is the lifeline of any business. So a robust finance financial function is very, very important for any business’ survival. And that over the years is what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to explore different functions of finance, which has definitely sort of helped shape my career trajectory. And then my role also has evolved from basic financial management and auditing to more strategic planning, which has actually helped drive business transformation in these organizations that I’ve worked for. And that’s something that also excites me on a day-to-day basis. So yeah, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. So finance it is,
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. That’s great. It’s funny how many people I talked to that didn’t necessarily set out to do this, but then once you get into it, you kind of fall in love with it and, and just, and yeah, just realize that this is where your career is gonna be in your career. You’ve you’ve been with some I impressive companies, big, you know, fortune 500 companies in the FMCG sector. Your background after Deloitte going to Nestle and Mars, and now Kraft Heinz. So you’ve seen practices at these largest companies, and I’m wondering what do you think it is that sets these organizations apart in terms of their financial management practices and, and what have you learned from being at, at such large companies?
Swati Bagri:
If I were to just point out common denominators across these organizations, I could like bring them down to three. I think each of these organizations have a very strong emphasis on strategic planning and forecasting. You know, all of these organization leverage advanced analytics to predict the market trends and adjust their strategies as and when needed. And that to proactively, it makes them stay ahead of market fluctuation and also secure a competitive edge. And you would see a common factor that during covid, when a lot of businesses were struggling, these organizations were actually really growing. The second common denominator that I’ve observed is that these companies invest heavily in technology to streamline their finance operations. And it can start from something very basic, like adopting the latest ERP system to more advanced, like automation tools. This sort of helps minimize that human error and enhance the efficacy of the work done by the finance team.
The integration of the technology also speeds up the work, like, which also goes back to my previous point of getting that competitive edge. Of course, that comes with deeper insight and helps decision making across all level and not just within the finance function. And I think lastly, the most important one is risk management. I think what I’ve observed is that in each of these companies, risk management is a very, very critical component of financial strategy. Like usually, you know, when we are in FP&A, we don’t think that much about risk management. But if I talk about broader finance function, it’s very important. And what a robust risk management system does is that it allows these companies to mitigate any potential financial setbacks. For example, whether it is any currency fluctuation. And I’ve worked for a market like Turkey or Egypt where, you know, currencies have devalued like 60, 70% overnight commodity pricing volatility. And we have seen what has happened during Covid and after Covid changes in consumer behaviors where consumers now want something else versus what they wanted five years back. The risk management system, the robust risk management system, has helped the finance team to sort of equip themselves with the information and then make, manage these risk in a real time way to drive more financial stability and then sustainably grow the business.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that because the risk management component, because I think about in smaller companies or really in any size company in, when you’re putting together the budget every year, and you know, sort of, okay, this is our target. It’s easy to get married to, okay, the target budget is our budget, but without the scenario analysis and without the risk management piece of it, you’re, you’re married to something that you don’t really know the range of where you’re gonna be. So I think that’s a, a great lesson on the on the risk management side. And I guess the other one that really struck a chord with me was investment in technology, because I think, I feel like it’s changing, but there is, there’s always a nature for businesses to look at finance and accounting as a cost center and not something that’s adding value to the business.
So trying to get that investment, if it’s, you know, if the mindset is, oh, it’s not gonna affect top line, and it, you’re just gonna reduce our bottom line because it’s another expense item. I think that the investment part, that’s the key word, is it’s not an expense, it’s an investment and it makes you more efficient. And when you’re not spending your time doing, you know, the kind of the menial tasks and the data entry, and instead you’re focused on adding that value, that, that you’re able to actually show how you’re more than just a cost center to the organization. So would you say that technology in your time in the industry has helped you be able to provide more value?
Swati Bagri:
Oh, absolutely. I think I have seen that change happening in the last 10 years. And, you know, this actually reminds me of a study that McKinsey did about one of the key things that CFOs now are focusing on, and it’s actually finance transformation. And for me, I think I’ve seen the impact of finance transformation on people’s life. Like in the sense how we are able to free up their mental capacity from doing something like Excel, just like, you know, consolidating data on Excel to actually focusing that entire attention into business partnering, driving more depth of analysis, driving more robust analysis, driving value to the business. So I, I have firsthand, because I have led finance transformation in my current organization, I’ve seen the impact of how much time it is able to free up for people and make them better business partners. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
And actually let’s, let’s dive right into finance transformation, because I think transformation’s always interesting to me because you go to school to be a, a finance or accounting professional, and you, you become an expert in that area. But so many times what we do is linked to technology, and we’re not technologists by training, but we have to learn it and we have to keep up with the tools. But we’re also, as finance and accounting people, I think we’re inherently risk averse. So transformation is big. It’s a, it’s a change and there is risk involved in the change. And I’m wondering through your career and, and seeing these technology investments and going through finance transformation, what does that mean to you? And what are some of the key initiatives that maybe that you’re currently leading or that you’ve led in the past and in your kind of learnings and takeaways you’ve taken from those?
Swati Bagri:
It’s so interesting you ask because whenever I tell anybody that I have led finance transformation, people ask, what is finance transformation? So, you know, I have this effective one line answer. It’s all about effective use of technology to free up people’s time. Like that’s all finance transformation is. It’s in simple word. I mean, essentially to me it means giving right resources to better, to make people better business partner and drive more value. And that’s also what future of finance is all about. So the faster we embrace it, I think the better professionals we can become. Now, coming to my role at Kraft Heinz, when I was doing finance transformation, I was leading initiatives around automation. You know, the day-to-day work, how can we automate them using things like single source of truth or creating various basic tools like vba like macros, how can we automate those processes?
Those are very, very simple tools, like no coding require, no coding language required, no science data science required other than that, of course, advanced analytics to sort of forecast the sales forecast, the trends and all of that. And the funny thing is, it’s not like, you know, it’s something new. I was working in Nestle about six years back, and we were exploring predictive analytics then to forecast how much rain would happen and how much of that rain would impact my sales in the market. What happens if one degree of temperature rises, what happens to the sale of my chocolates and things like that. So it’s not something new. But of course the focus has dramatically increased because companies have started to realize that that is the need of the abo. And personally for me, having led a lot of these initiatives, I have seen that we’ve improved our reporting speed, we’ve improved our accuracy, we have become more agile, and it has helped us make better decisions.
And lastly, we have democratized the data. You know earlier when I started out 13 years back, I saw a lot of the finance folks in the company would hide data from sales team. They would present only, let’s say, a limited quantity of data or limited numbers that they wanted to present. And that never created partnership between different functions. And it is because of the democratization of the data through finance transformation, I see that there is more cohesiveness in the business. People are working together, functions are trying to achieve the common objective. And that’s, for me is like the best use case of finance transformation.
Glenn Hopper:
I love what you said there. One, I I want to talk more about democratizing data and business partnership. But before that, I love to hear you because I’ve actually, when I was in retail, as you get more advanced in your FP&A skills, you love finding not just internal factors, but external factors, macroeconomic conditions, in your case, things like rainfall. And, you know, depending on the business, everybody’s gonna have their own exogenous factors. And now that you have that there’s so much data available, you can know historical weather patterns for you know, for an area or whatever, and you know, you know, it’s based on all this data, you can change the, the forecast or certainly in the consumer goods market, then inflation is gonna impact sales and all that. So yeah, I guess when you guys are doing your, your forecasting and budgeting, you’re always bringing in these external data points. Do you have any other examples or, or thoughts on, on how you can improve models by bringing in this external data, not just the internal?
Swati Bagri:
Everything that we do right, is for the consumers. So we need to take whatever the consumer wants. So like, for example, market share data, getting like how is the market responding to changes in price? How is the market responding to new product launches by different brands? You know, what are the competitors doing? All of these informations are very, very critical when we build our financial financial models. Other than that, I think what’s happening to the global supply chain, how is the fuel price going to be? Because that really impacts your cost structure. That really impacts your margin. Eventually, what is going to be the commodity pricing? Is the crop like the country where we get most of our crops from? Is the crop cycle good? Is the harvest cycle good? Are we expecting any natural calamities? Because, you know, the mar the countries currently, like for example, I’m in Dubai and the rainfall in one day, we had one and a half year worth of rainfall.
Who would’ve expected that? Of course, you cannot predict these things, but at least where you have like, where you can get information, it good to sort of plan all of these into our models. I’ll give you another specific example of markets like Turkey and Egypt. We all know that, you know, it’s in hyperinflationary, it’s sort of an hyperinflationary economy, especially Turkey, for example. What, how can we anticipate looking at the past trends how can we anticipate looking at, like, talking to people within the market, talking to different legal departments, et cetera. What is going to be the expected rate you know, and build that into our forecast so that we don’t get the currency impact at the end of the year. And these are some of the examples that if built into the model can help us become better prepared to first of all deliver the number. And secondly, to make a sustainable business, which is I think like what we are as finance function are supposed to do.
Glenn Hopper:
I mean, you can’t, you know, you can’t predict the sort of black swan events. You can’t predict an economic crisis or Covid or you know, a year and a half of rain in, in one day. But when you do really embrace risk management and scenario analysis, you know, that range, and then that sort of opens you up to let’s look at some dramatic event. And then if you have the model built and you know what you’re, you’re factoring in there, you can check the impacts on it. Great advice on that. So the other part in, in your last answer that I I, I is always interesting to me, and I, I’m always trying to hear how other people do this, but you talked about business partnering, and I know you’ve had business partner roles at Amazon and Nestle, and I’m thinking with that democratization of data and being able to build those relationships with the other departments, to have that two-way trust going back forth and back and forth, and where you are all kind of singing from the same sheet of music where you have, this is our data dictionary, this is where we’ve identified our source of truth, we’re all sharing information across the board, and that’s very important.
And, and to be an effective finance organization, you have to do that. So I’m wondering, what have you learned or how do you approach building relationships with the non-finance stakeholders? And what strategies do you use to communicate, you know, ’cause these are not finance people, so sometimes you have to communicate rather complex financial concepts effectively in order to keep that communication going. So how, how do you handle that? Look,
Swati Bagri:
I think one of the things that I’ve learned by experience is that I always try to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. In the sense, if I’m talking to the sales folks, I always try to understand their objectives, their KPIs, what are they trying to achieve at the end of the year? Because most of the times, the communication gap stems from the fact that somebody else is trying to achieve something else and while you are trying to achieve something else. So for me, I think what has worked is bringing both of us together to fight for the common objective. Of course, that plus clear communication you know, I, I don’t like to hide. This is what it is. Let’s work on the common objective together is always my stance. We are all trying to work for the same company and not two different companies.
So we all have to ultimately achieve what’s our value, what’s our mission and our numbers together. You know, I also believe in simplifying financial data. Like if I go to somebody in a different function with my complex fp and a model, that person is never gonna understand, you know, I’m going to speak jargons. That person is never gonna understand. So simplifying that starts with one thing, and that’s the tip I always give to anyone who comes to me. Start by coaching finance, non-finance folk in finance, like start with P&L. So anytime I meet a salesperson or a marketing person, I just ask, do you understand our P&L? Like, if not, can we just quickly go through it? People will usually say, yeah, yeah, I understand, but let’s quickly go through it all over again so that I can, you know, just explain the basics.
Then the person opposite to you, understand the p and l. It makes the conversation so much more easier. You know a lot of times it’s about the impact on the p and l that people are not able to understand. And that’s why all the confusion, all the discrepancy, all the questioning happens. And I think these are couple of things that has worked for me to become better business partner. And on a personal level, I always try to build that relation relationship outside of work as well. Like you know, the coffee cooler conversations, the the, sorry, the water cooler conversations, et cetera. Really, really helpful. So, you know finance team is always said that they work in silos. I like to break those silos and I usually, I would go to the go to the desk of a person and then sit with that person and just chat for 10 minutes, what’s happening in the market? What’s hap what are you doing? Are you facing any challenge? Can I help you with something? So just add a bit of more human touch. You know, how you would treat your friends. You would see that your life become much more simpler and you could be a better business partner.
Glenn Hopper:
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Hearing you talk about this, I think I can see now how it was a natural step for you. And we were talking a little bit about this before the show, and I know you’ve moved on from it, but I’m still, I love the story, the story of the Strategy Story. Tell us a little bit about the strategy story, which you co-founded in 2020. What the mission of strategy story was and what inspired you to start it and, and how that has, you know, from before and then doing that and moving on, how that experiences influenced your approach to storytelling and communication in, in your career now, kind of before and after and and what you learned and what you wanted to bring to the market with the strategy story.
Swati Bagri:
Yeah, so that’s a good question. Glen. ever since I was in my university and I got introduced to the world of finance, I loved reading about business strategy that used to be my favorite subject. And I loved understanding the why behind the what, like whatever the company did, why did they do it? But I could never find under one roof something that I could get inspiration from or learn something new. And I think that is how TSS came about. Like the strategy story came about just for the love of business, just for the love of strategies, just for the love of why initially me and my co-founder actually took one, one and a half months. I was into a full-time job. But, so that’s why we took this time to research about a lot of businesses, a lot of business strategy.
We spoke to a lot of co-founders you know, who started who have startups in India, middle East, France, because my co-founder was based out of France at that point in time. And we understood a lot of these strategies. We read a lot of books to also understand the why, and that’s when after one, one and a half year month when we had a lot, like around 15, 20 stories live, we actually went live in the market with the, with the website. And within a couple of months, we were actually able to get a lot of like-minded people together who had the same passion as us for writing storytelling, and most importantly, learning about business strategy. And, you know, the maximum number of people who visited our websites were those people who were preparing for MBA for, or they were already in their b schools who wanted to learn about different business strategy because they were trying to track into consulting these business strategies or the stories that we wrote, gave them a lot of insights that help them to prepare better for their consulting interviews.
Of course overall this definitely improved my communication in terms of expressing myself by writing and by also talking to people when I was talking to different co-founders, when I was talking to people who were interested to know more about the strategy story and communicating them about our vision, our mission, that definitely helped with my communication, my storytelling skill. It broadened my perspective. I think I can bring better insight into my business, into the companies that I’m working for, because what I did, and then of course, all that helped become better business partner viz a vis finance professional.
Glenn Hopper:
I wonder because I went and got an an MBA and then I went and got a master’s in finance. And I think that the MBA was very key to kind of get the, the broader vision of, of the company, not just the, the finance. But now I, I’ve been in finance a million years, so I think everything I do naturally starts with the financials. And I know, and I’ve spent, the funny thing is I’ve spent my most of my career in in the startup environment, and nobody starts out with a new product or a new company or a new innovation with the thought that we’re gonna have the best financials. You know, they don’t start, that’s secondary to the product. But with my background, I find I can’t help but start with the financial model first. And I’m wondering, when you were doing the strategy story, you had the background already in finance, do you think you were skewed more to financials? Which I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I mean, we all love finance here, and we know that at the end of the day, the, if the financials don’t work, the the company or the product isn’t gonna work. So did you, do you feel like you started with finance or were you able to back up a little bit and start more holistically or more globally and then have finance as a component of it?
Swati Bagri:
That’s the funny part. I did nothing in finance there. The whole idea of me to start something different was to step out of what I was doing. Like you know, I know finance is my bread and butter, that’s what I’m going to do rest of my life. But when I’m doing sort of something that I’m passionate about, why limit myself? So I was reading about marketing strategies, I was reading about, or let’s say writing about marketing strategy. I was writing about sales strategy supply chain strategy, whatnot. Of course, a couple of stories I did, or a couple of strategies I did on finance as well. But those were very niche. Like I never knew that marriage, something called marriage insurance existed till the time I did a strategy story. And no, it’s not like for people who wanna get a divorce, but <laugh>, but it’s, it’s too sort of if any mishap happens in, in during a wedding preparation, and Indian weddings are very, very extravagant. You know let’s say there’s a natural calamity or there is a fire or whatever this insurance helps you to get compensated for, for that loss. I never knew that till I started this. So for me, if I knew something very interesting in the world of finance, that’s where I would only deep dive, but I would not go for something which I would do anyways during my natural course of my career.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that. And I really think it’s a great lesson and approach for, you know, we all wanna be the best we can at finance, but also we wanna step out and we don’t wanna stay in our silo. And I think you’re more valuable when you understand the different sides of the business and the way different people are looking at things. So I think that’s great. I feel like you’re giving us a template for how to be better FP&A professionals. Back ack to finance our favorite topic, though, you know, you have this outside skillset and this outside approach that you use there, but your, your bread and butter in your day to day. And, and like you said, your passion is the, is the FP&A and I’m thinking about you have a wide range of skills, but in the FP&A realm, whether it’s business analysis or strategic planning or financial modeling, analytics, all that, how would you stack rank those or what would you consider the most essential, essential for success in in, in commercial finance roles, and why?
Swati Bagri:
I would like to answer this question a bit differently because the very basics are financial modeling and, you know strategic planning, that’s what everybody will say no matter what the rank, you need to know these basics to be able to succ get success in the roles, right? In both the roles, whether it’s commercial finance or FP&A. But I think there are few things that sets apart good FP&A slash commercial finance manager to a great one. And that for me is strategic visioning. The ability to sort of foresee the future and translate that into financial term is very, very vital. And people who can translate this quantitative data into qualitative business insight can actually add a lot of value. And so I think that’s one skill that I would say beyond the traditional ones. Second, I would say is technological agility. And by that I mean, I, I think we’ve already spoken about the fact how things are changing very fast.
And, you know, finance transformation is agenda for every company, every top company. So being able to sort of adapt to these new technology, learn about these new technology because that helps to, how, how we are going to do our forecast, our budgets and reports in different ways is going to be very, very essential. So I would probably put that in number two. And number one for me is going to be ethical judgment and integrity. I think now when financial scru higher than ever, and you know, we keep hearing something or the other in news having a strong ethical foundation is very, very crucial. And this means not only adhering to legal standard, but also maintaining our integrity in financial reporting and analysis. So that’s gonna be my top number one as finance, whether it’s fp a, whether it’s commercial finance, whether it’s any function of finance.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that’s great. And whether you’re a public company signing off on the, the quarterly and annual reports, where, but, or if you’re someone supporting that, it’s knowing, you know, it’s, it’s black and white, there’s no gray area in, in financial reporting.
Swati Bagri:
Yeah. And it becomes all, it, it actually becomes all the more important for public companies. I think one of the CPG group a few months back has been under scrutiny because of the way they reported their discounts and allowances, and it has been all over the news. And as finance professional, it is our responsibility to have that ethical and ethics and moral to not let that happen because we’re sort of, let’s say, guards for company’s financials.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I really love your approach and, and template here. And I’m thinking, you know, there’s so much of what you’ve done that people could model if they were starting out in an FP&A career. If you had a, a young you know, a junior analyst straight outta university, someone new on your team, or someone that was in school now or, or thinking about going into the profession based on what you’ve seen and, and kind of going through the, the priorities, what would you tell a young FP&A professional, what do they need to do to set a a good career path? What, what skills do they need to focus on? What sort of jobs should they be looking for? And I guess I’m thinking about this in, in FPA in general, but maybe if, if you have particular advice for the FMCG industry as well,
Swati Bagri:
Irrespective of the industry, the first and the most important thing is to stay curious and con continuously upgrade yourself. Because finance is finance everywhere. I’ve worked in e-commerce, I’ve worked in FMCG, of course. The p and l structure can be a bit different. Like, you know, how you record the revenue and what are your cogs, but eventually everybody looks at ebitda, everybody looks at net profit, everybody looks at that, everybody looks at earning per share. So these, some of the metrics remains common, right? So finance is finance everywhere, but if you’re curious, naturally curious if you are ready to upgrade yourself, you’ll have a good career anywhere, like any company, any function, and more particularly in FP&Aa because, you know, we, we’ve left those traditional ways of budgeting long back, like we spoke about having scenario analysis, I don’t think we were doing scenario analysis 20 years back.
Nobody knew probably what scenario analysis was. You had a fixed budget and that continued for like the whole year. Now you have rolling budget, you probably have daily budgets in some organization. So if people would not have upgraded themselves, they would have been outta job market. And that’s all the more important with new people entering the industry. The jobs are very limited. There are already people sitting before you, so you need to be curious, you need to upgrade yourself to be better and better every day, of course. Second would be to develop those strong analytical skills, like, you know, start with Excel, like forget about advanced tool. You need to at least first master Excel, and then you can go about mastering those advanced tool like power pivot tableau and all of that because that will obviously give you an edge over let’s say people who do not know these tools.
And most of the organizations are moving towards these tools. So it’s, it’s important that, you know, just stay ahead of the curve. And then lastly, I think the most important one for FP&A professionals specifically is to work on your communication slash storytelling skills. You know, we might have like 10 Excel tabs or 50 Excel tabs in, in one file, but what people want to see is like two or three bullet points, which conveys the key information, which conveys the key message, whether it’s the current status or the future status. Additionally, what can we do? Okay, this is what it’s, but to be able to provide that valuable insight that this is the current scenario, but if we do this, you know, maybe we can improve our profitability by 1%, or we can reduce our cost by 1%, and that will naturally come when you are curious, when you know the latest tools, et cetera. So I think it, it has to work hand in hand for somebody who’s move planning to move to either fmcg, either any other industry and in more specifically in FP&A roles.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that understanding the why and having the storytelling component and being curious all go together. A guest a couple weeks ago was on, and I, I thought he said it well, that to be a good FP&A person, you need to think of yourself as an investigative journalist. So the idea that, you know, it’s like, okay, here’s some, some data. Let me look behind it, let me understand why. Let me keep digging and digging until I, but, and you keep digging, and then you find that lever where, oh, here’s the cause. So now we have something that we can you know, a switch that we can flip to change that. It’s yeah. You know, and it kind of goes hand in hand with the, you gotta have the descriptive analytics, but once you get down to the why, then you can start having the, you know, going to the predictive and then the prescriptive, because you understand what’s driving those. So Exactly. And that’s where you can start adding value to the business.
Swati Bagri:
Yeah, absolutely. You said it right, like we cannot go into prescriptive until we do our basics, right? <Laugh>
Glenn Hopper:
That staying curious, it’s hard to do because the workload, you know, everybody, we’re all <laugh>. We have long weeks and we have lives outside of work. It takes a significant amount of effort just to be sure that you’re doing your job right. Certainly the technology and everything helps with that. If you have, if you don’t have to spend time in the weeds and doing, you know, deep in the weeds, data manipulation, but it’s hard to put that time in and to stay curious and to follow through with that so you know what’s going on. But with your work around digital transformation, you have to stay kind of at, at the tip of the spear on that. So I’m wondering how do, how do you stay updated with the latest trends and what the best practices are, and and how do you incorporate those in, into your work?
Swati Bagri:
Okay. I, I’m not trying to butter you up, but I think podcasts are like, let’s say the best, or let’s say my latest obsession. I make sure to listen to one podcast every two to three days. It could be on variety of topics, like whether it is FP&A like this one, or it is about business strategy. There are a lot of good podcasts. There are podcasts on communications. So it’s so easy, right? While you are working in a monotonous Excel sheet that you’ve worked for last 10 years, and you know what you need to do, but you still need to work on it. I would just switch on the podcast and continue with my work while driving, while walking, while sometimes while sleeping. And my husband gets very upset because, you know, I would prefer to put on a podcast and, and like, I’ll make him listen to it as well, and I go off to sleep while listening, and then I do the same thing next day.
So I think it’s a very easy to use tool tool because you might not get a lot of chance to read every day. You might not get a chance to complete one book a week but that’s something that you can quickly listen. Additionally, I think LinkedIn has been a really good medium to learn about new things, especially in the world of FP&Aand commercial finance. I think FP&Atrends is a, is a, is a website wherein you find a lot of latest information about there is Business Partnering Institute. So there are a lot of these tools available in, in on LinkedIn, and there are some good, I would say influencers who really post a lot of engaging stuff, a lot of interesting stuff. So I, I try to spend about half an hour on LinkedIn on a daily basis just to gain some information.
And of course, the traditional, you know, reading stuff online et cetera, of course goes there. I love reading books. Whenever I get a chance to read, I, I definitely make it a a point to, to read something. I at least try to complete 12 books in a year. That’s like always my target. So whether I complete two books in a month or whatever, but I always make it a point before 31st of December, I complete 12 books, including a mix of fiction and nonfiction. And I think lastly I love talking to people. I don’t limit myself to only, you know finance folks within the organization. So I’ll just go out and talk to everybody, anybody to just gain an understanding of market, to gain an understanding of their function. I will talk to people on LinkedIn to just understand how finance is managed in their com company. What, what are they doing? Some, are they doing something differently that we can incorporate in our organization? So it’s a net net, it’s a mix of podcast, it’s a mix of the traditional Google, et cetera, et cetera, plus lot of networking. So that really helps me stay updated and relevant, I would say.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. And I, I love the idea of getting up from your desk and going to talk to other departments. It’s like management by walking around, right? Like the MBWA or whatever it was from Hewlett Packard back in, back in the seventies. You learned so much just by interacting with the other divisions in the company. So that’s great and, and highly encouraged, you know, thinking of you and and we don’t have to get into specific companies and everything, but I always love the, the war story part of the show, because every time I ask these questions, I, I know it’s not just me, it’s, it’s our listeners too. I can, I I just know people resonate with that, and we’ve all had similar experiences. So I’m always interested in hearing about maybe a very difficult challenge you had in FP&A and kind of how you over overcame it and then, you know, and, and also on the other side of that successes, but it for you, do any, is there any particular challenge that stands out as something that you know, maybe it was really painful to go through, but you learned a lot from it?
I
Swati Bagri:
Think every annual planning cycle is like that. I would say <laugh>, you know, where you are constantly fighting, learning having sleepless nights. But I think I can, I, I would love to talk about one of the things that we did in my previous organization e-commerce major, and that really had good impact on, you know revenue growth management and like overall improving the overall revenue of the organization. One of the initiatives that I led was revamping the entire fee strategy for the sellers. So when I was working in this e-commerce company, I was managing the marketplace business and typically marketplace business, you know, you have sellers who come into the platform and list their products. Whenever a sale happens, you charge fees from them. This fees used to be sort of flat across for all the sellers. And for me, when I, I used to look at the fees and the fact that we were not growing and our revenues weren’t, weren’t improving, the way we wanted it to improve was a trigger that we need to adapt and change our fee strategy.
The project was not more about adjusting cost, but it was to create sort of a mutually beneficial fee structure so that sellers would come into our platform and be willing to sell. So we started with an in-depth analysis of our existing fee structure, compared it to market standards and evaluated feedback from different stakeholders, including the sellers, like we had representatives from the seller side also. And all of these conversations, all of these analysis, including the competitor competitors analysis, helped us evaluate the areas where we need to sort of modify our fee structure and create more value to our sellers. This also sort of helped us realize that we need to get these diverse perspective, you know, usually whenever we are planning any strategy, we are only thinking about internal consumers, but this time we decided to go out and seek some feedback from external consumers as well, and that we incorporated those external studies into our planning process.
And it helped us introduce a tier fee structure approach. Like, depending on the quantity you sell, you pay a particular fee, and then if you increase more than that, then you pay a higher fee. So it’s, it’s sort of like the taxes system. The people who earn less pays less tax, but the people who earn more pays more tax. So we introduced that into as in as a strategy to cater to different scales and different needs of the sellers. And it gave us a lot of flexibility. And, you know, the market share has been rising and rising. So I think overall it turned out well, but it was a bit of a challenge. No, a lot of challenge to get it accepted from the management, because anytime you change a strategy like this, it could have a potential impact on your revenue. It could have sellers leaving the platform, or, I mean, let’s say if I, if I talk in a general term, it could have impact on your overall portfolio, your market share. So getting that buy-in was very, very difficult. But eventually we did what was right for the business and what for right for the partners.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that because it’s not just, oh, I’m the finance person and I have this hunch I want to try out, because you can bring data to the argument and, and it’s data-driven decision making. And that’s, I think that is a perfect example of how FP&A can provide value to the organization. It’s not, we’re not just here to report on what’s historically happened and to, to do our forecast. It’s we’re taking this data and we’re using it to help form business decisions. So I think that’s a, that’s a great story, and thank you for sharing.
We are approaching the end of the program, and I do always like to this is a good reminder for, for me and for our audience, you know, that we’re, we are all people outside of our FP&A roles, and I know we could all sit around the the water cooler and talk about this all, all day every day, but I do always like to hear a little bit on the personal side so we can all find you on, on LinkedIn and, and, and see your career. But what’s something that maybe a a lot of our listeners or, or a lot of people wouldn’t, wouldn’t know about you?
Swati Bagri:
I love adventure sports, but I’m very scared of water, so it’s a bit counterintuitive, but yeah, I don’t know how to swim and I’m very scared of water, but I, i, if it, if it has to do anything with jumping, you know, from 50th floor doing a bungee jumping and stuff like that, or jumping from the air plane or whatever, I would love to do that as long as it doesn’t involve swimming <laugh>
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>. So have you done, have you done bungee jumping or anything like that? I have, yeah.
Swati Bagri:
Yeah, I
Glenn Hopper:
Have. Well, so skydiving, have you done skydiving?
Swati Bagri:
I have, yes.
Glenn Hopper:
Oh, wow. So my, my daughter who’s in college just went skydiving a a couple of weeks ago, and I found out, well, she mentioned it to me, but as a typical dad, I was like, yeah, that sounds great. And I didn’t internalize it and own it until she sends me a text right before she’s about to jump out of the plane and it’s <laugh>, all it says is, see you on the flip side. And then it had a little emoji of of someone parachuting. And I, I have never skydived and I don’t, I don’t see myself ever jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, but as soon as she sent that, I realized she’s jumping out of a plane. My palm started sweating and I was nervous until I heard she’d got got to the ground. But did you that’s had to be an amazing experience. Is it something you would do multiple times? Would you go do it again, or have you done it multiple times?
Swati Bagri:
Look, financially it doesn’t make sense to do it multiple times, but for the thrill of it maybe one more time, I would say, yeah, because it’s freaking expensive, and to be honest with you, you don’t really see anything when you jump. You know, you usually don’t see anything. It’s the pictures, of course, but
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>, I could see I would just black out as soon as I went over the edge, just, I’m out, just <laugh> and just wake me up when we get to the garage. You actually, that
Swati Bagri:
You could just keep your eyes closed and, you know, it’ll, it’ll not even be visible in the pictures because you will have glasses.
Glenn Hopper:
Oh, <laugh>. That’s great. Alright, I always love to hear this one. What is your favorite Excel function and why? I
Swati Bagri:
Look I think I use Index Match a lot. That, I would say that’s sort of my favorite function because it gives a lot of flexibility. You know, especially when we have to work between multiple Excel sheets, we look up Edge lookup doesn’t really work. So Index Match provides that flexibility and I just love that function. But additionally, I’ve started to use a lot more of X lookup. I would say, if I have to give a number two, I would say X lookup is sort of my number two,
Glenn Hopper:
Two very popular answers. I’m, I’m gonna talk to the producer, Jonathan, we need to start keeping a tally. I wanna see like a, because we, we get index match and, and that’s probably the most common I’ve seen, but I’d, I, I wanna see like a running scorecard for 2024 and see <laugh>, see what what feature ends up winning.
Swati Bagri:
Nobody’s gonna tell you Control C, control V, like F.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. That’s great. So I guess the last last question we always have, how can, how can people connect with you?
Swati Bagri:
Look, I am very approachable on LinkedIn. I’m quite responsive, I would say on LinkedIn. If people don’t want to connect on LinkedIn, I’m also available on Top Meet. I do have keep my mentorship sessions open. It’s a very limited slot because obviously I I also have limited time to provide these mentorship sessions, but I love interacting with people, so anybody looking to create to move into the world of finance, have no clue how to do it. I love to talk to you. So yeah, these are two places I am reachable and my email id if you need is swathi b6 at gmail com. I’m even available there.
Glenn Hopper:
Great. Great. And we’ll be sure and include those in the show notes too. So well, this, this was a great episode. Really enjoyed it. Thank you Swati, for being on the show and for sharing your insights and experience.
Swati Bagri:
Been an absolute pleasure.
