The Go-To-Market Strategy for FP&A Pros to Drive Growth using Operational Metrics with Rohit Divate
In this episode of FP&A Tomorrow, host Paul Barnhurst welcomes Rohit Divate, to discuss the intersection of finance, operations, and the high-growth startup world. They explore how finance leaders can partner with teams to drive growth while maintaining sustainability, the role of AI in finance, and the importance of communication and trust in leadership. The conversation dives deep into the challenges and opportunities faced by finance professionals in high-growth environments and provides actionable insights for those navigating this fast-paced industry.
Rohit Divate is a seasoned finance leader with expertise in high-growth SaaS companies. Having raised over $500 million and driven revenue growth from $20 million to over $500 million, Rohit has a deep passion for improving finance team effectiveness and is especially active in the AI space. He currently serves as the head of operations and finance at Sprig, an all-in-one product experience platform.
Expect to Learn:
How finance can act as a strategic partner to drive company growth, especially in the early stages.
The importance of balancing growth with sustainability in high-growth SaaS companies.
Key metrics and strategies for scaling operations and go-to-market efforts in early-stage startups.
Insights into how AI is changing the landscape of finance and operations.
Tips on building trust and accountability within teams to ensure collaborative success.
Here are a few quotes from the episode:
"You need to build trust with your teams before you can build accountability. It’s not about numbers, it’s about relationships." - Rohit Divate
"AI is going to be a game changer. Right now, we’re still figuring out how to use it in finance, but I’m excited for the day it makes me 10x more productive." - Rohit Divate
"In early-stage companies, you don’t really know what your metrics are yet, but you can always measure improvement." - Rohit Divate
Rohit shares valuable insights, real stories, and practical advice for anyone in finance, particularly those working in high-growth startups. If you’re looking to understand the dynamics of scaling a business, driving sustainable growth, and partnering effectively with teams, this episode is for you. Rohit talks about what’s worked for him, the challenges he’s faced, and the key lessons he’s learned throughout his career, offering actionable takeaways for aspiring finance leaders.
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In Today’s Episode
[03:41] - What’s Great FP&A?
[06:13] - Growth Challenges
[14:26] - Product-Market Fit at Pre-seed
[17:37] - Go-to-Market Strategy for Growth
[27:54] - Building Trust Through Action
[32:02] - Why Rohit Loves Equals
[35:17] - CFO’s Guide to AI Scaling
[46:49] - Biggest Opportunity for FP&A
[50:18] - Fun Questions
Full Show Transcript
[00:01:53-00:01:54] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka FP&A guy, and I'll be guiding you through the evolving landscape of FP&A . Each week we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your FP&A journey, this show has something for everyone. So this week I'm thrilled to be on the show. Rohit. Rohit, welcome to the show.
[00:02:28] Guest: Rohit Divate: Thanks, Paul. Happy to be here, big fan. I feel like I've made it being on this podcast.
[00:02:33] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that, I can relate to that. The first person I ever interviewed on a podcast was a Microsoft MVP, and his stuff I had seen on LinkedIn all the time and totally admired him. And I made the comment to him. I go, yeah, I feel like I'm a fanboy right now. And his comment was, no, you just belong. We're all the same. You're just part of the team. And that's what I tell people, right? Just because I share, I.
[00:02:54] Guest: Rohit Divate: Feel like I need a fat guy hat. Do I get a hat after this?
[00:02:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: We can work that out. I need to get some more orders. But you give me the address in an email, and when I get my next shipment, I'll send you one for sure. So definitely we can do that. You just gotta promise to wear it.
[00:03:08] Guest: Rohit Divate: Definitely will.
[00:03:09] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Alright, so a little bit of background. Rohit is a strategic finance leader for high growth SaaS companies. With 15 plus years of experience. He's raised over 500 million and growing revenues from 20 million to over half a billion. He's passionate about AI, focuses on driving Ten-x improvements in finance team effectiveness. He's very active on LinkedIn. I recommend you check out his stuff. He has a lot of great content and he shares clear CFO insights. And every so often he has a good spicy take. You gotta have some spice in there. It makes for fun.
[00:03:47] Guest: Rohit Divate: Definitely. Thank you so much.
[00:03:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You're welcome. All right. What does great look like? According to you, if I ask you to define grade FP&A , give it to me.
[00:03:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah.
[00:03:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: For me, grade FP&A .
[00:03:59] Guest: Rohit Divate: I mean, there's lots of different flavors of FP&A that's talked about, right? So what people considered an FP&A back in the day, pure kind of bean counting finance. Now there is a new flavor of strategic finance. And now there's a mix of both. Um, so for me, when I think about what great FP&A is, it's really about accelerating the business model, you know, about growth. So specifically in my world of SaaS and smaller companies that want to grow fast, it's how do you get them to the next level as fast as possible? And then also how do you get them to the next level with that sustainably as possible? So that's what that's what great means. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes in there. But these are like the detail, the tactics really matter. I talk about this a lot in terms of like, oh, you need a really good strategy. It's like, what does strategy mean? You know, strategy is basically a bunch of tactics like your go to market model, how you get opportunities, how do you close them? How does your financing work, all those things. So the biggest thing is to accelerate growth and not run out of money. That's the key thing here.
[00:05:08] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like that one. So don't run out of money. That's a bad thing.
[00:05:11] Guest: Rohit Divate: Definitely.
[00:05:12] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah I was talking to somebody I think it was today. We're like, right at the end of the day, as long as you still have cash coming in, just about nobody shuts down a business, right? You might sell off, decide to liquidate because you can add more value, but nobody's shutting down and just going home if they have cash to continue to operate.
[00:05:30] Guest: Rohit Divate: Right. Definitely.
[00:05:31] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So and I'm sure you see that having worked in SaaS high growth, you went through the growth at any cost phase that SaaS went through. I'm sure you saw a few things.
[00:05:42] Guest: Rohit Divate: 2015 was a period, 2021 was another period. Luckily, I think both times that I went through that, I was at companies that were a little bit more pragmatic in our growth, and we didn't kind of burn through everything. But I definitely, you know, when 2021 came around, it was a crazy era and people were just growing. You know, companies were just going from, you know, zero headcount to 1000 headcount overnight. And then we kind of saw the downfall. So you definitely have to keep both of them in mind.
[00:06:12] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And what did you think as you watched that in 2015 and 2021? Were you expecting a lot of companies to crash and burn or, you know, kind of surprised by that, you know, kind of growth at any cost mentality. What was your take as you were watching that unfold?
[00:06:26] Guest: Rohit Divate: I mean, you kind of look at it from the outside because you're not in and you're like, wait, are we doing something wrong here? You know, as a business like, well, how are they growing so fast? What's going on in that business that they can do that? And you start to think when you look at the numbers, when you look at the unit economics, you start thinking about, well, this could be possible, but it's unlikely that this is going to be sustainable. And then for me, when I internalize all that, it's like, well, you know, focus on and I tell this to my kids, to my four year old, two year old, it's like, focus on yourself. Like, do focus on your business. Focus on growing your business, and everything will fall into place. So that's what I was doing. I was like focusing on ourselves, focusing on, you know, on what we could do to grow our business in a sustainable way that, you know, we could grow, we could raise the next round if we wanted to, or we could get to cash flow, break even or positive if we wanted to. That's what I focus on the most.
[00:07:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I love how you said focus on yourself, right? You focus on what you can control. I mean, if someone else is able to grow that fast, they're able to do it responsibly and continue it. Good for them. Teach me what you're doing. Let me see if I can say take something away from it. But rarely do you benefit by spending all your time focusing on others. Maybe a little bit. Give our audience a little bit about your background. You're a little bit of your career journey. How you ended up where you're at today.
[00:07:42] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. Let me take you all the way back. So let's go back. I think it'll help you inform where I'm coming from. So I grew up in India, moved to the US in the 2000 and right in that 2000-2010 era. We had a lot of changes in those ten years. You know, we had the.com boom and bust and then we had the great financial crisis. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do in my career, that whole period kind of stuck with me in the sense that there was a lot of money moving in. And I thought, you know, if I could just be around money, understand how it works, understand businesses, I could make a career out of it and kind of understand the world. And that's how I kind of got into finance. And my first role, I remember I worked at this large public company and it was funny, like I was just working on one line of cogs, you know, that's it. And I didn't understand it at all. I was miserable, I was like, oh, I don't know what this is like. How does the business work? And that's after that I decided, you know what? I have to do this startup thing. And that was not new at the time, but it was definitely new to me. I was like, I'm going to go into startup, up, figure this out. And that's when I started doing startups. So I did a bunch of them. Um, more recently I was at a company called gusto for about seven years, uh, in the finance org, and now I'm at a company called sprig for the last three months, uh, doing operations finance. It's been an exciting time. You know, like, I've been mostly in startups, and I feel like startups are just so exciting because there's a new problem that comes up every day, and you're just coming up with solutions all the time.
[00:09:12] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It sounds like it's that solution thing that really attracts you to the startup. And when you were working for that large company where you only get to see this little thing, you have this little process, you're pretty miserable.
[00:09:23] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, I would say that, you know, even a large.
[00:09:24] Guest: Rohit Divate: Company, you can do that. But when you start, there's so many things that come at you, you know, like you're solving problems on the go to market side. You're solving problems on the headcount side, you're raising money. You're looking at metrics. Some days you have to, you know, build a desk and you're like, okay, like we have to figure out this office situation. So there's just so many different things that go into it that just I think that's what keeps it very, very exciting for me.
[00:09:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I was talking to somebody today that, you know, in the small business space and they mentioned how their retail every Black Friday he's helping pick and pack in the warehouse. All right. They're a small business. That's what you do.
[00:10:00] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah I mean that's the thing with me. It's like I'll do anything, you know, if you need me to, you know, watch the mail. Sort the mail. I'll do that. I've done that before. I think that's what a fun piece about a startup is like. That's a small, trivial piece, but what keeps it exciting, I think, is really if you want to dive into one area of the business, you can really go deep and learn and figure that out. And that allows I think the startup uniquely allows you to do that because a lot of larger companies, you know, let's say you're working at a big one of these fangs, like you have your lane and you're going to stick to that lane. It's very hard for you to get out of that lane. But in startups, you can really define what you want to do. And if there's a problem out there, you can go figure that out and you have the permission from everyone to say, hey, you can go fix that problem if you want to look into it.
[00:10:46] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Right. There's pros and cons both ways, different personalities. But when you mentioned, like fixing it and getting to see a lot of things and moving quicker, definitely. If those are things that excite you, you want to be seeing a scale grow. Startup is where to be if you want, you know, good processes, a little more stability. Some of those things generally come with large companies. They just both have their pros and cons for sure.
[00:11:09] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. What do you like? Like you've been around the block. You've advised a lot of companies like where do you see you know you know.
[00:11:15] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So if I went back into like let's say I went back into FBA role, I definitely would want to be with a small company most of my career as far as full time work, not most all my career was large company, so I, I started before I got into FP&A . I worked in procurement for the government. So as big as they come, right, the United States Navy, Department of Defense. Then I went to grad school. After grad school. I worked for American Express for about eight years. Right. Again, huge company. From there I went to a smaller company. Still big. We had about 10,000 employees. About half of those were a call center called Solera. You know, we were a $1 billion plus revenue company. And it was there for a few years. And I went to a company called Digicert that was, you know, smaller than that. So it was kind of each stage. I've kept getting smaller. Then I started my own thing. And so, you know, now I talk to a lot of startups, and if I went back to work for somebody, I definitely would want to be in the startup. The only thing that gives me a little bit of pause, but I do it now, is just the work hours sometimes with startups.
[00:12:13] Guest: Rohit Divate: I mean, I feel like now you hit the stage where, like, you're your own boss, right? Like, you don't want to go back to a startup or a big company. I think that's the ultimate dream for anyone. Uh, especially in finance. I think it's like, be your own boss because you get to dictate your own time. You dictate, you know what you do to solve the problems that come up to you. Um, so that's exciting too.
[00:12:34] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of benefits. I really enjoyed it. I did, uh, you know, entrepreneurship was] my emphasis in undergrad. I'd always thought, maybe someday I'll start my own business. So when it actually came to fruition, it was really exciting. Right. I want to ask you a question. Earlier this year, maybe it was late last year, but you became an advisor for Recall Capital. Tell us about that. What's it been like advising? What do you do there?
[00:12:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, it's an amazing recall for folks that don't know it is a really small firm. Um, it was started by Sarah and Sean, and, uh, and I used to work with Sean at gusto, and that's how we connected. And they focus on B2B companies across enterprise, SaaS, and fintech infrastructure. And they're really at that preceding level, right. When companies are really small and advise them. And a lot of other smaller stage companies too. And what I think is really exciting, uh, from an advisor perspective at that scale, is you're just trying to figure out the business. Um, I've seen some scale, I've seen some growth. So my advice is really around, you know, hey, what does a cat payback need to look like? What does the gross margin need to look like, even like recruiting or hiring? It's like, who do you need to hire and recruit? And what does fund raising look like? And there's a lot of value in that, I think, from people who have operated before. I also advise a lot of companies that are building for the org. It's the office of the CFO or the office of the Chief People officer on products they're selling to people like you and I on what we can use. So you can actually also get product advice. And I really like that because it keeps it fresh. One, I can keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on in the marketplace. And then it's just really exciting to give back. And I think you learn a lot too. So when you talk to other people and you're giving advice, you learn from them on what they're doing and all the exciting things that they're building. So I really, really it's definitely a two way street and I love that.
[00:14:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Awesome. And you mentioned Pre-seed. So I'm guessing a lot of these companies are really trying to still kind of figure out the product. Product market fit is probably one of the biggest things they're working on at that stage, right?
[00:14:36] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, definitely. I will precede even seed. I would say product market fit actually doesn't stop ever in a business. Right. But yes, definitely at any given moment you're trying to figure out what you are building and what are you selling to your customers. And that is core for that precede seed stage. Even series A companies are exactly like who is your ICP, your ideal customer profile, and what are you going to sell them? At what price point and where are you going to find these people? So it's really it's really fun kind of have these conversations with folks.
[00:15:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. No, I love to talk to a lot of people obviously in the, uh, finance software space. I'm talking to new companies all the time, usually a couple a week. And, you know, just talk to one. Actually, last night, funny enough, and I'd met with him a few times like, yeah, we changed where we're going as they got more feedback. You know, they're in that pre-seed, maybe friends and family kind of funding round. And that had changed a number of things and wanted to get feedback. And I've seen that with a lot of companies, they come around a year or two later and you're like, oh, the business has changed, or now we're doing this, or we realized and it's kind of fun to watch and really see how they develop, how they think about things, how they change. I think it's an exciting space and it's very different from the changes. Not that they're not exciting, just different that you'll see in a large company.
[00:15:53] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, definitely.
[00:15:55] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Cool. All right. So I want to ask a little bit about sprig. I've been there I think for six months. Now you're head of operations and finance. So when operations are all you kind of in charge of. What are you running there?
[00:16:08] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. Well let me tell you.
[00:16:09] Guest: Rohit Divate: You about spring.
[00:16:09] Guest: Rohit Divate: First. So sprig is the all in one product experience platform. So what that means is it's really easy to use our platform to collect product feedback, inform product decisions, and really increase the speed of innovation. For a lot of the folks in the UX design and product world. And, you know, a lot of big companies use us. A lot of small companies do, too. We have customers like notion, Robinhood, Hood ramp, all using spring. And for me, you know what my role there for the last three months has been is really figuring out that next stage of growth of the business. So I was like gusto for about seven years, a fairly large company, and it was really exciting. I loved working there. But the earlier stage company, you know, it's completely a different beast like I talked about earlier, right? So for my role here, I think the biggest challenge, you know, we're trying to figure out is growing for any small company. It's all about growth. So going to the market is super important. Scaling the business is super important. So that's the area that I focus on. There's also other areas that I focus on really around the operations side of the business like the people side, the legal IT finance side, and putting in some infrastructure. Um, and then, you know, getting ready for that next level of growth. So that's important too. But the main focus is all around going to the market.
[00:17:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Go to market. We hear that term a lot you know so talk a little bit about how you think about scaling in that early stage and think about go to market. What are things you think about as a finance and operations leader? When you come into a new company and they're like, hey, it's all about going to market, figuring that out, figuring out how to scale. And what are some of the things that where you started that you think about?
[00:17:51] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, I've been to a lot of companies at different stages. So 10 million to 50 million, 20 million ranges and then kind of going up from there in terms of scaling. And the theme has always been, you know, how do we grow. So what are the things I'm doing in going to market early on, especially coming in I think from the finance side. So if I were to break it down, you know, I have this, this framework and thinking about it, which is first, you know, you're thinking about your marketing side of the business, you know, where are you getting your customers first from? Who are your customers? So you know, the number of opportunities you're generating. You focus on that, then it comes to the sales side. If you have a B2B model, right, it's different from a B2C model. So for the B2B model it's pretty much your AES. You know how many AES you have. How's the ramp look like for them? What's the pipeline coverage you need and what's the conversion rate. So focus a lot on those B to SMB. Like I was like gusto. Completely different beast right. Where you're a little bit more inbound. So there's I think different ways to target these in earlier stages.
[00:18:59] Guest: Rohit Divate: It really depends on the businesses. But it's really around, you know, marketing sales. Then you go into the unit economics piece of it, which I really like as well. And that's especially from the finance lens that comes in because a lot of the go to market, you know, you can have Revops do it, you can have other folks do it. But from the finance angle, you start thinking about, you know, what's the payback look like? What is going to be the gross margins of the business? What's the, you know, burn multiple. Um, so you really have that lens where you're thinking about the business a lot more strategically, where a little bit more long term, not in a month or a quarter basis, but from a year basis. And you can bring all of those good things to your partners and help inform, you know, where do we need to go? What do we need to do? How do we target the market, and what does the next year's growth need to look like? So I really like that piece of the go to market of the early stage scaling business, because a lot of unknown and you're just figuring stuff out.
[00:20:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: How do you manage that kind of finance or a leader? Those early days you mentioned unit economics, but what advice for how you should be working with the business and kind of helping it move forward? Because obviously there is a lot of uncertainty. Obviously unit economics, looking at metrics is all important, but how do you really try to work with and influence the business and being that partner they need in those early days.
[00:20:25] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, it's tough in the early days because I don't think a lot of metrics really make sense. Like if you look at unit economics, the rule of 40 is like a great metric that people like to, you know, show a lot. But it doesn't work at an early stage business because you're just investing so much and you have no profits at an early stage, especially if you're in B2B, your CAK is going to be high. Your customer acquisition cost is so high. It's an investment you make and then, you know, you pay it back over 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, you really don't know what's good for your business. You kind of have heuristics, right? If you are, let's say a plg product like growth and product, your payback probably should be a little bit smaller, right? Yeah. Or months because you might have higher churn. If you're an enterprise business, you're selling to enterprises. You can afford to go a little bit more, but it's really hard to figure out exactly where that sweet spot is. So what I like to do, I think anytime this framework comes around is like, are you making improvements on the last period that you're measuring, you have to consistently keep making improvements.
[00:21:27] Guest: Rohit Divate: There's some benchmarks out there, you know, that people post, like iconic posts. Some, um, there's a lot of other great companies that post some, um, where you can see, you know, oh, this payback looks like it's 36, 24 is the average across, you know, 20 million or sub 10 million businesses. You try to try to hit those because, you know, I think that's how you're judged from the outside. But internally you really, you know, trying to figure out the details of the business. And you also ask how to partner and you have to go really deep. You know, I'm partnering with our head of marketing and going deep in terms of campaigns. We're thinking about these different channels of growth. You know, we have 4 to 5 different ones. We'll look at the details. We'll say, okay, where do we want to put our money. What is the biggest ROI we get. So you have to go. I think the partnership has to be very, very deep into the business.
[00:22:16] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. So it sounds like you really need to integrate yourself. You need to be that partner, understand what's going on. And like I said, you know, early on when it's hard to know what your metrics are going to be, it's going to take some time. You know, some general rules looking at benchmarks, looking for improvement. Right. Just because you're not sure where you're going doesn't mean you still can't measure where you're at.
[00:22:37] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. The measurement is key here, right? I think that's also something unique that your partners are going to look for from you, the finance person. And that's because you have access to this data. And we I think in finance you kind of occupy a very unique place in the business where you get to have your hands in everything, not to go to the market side. Right. You have marketing, sales, customer success, engineering, product, G&A, everything. And you are bringing not just financial data, but operational data too. So I'll give you another example. I use this tool called equals. You can use a bunch of these others. And we're now what we're doing is we're pushing metrics down, performance metrics down into slack on a weekly basis. Cases into specific channels for success, marketing sales on what's going on in the business, and that allows people to see where we are. Right? So it's not a black box where, you know, the finance comes around once a month or once a quarter and it says, hey, you overspend and you didn't hit this target. No. You know, we're in there diagnosing things almost on a daily basis. And that helps them understand the business. Everybody you partner with but also helps you understand the business, because then you can craft this mental model or even like a financial model of how the business is supposed to operate. And you can iterate, kind of move things around and figure out, okay, do I want to invest in cash in marketing or do I want more? What's going to yield the biggest ROI? So it's really important to be right on top of the metrics. And that's what I really preach, is you just have to know where your business is, especially as somebody who's leading finance.
[00:24:08] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that, and I agree with you. As finance people, we have to be measuring stuff. And it starts with operations. Just because we're over finance doesn't mean those are the metrics you should be looking at first because as we all know, they're lagging indicators. I think sometimes we forget that and just focus on those leading that you can influence and then review the finance. And if you're paying attention to making changes on those operations, you'll see the improvements. You'll see the positive sign in the financials. And they're more validation that what you're seeing is actually happening. Then they're the thing that should tell you to course correct. Thoughts on that?
[00:24:45] Guest: Rohit Divate: 100%. So the only financial metric that I think you have, you care about or not care about, but like you have ultimate responsibility over is cash. Everything operational is still the most important thing. I think in terms of finance. So 100% agree operational is the key. It is the leading indicator. It is what drives the business. You know nobody's going to care if revenue is X or you know net working capital is Y or you know your cash balance was X. If you don't have the growth, if you don't have the customers, if you don't have, you know, people buying what you're selling. And that all comes from operational data. So I 100% believe in focusing on the operational piece and the financial piece. Obviously, you want to keep an eye on, but it's not it's not the main focus.
[00:25:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that because I think sometimes we forget that, you know, it's easy to be like, well, we do finance. Let's focus all on that. Pnl like you said, cash is the first thing you have to understand. Where's my cash at? Because if you don't pay attention to that, you run out of cash. It doesn't matter how, how, how good you're paying attention to all the other metrics, you're screwed.
[00:25:43] Guest: Rohit Divate: That's right, that's right. You're 100% fired if you don't know where your cash is.
[00:25:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. If you manage to have the company run out of cash because you weren't paying attention. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're going to get fired. That's a sure way. But, you know, beyond that there's a little bit of gray area, but that one, you're gone. All right. So, you know, kind of going back to go to market for just a minute. From your view, how does FP&A help hold the market accountable? Right. We hear all these things go to market often struggling not hitting their numbers. All the challenges that come with growing a company. So any advice from your end? Obviously you need to be integrated. You talk about watching the metrics, but those difficult conversations sometimes and trying to hold them accountable to what they've signed up to. Any advice there?
[00:26:25] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, I have this rule that I try to teach, like folks that join our company, especially in my team, which is you never want to be in a situation where somebody says you have to do something because finance said so, right? Because if you're in that situation, you've already lost. You've lost the script. You're not going to get accountability. So for me, the way I keep folks accountable is with 100% trust. You have to build that trust. And how do you build that trust? You have to do something for them that they want desperately, right? Whether they want to understand their metrics, whether they, you know, you, they want to help to think through an investment that they need to make. You know, you have to, you have to listen. You have to build that trust. And then you build accountability as is part of that. You know, like you're like I said, you're deep in the metrics. You help them expose the metrics. A lot of times, you know, people might not hit the goals because they just don't know what the goals are, or you might not have the right visibility into them or the calculations could be wrong. So you're bringing in a lot of rigor, you're bringing in a lot of expertise and some of that, you know, ability where you've seen the scale, but you have to build that trust. And that's where I think you get the accountability. Obviously, you're going to have your dashboards, your OKRs and all that. Those are all, I think, just scaffolding. But trust is the main thing that I think comes in. And that only happens when you're deep in the weeds with folks and trying to understand what their business and what their challenges are.
[00:27:54] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So can you share an experience where you did something in a job that allowed you to develop that trust? Maybe an example?
[00:28:00] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. I mean, I'll talk about an example right now, like we are again working with the head of marketing. We're going in deep, right? We're going in deep in terms of each of the different channels that we're building. So we're working on a campaign right now where, you know, a campaign idea that I came up with, for example. Then we're putting that in motion. And you don't get to do that in, you know, bigger companies or if you don't have that trust, right. Like, why would you trust, uh, or why would you take an idea from this finance guy to run a marketing campaign? And that's the exciting piece for me because now I have that trust with them, the accountability to say, hey, we're in this together. It's not just your goal. I actually own the goal. So that's another thing I tell folks too, in finance that are on my team is like that. Supporting other members in the organization is somebody, let's say the head of sales miss the sales target, the bookings target. It's like, well, you can't just say they missed the booking target. You missed the booking target too. We missed the booking target. We own the numbers. We're ultimately responsible because we're the one kind of shepherding the business along and holding everybody accountable. Uh, and if you didn't see or if you didn't forecast that we're going to miss it, you know, that's something that you should be on top of. So you own the numbers like I own all the numbers at the company. I will never say, hey, this person missed this, that team missed this. It's we miss this because ultimately, again, it really comes down to finances, owning things and being a really deep partner to the rest of the business.
[00:29:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, if we want to be a business partner, if we want to collaborate, it has to be a we it has to be a team. Can't be missed. As soon as you separate yourself, you're breaking some of that trust and you're removing yourself from the team. They no longer see you as someone that's in it to help them be successful versus, well, that's your problem. I'm just here to make sure you fix it.
[00:29:45] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, and you're never going to get anywhere with that kind of mentality, right? Especially in a fast growing business, you have to be a partner and not a bean counter. Like that's what if you don't want to be a bean counter, especially in finance, like being a partner. Try to help them as much as possible.
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[00:31:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Agreed. And I think that's why a lot of people don't understand the value yet of fractional CFO advisory. You know, having an early stage because many people think, oh, they're just a bean counter, they're just a controller. They're just looking at the numbers. And today, as you mentioned, you know, FP&A has become much more strategic. You know, some people call it strategic finance. Sometimes that's a separate role. Everybody has a different opinion of where you draw that line. But at the end of the day, FP&A needs to be commercially focused. You need to be a business partner. You have to be strategic, not just looking at the numbers isn't enough. All right. So I'm curious, you mentioned earlier one of the tools you love to use as equals. I've interviewed someone who is familiar with it. We'd love to know. What is it you like about that tool? I'm just kind of curious because our audience often comes to me for tool advice as, as you know. So I'd love to know what it is about that one that you like?
[00:32:18] Guest: Rohit Divate: So let's step.
[00:32:19] Guest: Rohit Divate: Back a little. What am I trying to solve here when I use some of these tools? And obviously I think tools are just the mechanism. Like you can use whatever tools. But what we're trying to solve is understanding the business from an analytics perspective, and then also doing analysis. On top of that, you understand it, but you also want to do some customization spreadsheet work. And you know Excel works fine. Google spreadsheet. You can do it in the cloud where people can share information works fine, but it's really about having that automated data. So one thing that equals really allows you is you can pipe this into your snowflake instance, and it brings in the live data as your data changes. So every let's say week over week you have your sales dashboard as those even daily. As ops come in, as deals close, it's automatically updating. And that's not unique. I think any BI tool like Tableau, you can use looker or whatever. But equals to me is really easy because I can write SQL code and I can do all of that without a data team, and that's super powerful. More than that, it allows, I think, for me to push this data down.
[00:33:25] Guest: Rohit Divate: So there's two ways I think people understand information, which is like you either have people pull data where they need to go find a dashboard, you know, refresh that dashboard, understand it, or you can push it. I like pushing as much as possible down to the individuals. So we use equals. They have an integration with slack where I can then schedule a report to the individual or a team, slack on a daily, weekly, whatever basis. And I like pushing that down and that keeps accountability very high. So going back to, you know, how do you keep people accountable? You show them the information, you show them the progress, you show them that you're measuring things. And so I really love that I can customize a whole bunch of stuff on it that I couldn't do on Google Sheets with the data that comes in, so it's just like a nice platform that mixes kind of that. Google sheets mixes some of that by and just makes it easy where I don't need to spend a whole bunch of money integrating something like Tableau.
[00:34:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Sure. So kind of a lighter weight, easier way to do some of your BI and reporting with a spreadsheet environment that you can self-serve for sure. Yeah. And, you know, all of us want tools like that, whether it's equals or any of a number of dozen other tools, as you mentioned, you know, what are you trying to solve with the tool? That's important first and foremost, because the reality is there's pretty much always more than one tool that will solve something.
[00:34:43] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, definitely.
[00:34:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So it's about what works for you. What are your requirements? What's the implementation like? Do you have the right processes and people? Because tools are never going to solve your problem by themselves.
[00:34:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, they won't.
[00:34:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Be nice if they did. I wish they would.
[00:35:00] Guest: Rohit Divate: That's the holy grail.
[00:35:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, exactly. When we get there, that will probably be about the time I retire. That's about how it will work. So I won't get to use them. So I know you're quite active on LinkedIn. You post regularly, and you recently did a post around AI that I'd like to ask a little bit about. So you called it the CFOs Guide to AI Scaling laws and how costs will fall over time. Can you maybe summarize that a little bit? You talk about the three components of scaling. So maybe just walk us through that. I thought that was a really interesting piece.
[00:35:34] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah I'll simplify this a little bit. So just to back up everybody, you know everybody obviously knows ChatGPT anthropic and a whole bunch and how to use them. And now I think about every one of our businesses. So if you're a CFO or in charge of finance, your company is an AI company, right? Whether that's AI, Deeptech or you're using some kind of wrapper, essentially you're a wrapper. Um, but there's an AI component or you're not a company anymore, at least in the next five years. So just like I think you care about your AWS bill, you're probably looking at your OpenAI API bill and you're wondering, hey, how should I think about this? The growth of this cost, um, in the future. Or alternatively, if you have an AI feature in your product, you're thinking about how do I price this? So the scaling laws are really understanding, I think simply how these costs will come down over time. And we've seen that over the last, you know, five years. Um, it used to be very expensive to run these models and they've come down dramatically. Right. So the tokens per cost is another one. So the scaling law is really three different components, which is the data that's used, whether that's, you know, the data we have in the wild or now AI systems are generating synthetic data. So as they generate more data these models get smarter and they need to work, I guess less hard to do the work they need to do. Then there's the size of these models. Larger models take a lot of money to train, but now there's a lot of small models you can use that are very specific.
[00:37:07] Guest: Rohit Divate: Maybe you have a very specific model to do legal work. Maybe you have a very specific model to do for work. I haven't seen that yet, but that would be very exciting. And the third component of I think scaling law is around, you know, how much compute you have. So there's a lot of chip companies out there. Everyone's heard of Nvidia. They have a GPU chip, but there's a lot of other companies too, like Cerebras Grow. They're doing a lot of things around inference and inference. Is that a thinking piece. So, you know, when ChatGPT says, okay, I'm thinking I'm reasoning. And that piece is actually quite expensive, quite more expensive than training. I think the models and having the old models, the thinking piece could be, you know, in magnitude of 1000, even a thousand times more expensive than running the model previously. So I think understanding these things will be helpful for CFOs, because then you can basically say, okay, I see the growth or the decrease in costs over time, and this is how I'm either going to think about budgeting for these or this is how I'm going to think about charging for it. If I have an EHS product. So that's kind of the one on one of the scaling laws. So if you took anything away from what I said, it is that my costs are likely going to keep decreasing. So you should be investing and you should be investing double or triple what you're already investing in. I got it.
[00:38:28] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So the short answer is costs are coming down for three different reasons. You mentioned investing and know that things will get cheaper over time. I think a great example is I don't know if you saw Microsoft has created its own LLM for spreadsheets. Yeah. And it's still early. They haven't really released it, but when they built it, one of the things they specifically mentioned is that it's 95% cheaper than a traditional LM to try to analyze the spreadsheet. Yeah, right. And that's the type of thing we're seeing. These leaps and bounds, leaps, leaps and bounds, if I can speak here. Right. Like deep seek. I think everybody was kind of rattled in the market and surprised. What was it Nvidia lost? Was it half a billion or half $1 trillion in valuation when Deep Sea came out? Because everybody's like, oh wait, maybe we don't need as powerful of chips as we thought we did.
[00:39:18] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. So on that Microsoft end, and that's because that happened because of the data that they're using, right. And the size of the model they're creating specifically on spreadsheet information.
[00:39:27] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yes.
[00:39:27] Guest: Rohit Divate: So that is you don't need as much compute power to do that model, because it's so much cheaper to run a very specific use case. Deep seek. You know, a lot of people think that they and this is, you know, speculation. But a lot of people think they just distill the open AI models, basically took the open AI models, asked a bunch of questions, and then now their model is based on something that already existed. So you actually don't need such a big model to do what they did. So I think there's a lot of things there. I don't know if you saw something else come out recently just about a week ago. And what that does is uses, uh, a whole bunch of different agents, specifically Anthropics, uh, 3.7 model. And it does a lot of work, like very interesting work. And it runs for about 30 minutes during work. And I think that could be something really interesting for knowledge work and especially, you know, what we do because, you know, if you're looking at files, you're matching things or maybe you're doing some finance work like that could get very interesting. So I think there's a lot of innovation on this side. It hasn't hit finance just yet in my opinion, to the degree where it has hit something like engineering where everyone's using, you know, coding, um, programs from GitHub. Um, you have a bunch of others we haven't seen that in for just yet. So I'm really excited for that to happen for our field.
[00:40:46] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, we're definitely not as far along as like the coding one. You know, we're seeing new things. We're seeing more and more of the agents. But yeah, I think a lot of the potential and future is still ahead of us. We're still figuring out all the different use cases and the full benefit of it. When you mentioned, you know, the coding, I don't know if you saw this, but OpenAI had announced and not sure when the release it, but the pricing they're going to offer in the future, three different types of basically workers for you. There's the knowledge worker that's like the entry 2000 a month, there's the coder 10,000 a month. And then there's someone that has like a PhD level reasoning professional that's going to cost you like $ 20,000 a month. Did you see that?
[00:41:31] Guest: Rohit Divate: I did, I did, and I think that's really exciting. Also kind of scary. I don't know where I fall on this. You know, now that I have two kids, I'm always thinking about, you know, what are they going to do in the future if they can't do the work that you can conceptually think about now? Right. So it's good. It's also scary. But I'm here, you know, I like to embrace a lot of these technologies and kind of just, you know, figure out and play around with them because you just have to be ahead of it, you know? Otherwise, I think you get left behind. Have you used the open AI, the $200 model that's out there? I have.
[00:42:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Not. My, uh, partner that for Future Finance I co-host with Glenn Hopper used it. He liked it. He talked about it. I'd say a couple episodes ago, he might even have talked about the one that came out today, but he's discussed it a little bit. He's found he's got more than enough value out of it. I haven't spent as much time as I'd like automating things and different things with AI, so it's not an investment I'm ready to make. How about you?
[00:42:30] Guest: Rohit Divate: I've used it and it's exciting. Here's why I like it. Do so much research for you that you could, you know, you could still research things. You're looking at Google, you're looking at a bunch of different sources. But more than like what it writes, I just like that it finds things for me that I can go and look at And that piece alone is worth 200 bucks, right? But you don't spend 200 bucks like Google has one for, like, I think ten bucks. Um, perplexity now has research grok a bunch of other of these. Everybody has a research piece which is that long thinking inference piece. Um, the reasoning models that I have. So there's a lot to be done there. And I think it just gets more exciting. I'm not sure if I'm ready to pay $20,000 or more for it just yet, but I think it's exciting that, you know, these things are coming out and hopefully, you know, I, you know, with the scaling laws that have kind of talked about these will probably get cheaper and cheaper as you go along.
[00:43:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yep. And I mean, the other thing that's amazing to think about. You know, let's say it's good enough to be a worker for you. It works 24 over seven, right? It doesn't need the bathroom break. It doesn't need to sleep, all those type of things. So it's pretty mind blowing when you start to think of where we've come in the last two, two and a half years with this whole AI journey. I mean, obviously it's been around a long time, but just since, you know, three, five came out.
[00:43:48] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So we're going to move into a section. This is the section where I asked every guest similar questions here. So this first one if I was to ask you what's the number one technical skill that someone in FP&A should master. What would you say?
[00:44:07] Guest: Rohit Divate: Okay. Uh, I like rules of Three, so I'll give you three real quick. So number one is, are you good at modeling? Right. You can't, you know, you have to be creative to figure out what you are going to do in the spreadsheets to get to the answers you need. So that's the most critical, basic skill that you need, uh, in finance. Number two is actually are you good at writing? You know, a lot of work we do. And what I do is a lot about convincing people to do something else. And it's quite useful to have really good writing. So I think that's a core skill set that I look for when I hire . Can you convince me to do something in written format, not just something, you know, we're speaking. And the final piece, I think, you know, we just talked about this is like, are you going to I. Because I think that is going to be useful across all workloads, not just like in technical fields, but also in finance fields. And you just have to know what tool to use, how to use it at the moment. Just because I think you can, you can probably get like two x more productive right now as a finance person if you know how to leverage AI.
[00:45:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, you can definitely be more productive. There's just no question about it. It's a great efficiency tool. So we got modeling, writing and AI. Now let's turn that over to soft skills. What would be your answer?
[00:45:23] Guest: Rohit Divate: Soft skills. Really. Um, you know, part of the job. Half of it is technical, I would say, where modeling and all that stuff. The other piece is really a people relationship job, and I think about myself as more of a therapist sometimes when I'm, you know, working with folks because you really, you know, the number in that skill, I would say is like listening is probably the most important skill is like actually deeply listening and understanding what somebody's saying. A lot of times they'll say something, but they'll actually mean something else. So you actually want to peel back what somebody is actually saying, ask the right questions. Why? What do you mean by that? Let me you know, let's dive into that. Because sometimes what they ask is not what they actually want, right? Somebody might come at you frustrated, but they're actually frustrated about something else. So listening is like a very, very important soft skill. The second one I would say is probably presentation. Um, can you speak to various audiences? Can you talk to, you know, people in your company? Can you talk to the executives in a different level? Can you talk to leadership outside? You know, when you're fundraising board members. So communication is also super, super important along with, you know, that listening aspect.
[00:46:34] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you. Yeah. Now listening is always huge. You mentioned we're in a relationship building Partnering role and we have to be able to listen. We have to be able to tell Storytell and do all those things. All right. I'm curious. If I was to ask you, what's the biggest opportunity for FP&A moving forward is kind of a filter or profession. What would you say?
[00:46:55] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, again, I'm going to sound like a broken record because I've talked about this a lot, which is, you know, I think AI is the biggest thing. So right now, you know, I'm using a bunch of tools for writing. You know, I'll use ChatGPT to kind of refine my writing. Uh, I use another tool for meetings called granola to understand, you know, like to write down notes automatically. Uh, we'll use a bunch of tools in finance as well, like for writing queries in SQL, for example, like we use equals that has AI component. So using a whole bunch of these things and I think it's making me maybe 50% more, maybe twice as productive than I was. But I'm not to the degree where, you know, now you have engineers, you know, you have a concept of like a ten x engineer where an engineer is ten times more productive than the other engineer. And that was the thing that's been around for a while now. And now with, you know, copilot, uh, coding. Now, I don't know if you heard about vibe coding, which is basically people just like, tell the AI, uh, to do the coding, you know, you can get to like 100 x engineer.
[00:47:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: We don't have that in finance just yet. And this is what I think is the biggest opportunity is like, what is the innovation that's going to come out in our world and the tools that are going to come out in our world, which is going to make me like a ten x finance person where I can do ten x, I can solve ten x a problem because there's no shortage of problems to solve. There's no shortage of people, you know, knocking on my door and saying, hey Rohit, I really need your help with this, you know, can you look into this? Can you do this? I'd love to, you know, solve more problems. And I think AI is definitely that next opportunity that we still haven't fully tapped into. And I'm really excited for some of these tools. But also, you know, what else is going to happen in the next five years with AI so that, you know, it just makes me way more productive than what I do now.
[00:48:39] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm waiting for the thing that will make me ten x or 100 x more productive as a podcaster, but something tells me if that happens, I might be out of a job.
[00:48:46] Guest: Rohit Divate: You know, we might even replace you with an AI bot. You know, there's companies out there, Synthesia and a couple others.
[00:48:51] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Ai. Yeah.
[00:48:52] Guest: Rohit Divate: How do I know you're real right now? You know, I don't know if you're real.
[00:48:55] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I am, I'm real. Trust me.
[00:48:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: That's exactly what an AI would say.
[00:48:59] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, I'll let you. Just let you decide for yourself. You never know. Maybe that's how I get three shows done.
[00:49:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You know, it's not just.
[00:49:06] Guest: Rohit Divate: Like I deeply think about this a lot, which is like, what is, again, having kids after that? I think about this a lot more. What does knowledge work look like at all? You know, is this going to be a thing in 20 years when they're out of college? And what about, you know, anything physical labor? Is that going to be a thing? Because I've seen some, you know, uh, examples of, you know, these robotics companies coming out of China and even the US, where for like $5,000, these things are really, really advanced. Uh, and what they can do, you know, like, can they even be plumbers anymore? Can they do construction? You don't know right now. So there's a lot ahead of us. Uh, you know, sometimes I think about it, sometimes I'm like, okay, I can't think about it because it's a little bit too, um, you know, demotivating sometimes. But I think the best thing you can do is, like, keep your eye on the ball, just keep moving forward and see where everything kind of falls.
[00:50:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. You want to pay attention to technology and where it's going, but focus on what you can control, right? None of us can control what it's going to be like in ten years. 15 years, probably even a year, right? So just put your head down, take advantage of what's there today, keep your eyes open for the future and keep learning. All right. So now I'm going to ask a couple, uh, get to know you kind of fun questions. So the first one I'm going to ask if you won the jackpot. Big lottery. Yeah. Tomorrow. What are you going to do with it?
[00:50:31] Guest: Rohit Divate: If I won the lottery, I. For me, travel is super important with the family. I probably do that. I will probably go to Europe, probably Asia, travel around. After that, honestly, I want to keep myself busy. It also depends on how much I'm winning. Like I hope it's not like 50 bucks.
[00:50:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You won the $100 million lottery. There you go. You got plenty of money. You have to worry about it.
[00:50:53] Host: Paul Barnhurst: $100 million one time. Okay, we're talking about big money here. Yeah.
[00:50:57] Guest: Rohit Divate: Definitely traveling and, like, hanging out and then maybe doing something with that rest of the money, advising companies, whatever. But I would definitely put travel at the top of the list.
[00:51:08] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. I like it. If you could have any person's job in the world for one week, what would you pick?
[00:51:16] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, I always wanted to be a pilot when I was growing up if I was in finance. So, um, you know, when I. You saw Top Gun, the latest one?
[00:51:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah.
[00:51:26] Guest: Rohit Divate: I'd love to be in a jet like that adrenaline you get when you sit in that cockpit and they kind of just maneuver around. It just sounds so exhilarating. I love to do that for a week.
[00:51:36] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So I think I mentioned to you I started my career with the Navy. I worked in procurement.
[00:51:40] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Do you ever get, like, sit in a jet?
[00:51:42] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I did not, but a couple of guys I worked with, one of them was qualified to be a back seat test pilot. The other one got qualified to be a test pilot. They were both civilians and they loved it. I did get to ride in a glider plane. That's a unique experience. If you've ever done that, they have no engine. Right. You just get towed up behind a plane to ten, 15,000ft, pull the cord, and you got to use the thermals to keep yourself up.
[00:52:09] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah, I think flying would be really exciting.
[00:52:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It was pretty amazing because you're in this little tiny cockpit where you're just looking over the side and you can see everything.
[00:52:18] Guest: Rohit Divate: Now, does it have, like, full landing gears and all that, or are you just.
[00:52:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Kind of it has.
[00:52:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Wheels and stuff for landing?
[00:52:23] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It's full.
[00:52:24] Guest: Rohit Divate: Plane but just no engine.
[00:52:25] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, just no engine. And so sometimes people will be able to go if you get the right area along the mountains where you can get thermals for five hours.
[00:52:33] Guest: Rohit Divate: Oh, wow.
[00:52:34] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Okay.
[00:52:34] Host: Paul Barnhurst: On a flight, sometimes even longer. Unfortunately, my stomach didn't like it as much as I did, so it was a relatively short flight. And I told my friend, I'm like, you better land or you're going to be enjoying my breakfast. So there you go. There, there's my unique story. All right, we're going to do one more here and then we'll wrap up. Sure. What's your favorite memory from your childhood?
[00:52:55] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. So I grew up in India, um, when I was growing up, and we had this, uh, community, like, really interesting small community. There were about, I think, 5000 people and where you kind of knew everyone. It's kind of like a, you know, the 50s utopia type feel. And I think what I really liked the most when I was growing up is like, you could just be outside playing all the time. I can't. I don't have a single memory of me coming home and not, you know, being inside. I always come home, go outside, play cricket or ride bikes with my friends. And then, you know, my mom would call me when it starts getting dark. You go home, do your homework, whatever. Uh, but that was just like, a very, like, fun and exciting time. You don't really get that in the US too much these days, but I'm really trying to push that with my kids right now is like, let them just, like, get out in the backyard and just play. It's a lot of fun.
[00:53:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Great memory. You know, I remember being outside a lot and playing with my friends and in the yard as a kid as well, and feels like in some ways it's been lost a little bit on the current generation. And so trying to push that I think is important. All right, so as we wrap up here, if somebody wants to learn more about you, or maybe they listen to this and they'd love to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
[00:54:08] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn uh, at or I have a Twitter handle as well. So just find me on LinkedIn. And that's probably the best way to get in touch with me.
[00:54:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Perfect. And we'll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed it. I know our audience will enjoy it. And thanks for carving out some time.
[00:54:26] Guest: Rohit Divate: Yeah. Thank you. Paul. Really looking forward to your hat that you're going to be sending me. But thank you so much for having me on.
[00:54:32] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Really, really. Thank you.
[00:54:33] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I'm looking forward to the next episode. We're both wearing.
[00:54:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It. Yes, definitely.
[00:54:36] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Thanks, Rohit. You have a good one.
[00:54:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you.
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