Establishing A Mission, A Culture And Trust Is Key To Building A High Performing FP&A Team With Aswin

In this episode of FP&A Unlocked, host Paul Barnhurst sits down with Aswin Saravanan, VP of Finance at Qualtrics, to explore what it really takes for FP&A teams to move from insight to action. Aswin shares why trust is the foundation of strategic finance, how culture and vision enable better decision making, and why simplicity in financial modeling often delivers the greatest impact

Aswin is a strategic finance leader with over a decade of experience across global technology companies. He specializes in connecting strategy to execution and helping finance drive business outcomes. Currently the VP of Finance at Qualtrics, he brings deep expertise across corporate, product, and go-to-market finance. He has previously held leadership roles at Microsoft and HubSpot.

Expect to Learn

• What great FP&A looks like as a strategic business partner

• Why is trust required to move from insight to action

• How culture and vision shape high-performing FP&A teams

• The importance of simple financial models over complex ones

• How FP&A teams create strategic value that influences the future

Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:

• “Taking something from insight to action requires trust. Without trust, nothing really moves.” - Aswin Saravanan

• “Great FP&A is when the team can be a proactive strategic partner and actually change the trajectory of the company.”- Aswin Saravanan

Aswin Saravanan shares practical insights on how FP&A teams can move from reporting to truly influencing business outcomes. By building trust, setting a clear vision, and keeping financial models simple, finance leaders can turn insight into action. The conversation reinforces that strategic value comes from helping the business make better decisions about the future.

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Explore Campfire today: https://campfire.ai/?utm_source=fpaguy_podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=100225_fpaguy

Follow Aswin:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aswinsaravanan/

Company - https://www.linkedin.com/company/qualtrics/

Earn Your CPE Credit
For CPE credit, please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions and earn your CPE certification. To earn education credits for FPAC Certificate, take the quiz on earmark and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.

In Today’s Episode

[03:56] - What Great FP&A Looks Like

[05:23] - Why Finance in Tech

[07:20] - Outcome-Based Pricing Risks

[10:49] - Leading Finance at Qualtrics

[13:13] - Culture and Vision in FP&A

[17:16] - Building Team Culture

[22:47] - Trust and Core FP&A Skills

[26:18] - Defining Strategic Value

[32:39] - Driving Operational Excellence

[34:37] - Simple Financial Modeling

Full Show Transcript

Host: Paul Barnhurst (00:38):

Welcome to FP&A Unlocked. Excited. You have chosen to join us for another episode. Are you tired of being seen as just a spreadsheet person while others get a seat at the table? Well then welcome to FP&A Unlocked, where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, also known as the FP&A guy, and each week we bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FP&A in today's business world. Together we'll uncover the strategies and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. Speaking of impact, our title sponsor for FP&A Unlocked is Campfire, the ERP. That's helping modern finance teams close, fast and scale faster. Today's guest is someone who's earned that coveted seat at the table. I'm thrilled to welcome Aswin to the show. Welcome to the show.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (01:38):

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. I'm very excited for our conversation today.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (01:41):

Yeah, no, I'm really excited as well. So lemme get a little bit of background. Aswin Ana is a strategic finance executive with over a decade of experience driving impact across technology companies at every stage from early growth to global scale. He specialises in connecting strategy to execution, ensuring finance plays a pivotal role in shaping business outcomes. He is known for his close partnership with C-Suite leaders, aligning financial insights with operational strategy to accelerate both top line and bottom line growth with deep expertise in financial planning and analysis. He leads key rhythms like long range planning, forecasting, and performance management, always with a focus on clarity, accountability, and collaboration. Currently, Aswin serves as head of FP&A at Qualtrics, where he brings global leadership experience across corporate product and go-to-market finance. His past roles at Microsoft and HubSpot have sharpened his ability to deliver proactive strategic value through finance. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree in engineering from the National University of Singapore and is a former CFA charter holder. So again, welcome to the show.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (03:00):

Thank you, Paul.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (03:01):

Yeah, no, excited to chat with you. I love the background. I love the guitars back there. It looks fun.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (03:05):

Oh, absolutely. I'm on a journey to learn to play the guitar and that's probably going to take me a few decades to get there.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (03:12):

Well, let me know when you get there. I didn't try the guitar. I did the piano for a few years. When I started, I was pretty much tone deaf and terrible at music. I can now at least peck out a few notes.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (03:21):

I'm still tone deaf, so Yeah.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (03:23):

Yeah, my funny story and then we'll get into the actual podcast, you'll get a laugh out of it if you struggle with music. I still remember one time when I was early, I had a roommate and I was taking piano lessons and I'm out practising and he was quite musical and I was off one note and I didn't even notice. He's like, you do realise you're off one note every key you're playing and I'm just like, okay, I'm never going to get this. There's how bad I am. It's bad enough now that whenever I sing, my daughter asks me to stop.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (03:49):

I just play by myself so no one can hear me. So I think we're on the same board here.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (03:53):

Well, hey, we have that in common. We got FP&A in our musical talents.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (03:56):

Absolutely.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (03:57):

First question we ask every guest this, tell me what great FP&A looks like from your perspective. What does that look like? What is great FP&A?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (04:04):

I think great FP&A for me is when a team can be a strategic partner to the business. When the FP&A team can be proactive and bring insights that change the trajectory of the company, be it on the expense side or on the income side. A great FP&A team helps the company hold itself accountable to goals, be it short-term, long-term financial goals for the company and the FP&A team that really works, solves for the company always above any function that the team support. So those are the four key, I would say FP&A value drivers that any great FP&A team should espouse for a strategic, proactive accountability and focused on company outcomes. And as I said, a great AFIN team can truly change the trajectory of companies for the better, be it on the top line of the revenue side or on the profitability side.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (04:59):

Thank you, I appreciate that. I like how you broke it in the four categories and the idea that we can help with both the top line growth with profitability with many different areas, we can make a real impact. I know for you, you've spent most of your career with large tech companies, obviously Microsoft, HubSpot, Qualtrics, what is it you've liked about the tech space? What's kind of kept you in that space? I

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (05:23):

Think there's two vectors to that question. Why the industry and why finance or fp and e in that industry? I think tech is just exciting. Tech is just something that keeps evolving. Tech was, I would say licences and servers 30 years ago. I dunno, 97% gross margin on licenced software that evolved to SaaS businesses with seat based pricing that then evolved into cloud infrastructure hosting businesses that was consumption based and now we're getting into an AI world where you want to a price based on outcomes. So as you can tell, doing finance in the technology industry is very exciting because that keeps evolving every few years and what value it is for the company. So you get to tackle really interesting, exciting, future focused problems and opportunities as a finance person being in the tech industry. That could be revenue growth challenges in the 50 to a hundred percent growth if you're in early stage or billions of dollars of revenue problems or opportunities or multimillion hundreds of million dollars in expense profitability opportunities and problems that you can solve. So to me, the industry is always dynamic. It's always evolving, which means the finance job evolves. There's a lot of innovation and great thinking that a finance leader can bring to the tech industry. So that's why I love being in this industry. I love doing finance in this industry. There's never a dull moment.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (06:45):

I like that. Never a dull moment. There's one thing you said that I'm curious to get your thoughts, right? We've moved, you talked about the whole pricing history from the old server based and 97% margins and you had this five-year agreement or whatever and it was all on-prem to right now we're starting to see more and more with ai, this whole outcome-based pricing. What excites you, what scares you about this outcome-based pricing? I think it's definitely a different model with its own set of risks and challenges, and I'm sure you've seen some conversation maybe dealt with some of that on your end. So I just love any thoughts on that.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (07:20):

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's one thing that really excites me and one thing that really scares me. I think the exciting thing is that you get to price and charge customers as close to the value as possible that the customer receives from the software. If you think about the trajectory, customers bought licences and they were gone forever, then they bought seats, then you had to keep them continually engaged to get value. Then with consumption you got even closer to value. They were using the product, they were getting value, and now you're getting to AI where a customer has to see the outcome for you to be able to collect on the thing that you're selling them. To me that is exciting because at the end of the day, the use of technology is to drive business outcomes and customer value. So that is the most exciting thing.

(08:02):

You can't hide behind something that you sell once and collect on revenue for years to come. So that's the exciting part. The challenging or the scary part is how you forecast the business, be it to a customer who wants to buy software and they're like, how much software do I need to buy? You don't know because how much outcomes are you looking for? How successful is that going to be? It introduces more levers from a forecasting perspective of how do you even size this deal? How much did they buy? And from an internal revenue forecasting perspective, you add more degrees of freedom in terms of how you forecast the business. So that makes it challenging, but I think it's another challenge that a good finance person is going to be up for as we see this evolution in transition. But it is a bit scary because there's going to be a lot more volatility, far more than the consumption world as we moved into kin based pricing.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (08:52):

I agree with you. I think that's the part that makes me the most nervous is the challenge of forecasting it. Like you mentioned, the exciting part is we're getting closer and closer to value-based pricing, which almost everybody will agree from a business standpoint is kind of that holy grail of I'm charging you based on the value you're getting as a customer. That's great too because you can be like, okay, I know I'm getting value versus I think I'm getting value. Maybe I'm getting value. Now you can look at it and see that value the more transparent and the closer it is to value-based pricing.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (09:29):

Absolutely, and as you do that, you have direct trade-offs and implications in your p and l as you make resource allocation and investment decisions because this outcome here means that I don't need to spend here. So the ROI for a customer is far more apparent as they look into technology transformation that involves outcome-based pricing.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (09:49):

A hundred percent agree that ROI is easier and as a salesperson, I'd love to be able to have that and be like, look, I can clearly show you're getting a six to one return on your investment now if you're not getting that, then we're doing something wrong and let's have a conversation versus I'm pretty sure we can give you value. We have a great product.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (10:08):

You're talking about good software and good salespeople, but the flip side of that is you need to deliver on it or the customer is going to come back a few months later and then show you that they have not gotten value because it is so transparent and it is so obvious. So it's a double-edged sword for sure.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (10:23):

A hundred percent agree. The scary part is if you don't deliver, you can have much higher churn, you better make sure when things go wrong. I think there's a lot more risk in an outcome-based pricing.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (10:36):

Absolutely.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (10:36):

It'd be fascinating to watch, but it's exciting. So today you head up FP&A for Qualtrics. Love to know a little bit of what your experience has been like, how long have you been there, and maybe just talk a little bit about the experience so far.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (10:49):

Absolutely. I've been at Qualtrics now close to a year. I'm just shy of a week to get to a year. It's been an awesome journey at the company. I think some of the past of Qualtrics, the company was about to go public. They were acquired by SAP, that was a couple of years. They went public and then they were picking private by Silverlake, which is one of the foremost and the largest tech PE firms in the us and I get to work with really smart people across the board, my team, my peers, leaders, Silverlake and the other board members in the other PE firms. I love the people in the company. I love my team. I think everybody really wants Qualtrics to win and succeed and is willing to go above and beyond to get things done. It's a great atmosphere to be in On the work side of it, I think there's the same thing that I described about the technology industry is also true for Qualtrics.

(11:46):

Qualtrics has been through a lot of transformation. We've created a category of experience management. We bring tonnes of value to customers in their customer experience programme or broadly experience programmes for employees, customers and strategy and research. And as we think about the future, we just recently announced a large acquisition that hopefully we close in the next several months and we'll look to integrate that. So the diversity of finance challenges and opportunities is super interesting to me as I think about my team's work in enabling Qualtrics to succeed. As I said, being strategic partners with the business, being proactive, partners with the business, holding ourselves accountable to delivering on short and long-term goals and finally caring about Qualtrics and its success. So it's an exciting time to be here and I've had a great time so far.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (12:32):

Awesome. And yeah, acquisitions always bring a whole set of challenges, so good luck with that. Hopefully that closes and integration goes smooth. They're

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (12:41):

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (12:42):

Yeah, it's definitely great opportunity to learn. Acquisitions are a time to learn and grow, but they can definitely come with their own set of challenges. I want to jump into a little bit of a culture and vision. So when you and I chatted, we talked a little bit about this and something I think we both agreed on is fp a and finance professionals, we do not focus enough on one, creating that strong FP&A culture but also having a clear vision of where we want to go. So I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (13:13):

I don't think either vision or culture is an absolute necessity for any organisation or company. I think the key differentiator is what the nature of the work that a team does, and I'm not going to narrow it down to fpn hs yet. Is it transactional? Is it well-defined? Is it a set of steps? Is there a standard operating procedure that a team's going to have to follow to achieve the outcomes for the company or for the team? If that's the case, I don't think you need a vision or a culture because you know exactly what everyone in the organisation needs to do. But if you're in an organisation that the goals of the organisation is less well-defined and you need everyone aligned and working towards the same direction, I think the culture and the vision truly help set up decision mechanisms and create alignment in the organisation.

(14:07):

I like to think about this in terms of an analogy. Think about a team whose job it is to climb stairs. You leave the people at the bottom of the stairs and you say, yeah, get to the top. And I think there's one path and you'll see the people take the steps and get to the very top and the job is accomplished, well done. There's not a lot of benefits or efficiencies that you'll see in that. Now think about a more complex analogy where you have a bunch of people on a rowboat in this middle of a lake and you say, okay, get to the shore and you're going to have people rowing in different direction, different rhythms. The boat probably isn't going to move because you don't know where you're headed and how you're headed there. A vision in this situation for me is the direction.

(14:52):

You have someone at the front pointing the entire group, we're headed in that direction and that creates focus for the people on the robot. And to me that is the vision, making sure everyone understands where we're headed. Culture for me is how is everyone rowing together? Even if you have the right direction, if people have their own rhythms of rowing, there's going to be inefficiencies that does not allow the robot to get to the shore in that direction in the fastest and the most efficient way possible. To me, the culture in that situation is someone instructing when you need to be at the top, when you need to be at the bottom. I don't know the technical terminology of rowing, but it essentially coordinates everybody on the robot to head in the same direction. To me, that's what a culture does. Taking this back to the team for FVNA, the four things that I talked about, and you're probably getting a sense of it by now, that's my vision for NFP&A function or my team.

(15:49):

It is to be strategic, proactive, hold accountability and care about the company. To me that's the vision or the direction, but these are very nebulous things. People could have their own interpretation of how you get here and that's where the culture really helps. So you create a culture within the organisation that provides the most seamless, most effective and most efficient way for the team to achieve the vision that the FP&A team is capable of in the context of the broader company. So I think it truly helps align the vectors. It simplifies decision making as I said. So people aren't wondering, should I do this? Should I do this? If there is doubt, you look at the vision and you look at the cultural tenets and you simplify the decision making process. So all of the decisions that get made are generally aligned in the same direction. So to me that is a critical element of how you succeed as a team.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (16:40):

Thank you for that. And so how do you focus on, you come into a new role, how do you focus on creating that culture or making sure the culture's strong? Because every company's going to have a culture, but you can still have a subculture and your team needs a culture that should fit with the overall company's culture, but it has its own kind of flavour to it. So when you come into a role, any thoughts of how you create a strong culture, what kind of things do you do? And then any thoughts on vision as well, but maybe we start with culture or even just how you focused on it today at a Qualtrics. Yeah,

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (17:16):

Absolutely. If you're fortunate enough to walk into a company that has strong culture, that's awesome. I would say first evaluate and look at your team and peers around them and see what parts of that company's well-defined culture you see embodied in the organisation. And hopefully you can see a lot of the company's culture and how the teams work together. Then you're thinking about the, I think the vision and cultural elements are intertwined in that you're thinking about what are the incremental cultural pieces that you need for your team to enable them to get to where you think the team is capable of being and their highest potential and where they can bring the most value. And then you think about what are the incremental cultural elements that would help the team get from here to there. I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the elements that I focus on with my team is candour.

(18:21):

Candour is speaking up about what you see, having opinions, being able to create a psychologically safe space for people to disagree with each other, ultimately making each other better. To me, that's an incremental cultural component that will really uplevel the team from Qualtrics people values. Because what I noticed as I came in was everybody that I spoke to on the team had great opinions, had ideas that would really uplevel the work that they did and the outcomes that they achieved for the company. But there wasn't that psychological safety for them to be able to speak up about it or share or even be heard by leaders across the company and just focusing on changing that I think could unlock a lot of value. So that's one cultural element, but taking a step back to answer your question, take stock, take stock of what the cultural composition is of the organisation, and then think about what incremental cultural components are going to help the team achieve the vision that you think the team is capable and not willing to work towards.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (19:28):

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Guest: Aswin Saravanan (20:44):

Yeah, for sure. Going back to the rowing analogy, if you ask me what direction should we row the book, I think it requires an understanding of where the team is and how can that specific group of people bring the most amount of value to the company. So as a leader going in and thinking about vision, you have to define the ideal state and that's not going to be the same for an FP&A team in multiple organisations. The reason being you are looking around to see what are the strengths and weaknesses of peer function, say in FP&A, I think about product operations, I think about revenue operations, I think about marketing analytics. Then you get a sense of how can this FP&A team bring the most amount of value to the company? What are the areas that they should play in?

(21:34):

Where should we build a muscle and where should we maybe scale back because there's not enough value in that. So I think the first step is to define the end state, and this comes from discussions with peers, discussions with the team, with the leadership team, and getting a sense of where is value that this team can deliver and then synthesising that into a vision statement, let's say, and then talking to the team about it, see if they get excited. Is that important to them? Is that what they want to develop? Is that success for them? I think you have to go through the journey of repeating the vision and getting feedback and honing it and then codifying it and talking about it. So me, all those things are important for me because a vision statement and isolation from a leader is not going to change anything. I think you need to inspire people, you need to get them bought in to what that vision is to be able to get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (22:29):

Yeah, I really like that you mentioned you can't just set a vision and then not talk about it, but let's say you have a culture, you feel like you have the right vision, you're talking about it. What else do you need to make sure your team's performing at a high level? From your perspective, what are the next things you should be thinking about?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (22:47):

I think vision gives you direction and that doesn't help you actually get there. I think there are, I would say a few critical pieces. I can speak about ones that are top of mind for me. The first one is trust and you have to gain the trust of the business that you support, the business partners that you support, and it's a long journey to trust. The trust starts with mutual value, curiosity, understanding of what is important to your business partners to the business, and showing up and delivering value to them in a consistent basis. To me, that creates trust and that trust is the foundation for any progress that you will make together without trust. You could do all you want, but you're not going to be able to take a data to an insight to action. Like taking something from insight to action requires trust.

(23:40):

To me, that's the first one. The second one is obviously as much as we talk about vision and culture, you have to be good at the bread and butter of doing at a predictability in your forecast. Insights on performance, financial frameworks to support decisions, tonnes of frameworks around unity, economics, our Y frameworks, being able to build simple financial models to facilitate a decision for a business partner, translating a business statement into a financial model with the simplest assumptions and drivers to support them. I think those are all critical pieces that you either have on the team or you work to develop and build capabilities on the team. To me, those two are the other next pieces that are absolutely critical to be able to create strategic value.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (24:27):

So if I'm hearing it, you got the culture, you got the vision, you need the trust, and then that, I don't want to say last in the sense that it's last in the list, but next is obviously you have to have the capability. So like I say, you could have great trust, but if you're not capable, it doesn't do you a lot of good. We've all worked with somebody we'd love to go play a game with or go hang out with, but we don't want 'em on our project at work.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (24:51):

Absolutely. I think that's a given. I almost think of all of these as ingredients in a recipe. You miss one of them, the end outcome is going to taste very different and not what you're expecting. So we're talking about them sequentially, but they're all I think equally important. You miss one. I think it veers off in a different direction that you're not ready for.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (25:09):

I would 100% agree with you. I've worked in environments where there's not trust with the business partner I had, even though the company had a good culture, it didn't matter. It was a fractured relationship. We were limited in what we could accomplish. There was clearly not trust there or you've done it. We've all worked with those people that aren't capable and no matter how nice they are, it's really hard when you work with somebody, you're like, okay, they're just not getting it. This is not the right fit for them. They may be great at other things, but this is not it.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (25:38):

Yeah, absolutely. And there's something else that they're great and capable at and I think the kind thing would be to direct them there as well.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (25:47):

Yeah, I mean that's obviously what we always want to be able to do as a manager is try to figure out where they're going to be able to bring value. And sometimes that may be in your department and sometimes not, and that's kind of those things we have to figure out. But

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (25:58):

Absolutely

Host: Paul Barnhurst (25:59):

Leads me to want to talk about strategic value because ultimately all of these things we're doing as an fp a team, we want to bring strategic value. If our work is just tactical, we're missing what FP&A should really be. So I would love to get your take. What does it mean to you? What do you think of bringing strategic value to the business? How do you think about that

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (26:18):

Simplistically? To me, strategic value is anything that influences the future, changes the future. That is the most simplest definition of strategic value. And that could be again, on where you allocate resources or that could be about where you make investments to grow the business. It could be about bringing predictability to financial reporting. It could be any of that. So anything that influences the future to me is strategic value. And the way that I've seen great FP&A teams do that is I think about this value chain of you have data, everyone has access to data, giant Excel sheets, Google sheets, whatever the data was or database is. How do you take that data and analyse the data to come up with insights that then you craft into recommendations to the business that you support? And that could be a go-to market team, that could be a sales leader or a product leader or an IT lead, or it could be the CEOs, the CFO or the board. It's about how do you tell the story with the insights that you have in influence a change in any decisions that the company makes. You don't have to restrict yourself to any decision like where you can use numbers to craft a compelling narrative and change the trajectory or influence a decision that informs the future. I think you're bringing strategic value. It could be anywhere in the p and l or cash. Any domain I think is fair game for strategic value in my opinion.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (27:43):

Thank you, I appreciate that. Can you share an example where you've made a decision or your team that's brought strategic value to the business?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (27:49):

There are actually a few different ones that I could give you a little sense of. The first one, this is in one of my past companies that I worked in, there was a pretty large expense item on the p and l related to commissions that we paid out to partners. As the company was getting bigger, we were realising that the dollars in that expense item was not heading to the right place, was not fueling the success in the future of the company and wasn't being invested in the partners that were invested in the company at that point. This was sort of understood, but the company did not have the right data or the insights to think about where they should go and what needs to change for the company to be able to invest in the partners that will deliver the future of the company.

(28:34):

So my team was able to dig into data. The data itself is not mind bending it's revenue data, it's demand attribution of what revenue came from partners, and they were able to use the data build simple analysis to say what percentage of that expense was going to partners that were active 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and why I was not leaving dollars on the table to make investments in the future of the company and where the company needed to go and partnering really closely with the partner operations and strategy team, they were able to come up with a compelling recommendation to the CEO and the CFO that helped reallocate some of those resources. This was a broad partner incentive change that we ended up getting approved and landing with the ecosystem over several years that unlocked dollars for the company to invest in the right places.

(29:28):

This is just one example there. There's several other examples around incentives for sales and customer success and alignment of those incentives to drive the best outcomes that are also work that my team's done on optimising the go-to-market funnel, the marketing funnel of how much are you paying for leads, how are you converting them into opportunities and to revenue. So I think an FA team, a great FA team can play in any of these domains because yeah, there's tonnes of data and the team has the depth and the expertise to understand this data and be able to drive insights that changes the trajectory of the company in my opinion. So yeah, those are all examples.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (30:09):

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Guest: Aswin Saravanan (31:48):

Yeah, absolutely. The diversity of strategic value that I've seen both at Qualtrics in my past companies, it just makes me excited for everything else teams going to be able to do this year, next year. We're only bounded by the capacity and again, the things that I mentioned earlier around trust with the business to be able to truly bring value back to the company.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (32:10):

Yeah, timed always a constraint and I think you mentioned maintaining that trust always critical. I have one more question I want to ask before we move into our FP&A section where we have some standard questions that I ask of guests. So on your LinkedIn profile, I noticed you mentioned that your team helps drive operational excellence. So two questions. What does operational excellence mean to you and then how is your team driving that? How do you drive that as a team?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (32:39):

When I think of operational excellence, I think about follow through on commitments that we make at the beginning of the year, be it the annual operating plan, financial plan, whatever that is that has elements of product investments following through on product roadmaps and what are we building and delivering to customers. And then there's the go-to market element to it, which is how much are we committing to on sales retention? A financed a great fp A team in my opinion, can really connect the dots from the plan to execution and hold the company accountable to delivering on those right taking go to market. As an example, when we work with the sales team and on the quarterly forecast or the weekly forecast in understanding where the business is headed, you as a great FP&A team can bring a lot of rigour into understanding that and how the plan gets operationalized to deliver on those commitments in the plan.

(33:32):

So I think this again goes back to being deep business partners with the go-to-market team and holding ourselves and our peers accountable to delivering on those commitments. To me that operational excellence can show up in many ways. It could show up in again, data insights that helps us operationalize things better or it could also come from analysing trends and surfacing areas of opportunities or weaknesses to be able to course correct as we go through the year. To me connecting strategy to operations is just being able to deliver on the commitments in year, just partnering with the different functions of the business in achieving that.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (34:06):

So it sounds like really that key is being able to take the plan and help the business execute on it, helping ensure the commitments and the things happen that the plans are in place, the support is there to achieve what you've set out to achieve.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (34:22):

Absolutely

Host: Paul Barnhurst (34:22):

Right. Thank you for sharing that, appreciate that. Alright, so these first couple questions are ones I ask every guest and then some others are customised a little bit. Number one, what is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals should master?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (34:37):

It's one of the elements that I mentioned previously, financial modelling in the simplest way possible. I think there's a lot of emphasis on the last one. Sometimes when I see finance teams go off and build a 20 tab model to answer a question that takes weeks, I think that could be a one tab model that could be done in a day to deliver the same impact to that particular decision. So being able to calibrate how much effort goes into building a model. So I think one of the technical skills is just being able to model a business problem into the simplest way to explain to a business partner, make assumptions and influence a decision, I think is such a critical skillset. Just to reiterate that the two elements of that is being able to model and the second part of it is being able to build the simplest model possible to inform that decision. Both of those things together will dramatically increase the throughput of any team and that ultimately correlates to the strategic value.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (35:34):

Thank you. And I really like how you added the simple part versus just modelling. One of the best sayings I heard, and I can't remember where I heard it, but I always agreed with is keep the model as simple as possible because your business partners will make it more complex whether you want it or not.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (35:50):

Yeah, it's like playing reverse scrabble, I dunno what it's called. It's like removing pieces on the board and still making it make sense to me. That's how you should be thinking about a financial model if you remove a driver, if you remove a click down of depth in the model and it still gives you the same level of accuracy, I think we've over-engineered it, so just subtracting I think sometimes adds a lot more value.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (36:14):

A hundred percent agree. I mean I know they've done studies where they basically say often simple models are close to or as accurate as complex models often creates all sense of precision and I've been guilty of building plenty of complex models, but the more and more I talk to people, the more and more I learn. You just realise the value of keep it as simple as you can.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (36:36):

Absolutely. And sometimes when I think about it, I will tell someone, let's use three cells in Google Sheets to answer this question, or let's not use more than 10 rows, or let's not use more than three tabs. Is maybe a way of talking about model complexity sometimes and I wouldn't always have the context. Sometimes it becomes a little more complex.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (36:55):

Well, I mean if you start simple, it's like I remember I had a professor in grad school, we always had to write the memo as one page and forcing yourself to really think about what's important leads to a better outcome. Even if you end up with five tabs instead of three. Well if you just given no guidance, maybe you ended up with 15 tabs.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (37:15):

Yeah, you actually have to think longer and have more context to be able to build a simple model. Yeah, because if you used all the inputs, this could change this and in many times they're all correlated to one thing that could be a simpler driver. So it requires a deeper understanding in my opinion, to be able to build a simpler model.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (37:34):

I agree. I'm a hundred percent with you. Alright, so what about soft or human skill? What's number one?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (37:39):

For me, I think it's like storytelling and I'm still learning, trying to get better at it. There's a concept of the insight action gap. You could have the best insight that could change humanity, but if you're not able to translate that to action by influencing the ones who should, you're not going to go anywhere or that's as good as nothing at the end of the day. To me, a great FP&A person with great storytelling skills will go far. I guess further in terms of being able to bring strategic value to the organisation or the company. Just compelling narratives, simple narratives that makes people question what they believe with the data that you've brought into convert to insights. So to me, I think storytelling is a critical skill that can set people apart.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (38:30):

Thank you, I appreciate that. As you share in that example, and as Brent Dykes, and I've heard others use this term, that last mile of analytics is where you have to the whole idea of adding insights, call to action value. So often people think of data and they present it to the business, but they don't tell 'em what to do with it and it's hard to influence if you don't have a recommendation, you don't have some kind of action that can be taken away. And that to me is the key part of data storytelling, especially for FP&A professionals, is what's the action? What are we doing with this data?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (39:04):

Yeah, absolutely. Again, even the goal is simplicity. The simpler you can make the data to tell the compelling narrative, you can have all of the data and the appendix. Different leaders prefer different styles. Some of them want to go deep for those, you can go to those slides, but for some it's like simplify the story for me. What are you telling me? What do you want me to do? I trust you enough to believe that you've built the rigour into the model and the recommendation. So sometimes you have to simplify and you have to tell a compelling story to invoke action from the people that you're speaking with.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (39:37):

Agreed. Alright. This is a fun one. I ask almost every guest. If Excel removed one feature tomorrow, which one would cause you the most panic and why?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (39:47):

I'm not sure there is one. Unfortunately, some of the more recent companies that I've worked at, we do majority of our work in Google Sheets, whether you believe it or not.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (39:55):

I knew you were going to say that. I was, okay, fine.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (39:57):

If

Host: Paul Barnhurst (39:57):

Google Sheets remove, but even

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (39:59):

I was going to answer that question too. Even if you do that with Google Sheets, I think there's so many more purpose-built software these days to help you do the thing that we send multiple files and tabs to do, and now there's AI and LLMs. I would say the thing that you were trying to do with Excel, yeah, just put it in an LLM and see what it does. It's probably not going to be great like first go, but you'll figure out a way to be able to do it. Maybe along the way you'll figure out a way to do it even more efficiently and effectively. So that isn't one thing, to your point, that gives me anxiety if it just disappears from all of our standard financial tools because I have hope for the future. Every day I obsess about how can I use AI more, how can I use these LLMs more to make my job easier and I think we'll find a way and that might even be better and more optimised.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (40:44):

What's the biggest thing you're using AI for today?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (40:47):

There's plenty of ucss across my team today. We're constantly on the lookout for AI features and software that we use today to make our jobs better or purpose-built AI software that can integrate with our work and give us a lot more value. We haven't found, I would say great use cases on either of those at this point, but where I use AI today is I use the Gemini deep research functionality quite a bit. When there is an interesting business problem, there's an interesting translation of a business problem into a financial assumption. I usually go to Gemini and I ask it to give me a thorough research report on a particular topic. We actually used it a lot as we went through planning, as we were thinking about areas that we wanted to transform change to get ideas. So I think of Gemini deep research as an intern sort of consultant that can help you think about a problem or an opportunity in a structured way with lots of data, lots of research that's already out there. That process took a lot longer and you had to be careful about the sources. So I think that's where I get a lot of value. But these are high value, low frequency use cases. Obviously I use AI for a lot of summarization, communication type things that everybody does. I'm always on the lookout for higher value use cases for FD and a that. Yeah, I haven't chance to upon many at this point, but yeah, looking do around more.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (42:13):

Got it. No, thank you for sharing. All right, we're going to move into the personal section here. I'm going to ask you a couple questions about yourself. When you have free time, when you're not working, what's a favourite hobby or passion of yours?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (42:24):

Yeah, I dunno if I mentioned this earlier. We live in Seattle, which the outdoors are amazing for when it's not fully covered in clouds. So in the winter I ski a lot. In the summer we hike and kayak. In the fall we go hiking and backpacking and we try to bike through the air, me and my wife. So we really enjoy just being outdoors and doing things in the nature, trying to do more and more of it.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (42:48):

Nice. Yeah, always great to get out of nature. Seattle's a beautiful area. I love Washington, was up there, took my daughter there for a little kind of celebration of the end of the year up to Seattle. We had a good time. So it's a fun place.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (43:01):

It's always nature when the sun is out, which it's been out a surprising amount this winter. It's really sunny outside right now, which is why I'm kind of squinting. But yeah, when the sun is out in Seattle, it's celebration.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (43:11):

Well, it's Friday afternoon, so hopefully you get to have some fun this weekend and the sun stays out. I know Washington and Seattle, you don't get a lot of it.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (43:20):

Yeah, fingers crossed.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (43:22):

I hear you. When I went it was nice and sunny the whole time, so it was really fun. Okay, so if you could have dinner with one person in the world today, who you taken and why?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (43:33):

I'm going to assume one person in the world today is alive and is able to have conversations. I thought about this one a decent bit. I think it's a lot of pressure to meet somebody famous or someone that you admire and sit them down in a dinner conversation, ask them a bunch of questions. I don't think they're going to have fun, especially with podcasts and so much more media out there today. If I want to understand someone that I admire, I feel like there's enough content out there. So if I got to have a dinner, hopefully it's a free dinner somewhere. Nice. I probably have dinner with my wife. We enjoy spending time with each other. I love listening to her and we bring so much insight into the conversation. So yeah, probably just have dinner with my wife.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:07):

Good answer. I have had that one a few times, so I like it. Alright, so if you could offer our audience one piece of advice that would help them be a better business partner today, what would that be?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (44:21):

Ultimately, it's about the trust element and I can offer one maybe tactical advice to build that trust. I would say be curious, just be curious. Be curious about the business, about the function that the business partner leads, supports. What are their challenges? What are they thinking about? What's top of mind for them? Where do they need your help? Just ask questions and follow through as you ask questions and they're interested in a few pieces, go back with some sort of value and be more curious. That builds trust. Just knowing that someone cares about what's important to you and is able to bring value is the single biggest trust builder in my opinion, particularly in the finance function. So just wins and repeat that and you'll be a great business partner in no time.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:10):

I love how you said value and curiosity. What it made me think of is the book, if you ever read How to Win Friends and Influence People, nothing better than hearing your own name, showing interest in someone. Genuine interest creates trust and opportunities that you won't get otherwise.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (45:26):

Yeah, absolutely.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:27):

Alright. If somebody wanted to contact you or maybe learn more about you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (45:34):

They can reach out to me on LinkedIn. It should be easy to connect with me and drop me a note and if you have any questions or if I can help you with anything. Perfect.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:41):

Well, thank you so much, Aspen for carving out some time. I've enjoyed chatting with you. It's been fun to have you on the show and I'm confident our audience will get value out of this. So thank you so much for coming on.

Guest: Aswin Saravanan (45:51):

Thank you so much, Paul. I really enjoyed our conversation as well.

Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:55):

That's it for today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A  unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com. Downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A guy, and I'll see you next time.