How to Master Financial Leadership Across Industries

Megan - 00:00:18: Today, my guest is Madhu Jagannathan. Madhu is a dedicated professional with over 20 years of progressive achievements in the areas of strategic planning, E&L management, working capital management, and investor relations. He is a team leader skilled in building, developing, and leading large, diverse groups of professionals. Madhu, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Madhu - 00:01:15: You're most welcome, Megan.

Megan - 00:01:16: Today, our topic is navigating financial leaderships across different industries. Lessons from a CFO's journey at Lobb, Inrix, and beyond. And I'm looking forward to learning about you and from your experiences. So let's jump right in.

Madhu - 00:01:30: Awesome. I love talking about myself. So I'll talk all day long if you like.

Megan - 00:01:35: So just to start us off and so that we have some idea of where you've been over the years, can you just give us a brief overview of your career to date?

Madhu - 00:01:44: I started my career way back in the 1990s. I started in public accounting. I worked at Ernst & Young, and I was exposed to financial audits. And I graduated in the year 1999. And I'll say that I was super lucky because when I came out of college in 1999, the technology industry in India was really taking off in a very big way. There were a lot of U.S.-based technology companies. Think of companies like Intel and Sun Microsystems. They were all setting up engineering centers in India. And lucky for me, they chose Bangalore, which is my hometown. So it just became very natural and logical for me, as I was thinking about what I was going to do with my career, to gravitate towards the technology industry. In hindsight, it all seems perfectly laid out, but it wasn't so obvious back then. And I wasn't even sure what I was doing. But I landed a job with one of the country's leading IT services companies. And what I mean by that is, that Wipro, which was the company that I'm talking about, would essentially be the extended IT arm for a lot of Global 500, Fortune Global 500, Fortune 100-type companies. And so the company was growing like crazy, which meant that I got opportunities and I got career breaks that I was not even ready for. A lot of times I was thrust into roles that I had no idea what I was doing, with little to no training. In a lot of cases, little to no mentorship even. I just got completely... I was completely lucky. And so I grew with the company. I stayed with them for 10 years. It feels like a lifetime, right? A lot of times people will be like, what were you doing with the single company for 10 years? But in my case, it felt like every 18 months or so, I was being given a new role and I was learning a lot. And through that company, I moved to the United States in the 2005–2006 timeframe. And thereafter, I stayed with that company for five years, joined Microsoft once I got my green card, and continued to stick to the technology sector.

Megan - 00:03:46: So you were doing accounting, but with technology industry or within the technology industry, or did you, or were you doing IT type projects back then?

Madhu - 00:03:55: No, not at all. Actually, I started in accounting, but then most accountants typically tend to graduate into more finance-focused roles. And so I grew up what we would call the FP&A ranks over the years and eventually became a Finance Director and then a VP of finance and a CFO. But my roots are still with accounting. I still think like an accountant sometimes.

Megan - 00:04:18: And looking back at your diverse career journey from your early days at Wipro Technologies to your current role, which is at Lobb, is that correct?

Madhu - 00:04:27: That's right. You pronounce it as lob.

Megan - 00:04:29: So can you share a pivotal moment or decision that significantly shaped your approach to financial leadership?

Madhu - 00:04:36: I can think of a dozen, Megan. Let me see which one might be an interesting one to talk about. I'll actually say that when I was at Microsoft, up until that point, I had always worked for large, publicly traded companies that had hundreds of thousands of employees. And then I was really lucky because one day I was called into my manager's office and he told me, look, we have a secret project going on at Microsoft that we'd like you to be a part of. And in order to take that role, you're going to have to sign a special NDA. You'll have to promise that you're not even going to talk about what you're working on with your friends and colleagues. And I was like very intrigued. And as it turns out, what Microsoft was doing back then was building their own PC, which was like quite revolutionary back then. Because if you remember, Microsoft, for the most part, sold their Windows operating system through OEM partners like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Asus, and so on and so forth. They never had their own PCs. And back then, they decided to build their own PC. And they were assembling a team. And I was given an opportunity to work on that project. And I didn't realize how big of an impact it would have on me. Because what I realized once I took that role was that I was working for a little startup. Within Microsoft, no doubt. But at the same time, this was a business that had no product. It had no revenues. There was not even a name for the product. We actually had code names that we were using. The team hadn't decided what they were going to call the product. To see that then come to life, be rolled out across the globe to 30 different countries was so gratifying that at the end of that experience, I told myself, you know what, maybe I need to go work at startups. I was done working for really large multinational companies. And instead, I was starting to look for opportunities that entailed 50, 100, 200 people, early stage venture capital-backed companies.

Megan - 00:06:28: And you've never gone back, right? You're still with small and startup companies? Yeah. I personally agree. I like to wear a lot of different hats at work. So I think it's more interesting to work for newer companies that are smaller in size. I also work at Accenture, which is a huge company. And you were very pigeonholed.

Madhu - 00:06:48: There are lots of professionals out there that I think will do really well in larger companies. And I don't that a startup is meant for everybody. I think there are well-meaning, extremely talented people who do really, really well in these large organizations. I mean, what would life be like if there was no Amazon? And what would life be like if there was no Stripe? These are all very large companies that employ tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of employees and they all need to exist and actually thrive. And I'm really good for them. And I'm very grateful for those professionals who work in those environments and actually are successful. I guess different people enjoy different experiences and I've just taken to startups, that's all.

Megan - 00:07:26: Agreed. So throughout your career, you've transitioned through various companies and industries. So along the way, has there been a particular mentor or maybe an experience that had profound impact on your leadership style?

Madhu - 00:07:41: For sure. One person that comes to mind is Michael Natkin. Michael was the head of engineering for a really tiny startup that was headquartered in Seattle. And I use the past tense mostly because this company eventually got acquired and it doesn't really exist as an independent company anymore. But Michael had been with this startup for many years and I was joining that particular company as their head of finance. And very early on, I reached out to Michael and I basically said to him, hey, you've been with this company for a while. Clearly, you're doing something right. And you surely know how this company works and how the founder thinks and whatnot. Do you mind maybe giving me a piece of advice or two about what it takes to thrive and be successful in this company? And so we went out for a walk on a beautiful summer afternoon. And Michael gave me some really sage advice about how to think about founder quirks, how certain founders have certain types of personalities, and how not to take everything personally. Which in hindsight now was not just relevant for me at that one particular company, but has carried with me to every other opportunity that I've gone to since then. And I think it's by far one of the single most important pieces of advice that I probably needed back in that day. And today, a lot of times things happen that are not exactly to your liking. And I've learned not to take things personally. And I think that's like a superpower. Once you can master that, I feel like you can encounter almost any challenge and still be okay with it.

Megan - 00:09:08: And you've transitioned from roles in tech companies to consumer goods and logistics. So how have you had to adopt your leadership or adapt your leadership style to address the distinct financial challenges and operational demands of these different industries?

Madhu - 00:09:26: I'd say the first thing that's actually common is the fact that you walk in with an open mind and be genuinely curious about how each business works. And that's true no matter whether you're working for a software company or a hardware company, a SaaS business, different business models, usage-based billing and things like that, whatever be the case. I think one thing that's always true and that's worked well for me is walking into that business with a beginner mindset and telling myself no matter how many years of experience I have, there's a really good chance I don't know half of what goes on here and how things stick and how things work. And so I usually approach every business with a sense of curiosity, almost childlike enthusiasm. And I'll go in and say, look, I'm not going to take positions on issues on day one, even if I have a playbook. I'm going to first... Meet as many people as possible, take in their wisdom, and then thereafter start to form a personal opinion about various issues. That's worked true for me. And that's what's allowed me to sort of transition from business model to business model without stumbling along the way. I'd say that that open-minded approach actually helps because sometimes certain patterns that you notice with one business actually apply to a completely different business, completely different industry, completely different business model. There are certain universal learnings. I feel like... That can actually apply. I mean, human beings are human beings. Organizations are organizations. Sometimes you will see how incentives are not aligned, how people are probably rowing in different directions. Those things are also common. And so you can start to watch and find some of these patterns just because you have a lot of years of experience under your belt. That allows you to sort of see around the corner, be aware of your blind spots. Those things have helped as well.

Megan - 00:11:08: And do you have any advice as far as like getting knowledge of the business or getting closer to the business? Do you spend time with important customers or on the floor with operations? How do you learn a new industry?

Madhu - 00:11:22: It all begins with a product. I mean, a company does not exist if it does not have a product that its customers want. And so for me, almost always gravitated towards talking to people who build product, whether it is product managers or engineers, really understanding what is it that this company is building and trying to sell? What is the value prop? Who are your customers? Why do they care about this particular product, the way it stands today? Why are they not choosing to get their problem solved in a different way? I think once you really understand and appreciate that, I think a lot of things start to fall into place. Because from that, you can start to understand what's your go-to-market motion? How do you actually speak to your customers? Do you have an enterprise sales motion? Do you have a self-serve motion? All of those things, they start to fall into place. Once you understand what is the problem statement, what does the product do? How does it help your customers solve their problems? And how do we talk about it? I think that's really usually where I like to begin. And that's what I'm usually most curious about.

Megan - 00:12:19: And can you share specific examples of how your approach to financial strategy and planning evolved when you moved from more established companies to startup?

Madhu - 00:12:30: A plan is a plan, right? At the end of the day, you can put together one of the most sophisticated, elaborate plans, and then you're wrong literally the day after you kind of on the plan. Because you make a whole bunch of assumptions, and then assumptions on top of assumptions, so they start to compound on top of each other. And then one assumption goes wrong. And then soon enough, everything else is out of the window. But that said, you obviously cannot just wing it either. You cannot just simply say, plans are useless. Let's just take it one day at a time. That doesn't work either. You certainly need to have some guardrails and some sense for where things are going. And knowing what the key assumptions are. And once those assumptions change, knowing how to update your plan to reflect the new reality. I think all of that is super important. And so a lot of times I've seen even CFOs that I've worked for, sometimes will... Spend a lot of time agonizing over the minutest of details, overengineering a financial plan, and really getting caught up on the spreadsheet itself. And not just taking a step back and thinking about the big picture as to what exactly is this plan supposed to do. I mean, you have plans for different reasons, right? You can build a plan that you want to share with the board to manage their expectations. You can build an internal operating plan that cascades down targets to different departments and different teams. There are different reasons why plans exist. I think really, taking a step back, asking yourself, what are you planning for? What is the purpose for this plan? And how are you going to actually use it is a good starting point. And then thereafter, asking yourself, what is the level of fidelity that you want in your plan, different seasons, different times? You want different levels of detail or different levels of granularity? And so really thinking about, do you want a big picture plan that is super high level? Do you want something down to like, 85 different drivers that sort of are linked to each other. That's so sophisticated. That it actually literally requires a team to manage it. All of those things need to be questioned and addressed. There's no one perfect answer necessarily, but those are all considerations that one needs to take into account before you roll up your sleeves and say, okay, I'm just going to go ahead and build a plan.

Megan - 00:14:30: And how have you used technology such as maybe advanced ERPs or data analytics to drive financial performance and operational efficiency across the companies that you've worked with? And can you give an example of a technology-driven initiative that made a significant impact?

Madhu - 00:14:48: Certainly when it comes to planning, since my previous question was around planning, I'm just going to start with that particular aspect. There are so many different tools out there, Megan, in market that claim to help you automate and make your business planning process super robust and intuitive. You have folks like Adaptive Insights and Anaplan and Planful. Those are heavy-duty implementations, no doubt, but extremely robust products that have been around for a decade or more, used by thousands of companies, perfectly well-suited for large, complex businesses. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are lots of startups out there, with 20 people, 30 people, very small, nimble startups that are building more modern solutions that integrate well with your ERP system, with other systems like your HRIS system and payroll systems and whatnot, that do a perfectly fine job as well. And really, it does come down to what is your internal bandwidth around driving an implementation like this? How well do you understand your business? Because sometimes if you don't understand, you don't understand your business well enough, and you go ahead and implement the planning system, only to find out six months later that you had not accounted for many different nuances that are super important. So sometimes taking a few seconds to really understand the business before you say, okay, this is how I want to design the planning system is going to be super critical. And then thereafter, really, it's about how much of in-house knowledge you want to have to update and maintain those systems versus when are you going to lean on consultants? Because some tools are so technical in nature, they're almost like an ERP system, you cannot do anything with it unless you actually hire a consultant. And then there are some others who claim that it's so intuitive, it's like managing a spreadsheet, you really don't need to learn a special language, you don't need trained consultants, your analysts on the team can actually do it. So again, the truth is somewhere in between, not everything that is claimed is true. So you have to be careful about how you evaluate it. But that's only one aspect of technology, which is the planning system. You can think about technology in many different ways too, especially these days, a lot of companies you know, want to evaluate the system and you need to be aware of that, but it's not always the case. To be data-driven. They want to rely on data before they make decisions. And a lot of this data is actually non-financial. You're talking about customer behavior data, usage data around your products, things like that. And so there are many, many different systems that are at play at this point. And being able to work with your engineering team, your data engineers, plumbing your systems in a way that you actually have good, reliable data that you can access, and then having the right kinds of analysts who are proficient with writing SQL queries or Python queries to extract that data, aggregate information, and surface insights, all of that are becoming super critical, right? It's not like the olden days where you had an ERP system and all that you did was just work with that. But these days, you're really having to rely on a whole bunch of other pieces of information within the company, whether it's from your CRM system, your marketing automation platform.

Megan - 00:17:39: or

Madhu - 00:17:40: literally data. If that's coming out of your products, that might be relevant too.

Megan - 00:17:44: And when you look for people to hire for your own team, what are the skill sets that are important to you these days? And how are they evolving or how have they evolved over the last three to five years?

Madhu - 00:17:57: And my answer is going to be heavily biased towards the types of competencies or skill sets that you need to work in typically a chaotic startup environment. You ask the same question of someone who works for Microsoft or Amazon, they'd probably give you a slightly different answer. And so keep that in mind as I say that a lot of times what I'm looking for in candidates is that ability to be calm in a very chaotic environment. There are always changing priorities, changes in direction at short notice. And so some people can get really flustered by it. Some people like stability, predictability. They want to plan their life six months in advance. And that's okay too, because in larger companies, that's the case. You know, a lot of times your planning is six months out into the future. You know exactly. Which week or which month you're going to do a refresh of your forecast. As an example, there are literally forecast refresh calendars that will get published in larger companies. And that works great for certain types of professionals. But in a startup, you can never tell what your next week looks like. There are lots of days where my team and I will have planned priorities at the start of a Monday. And then lo and behold, on a Tuesday evening, you set that plan aside and you basically have a completely different set of priorities to work with. And so you just have to be nimble and agile and not get, too flustered by changing priorities. And this is not something that you can actually train someone on. Either you're comfortable with it or you're not. And it takes a long time for someone to change their style. And a lot of people don't change their style ever. And so this is like one of those things where I'm like super particular, making sure that they're going to be comfortable coming in and not hoping that somehow they'll get comfortable with it eventually. Because you just don't have that luxury of time in a startup to be able to deal with that.

Megan - 00:19:38: And in these fast-paced and fast-growing environments, how is it that you balance the need for aggressive growth with maintaining financial discipline and long-term sustainability?

Madhu - 00:19:49: Sometimes we like to joke, right? I think growth solves a lot of problems. And that's actually not untrue. Sometimes if you can solve for growth, maybe your systems are not great. Maybe your processes are not perfect, but you can perfect them over time. But if you're stagnating or declining, you're having difficulty saving your customers and you're having a lot of churn. If you're spending your time perfecting a process and having an amazing checklist, while on the other hand, the company is bleeding and it's losing customers, they're unable to close deals, I think we have a much bigger problem, right? So now I wouldn't say growth at all costs necessarily, but at the same time, I think by definition, if you're a startup, you're probably really small. You're likely going to be copied very quickly by competitors who can probably come up with a feature or two that mimics your product. And so you have to be quick on your feet. You have to be moving quickly. You cannot rest on your laurels. And so from that standpoint, I think grow or perish probably somewhat true. But of course, you don't want to do that at the expense of producing inaccurate financials or not being able to get your audits done just because you had no controls and you don't have any of your balance sheet items reconciled. And there are some table stakes things that you have to do. By all means, one needs to invest in that. But growth obviously is going to be super important. And you certainly want to make sure that, as a CFO, at least I allocate a good chunk of my time really thinking through whether our business model is working for us. What does customer feedback about our product? Is our pricing models working well? How do we optimize for margin? And not necessarily just grow, but at the same time losing a ton of money along the way. You just have to make sure that your unit economics are fine. As you're growing, you're not losing a ton of money. So those are the kinds of things that I usually spend a lot of time on.

Megan - 00:21:29: And your roles have involved leading diverse teams across different business units and regions. So what strategies have you employed to build and manage these teams effectively when it comes to culturally or maybe even generationally, since we have four different generations in the workforce at the moment?

Madhu - 00:21:46: I'd say there is probably one style or one set of practices that worked pre-pandemic. I think post-pandemic, especially in a distributed environment, we're all having to figure out what's the most effective way to keep teams together, be energized, be cohesive. It's definitely a challenge. I'll be the first to confess that it's not obvious. At first, I was like, oh my God, being able to work from wherever you want to work is like the best thing ever, right? And I was all in on it and I was like, hybrid or forget about hybrid, like fully distributed is the way to go. And that's the future. And I can't imagine why anyone would change. I'd ever want to go into an office ever again. I was totally in that camp for a while. But I think increasingly begun to realize that it puts a lot of pressure on the managers to figure out ways to keep their teams engaged, excited and bought into each other's lives. It's super hard because, you know, when you're all working together, people talk about how you can brainstorm more easily and things like that. I think there's definitely value in that. But the thing that I miss the most is the ability to celebrate small success and say, Hey! Wow! Today was a tough day. We've worked super hard. I see that it's 5.30 PM. Let's all go downstairs. Let's grab a drink and just unwind for a bit. That's something that we would do all the time pre-pandemic when we were all going into offices. That doesn't happen anymore. And that I think is a huge opportunity lost, especially if you're trying to bring together a team that truly works well together. But that said, you know, I've only described challenges. Like what can you do to overcome that? Right? I think especially at law, you've taken a lot of pride in saying that, you know, what we will deploy best practices in a way that we are seen as gold standard when it comes to distributed teams. And what does that mean in reality? We took our very generous budget that we had for actually having a very expensive office in San Francisco. And we said we'd repurpose a large fraction of it to supporting off-sites, having teams come together for a day or two, no matter where you are in the country. We'll pick a neutral location, have everybody fly in. We'll spend a couple of days. And we do that often enough. Like, you know, it's not like once a year. We do a company-wide holiday event where we fly in everybody. But that's not the only thing that I'm talking about. We are talking about team-specific off-sites where we get together, we hang out, we have fun, we learn about each other. You know, we are invested in each other's lives. That's something that we care a lot about and we want to do. The second thing that we've done, we've actually created a budget so that people who don't want to just work from home every single day of the month have their own office. So we have the ability to access co-working spaces near where they live and go out there and actually either just hang out with complete strangers, no doubt, but they're all working professionals too. Or other employees within our company who might be in and around that zip code might choose to coordinate and get there on the same day. It's very informal, but at the same time gives people an opportunity, especially those of us who live in smaller condos, in dense neighborhoods, in the city. There's not a lot of space. Some of us don't have air conditioning. And I'm like, okay, let's do this. We're in our homes and it can get really hot. It's nice to be able to step out, go to a WeWork-like location and be able to mingle with others, go out for a lunch. So people can actually feel like they're not just stuck in their respective homes.

Megan - 00:25:04: Yeah, that's a really cool benefit, one that I haven't really heard of before. And along those same lines, so that covers off team collaboration, but how do you effectively foster collaboration between finance and other departments, such as maybe operations or sales?

Madhu - 00:25:22: We actually structurally try to solve for it. Initially, we set together analysts that are embedded within our sales function, be it Rev Ops and marketing ops or Ops. We had analysts throughout the company that we, at one point, thought might be a good idea to actually centralize and bring everybody together under a single umbrella. We tried to do that. And then we also experimented with embedding them with different teams and seeing how that works. But nevertheless, I think your question is even bigger than that. It's like, hey, how does finance work with a VP of engineering or a VP of sales even? And so from that perspective, there are a few things that we do. One is, from a planning standpoint, we try to get ahead of the process by prioritizing. We're publishing a calendar well ahead of time, setting expectations with them around what we are hoping to accomplish from the planning process, identifying different stakeholders who will actually contribute to the process, and distributing templates and things like that. That allows for a good amount of collaboration across different functions so that ultimately the plan that we put together is a robust one, well thought out, that everybody's bought into, and everybody's steering in the same direction. So that's from a planning standpoint. But even beyond that, on a month-to-month basis, we actually have a monthly process for distributing our financial results to different departments, showing them how they're performing relative to their budgets. Are they overspending, underspending? How are they doing on hiring? Are they on track to fill all their open positions? And so we have this dialogue every single month that allows us to sort of be on the same page with these teams about how they're performing. Because a lot of times, certain departments will feel like they're performing really well. In fact, the numbers say otherwise. And there's a huge disconnect between how they feel versus what's actually happening on the ground. And distributing these reports and having a dialogue about it actually helps. So we are all completely objective about how things are going. And so when we meet as a leadership team, we are all aligned as to what's working well and what's not. Where are we falling behind and where are we tracking ahead of the plan?

Megan - 00:27:20: And you've been involved in outsourcing and offshoring. So what are some of the key lessons that you've learned? And have you integrated these models into your own financial operations? Why or why not?

Madhu - 00:27:33: For those of the listeners who don't know, the company that I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, Wipro, is actually an IT, we call it an IT services company, but they really use an offshore on-site model, right, for the most part. So I've been exposed to that business model for almost 10 years. And I bought into that value prop as well, right? In terms of being able to access talent globally, because sometimes if you just confine yourself to talent around your ZIP code, it's very constraining. And, you know, the very fact that we are a fully distributed team basically now allows me to hire for people. I might be based in Seattle, for example, but I'm able to hire people across the country. So why should it just be limited to the country? Why not globally? Becomes the next question. And I said there are two or three very obvious challenges that one needs to be able to overcome. The first one is time zone. It's one thing if you're going to LatAm, for example, and if you're based in the US, you don't have as big of a challenge. But if you're going to Southeast Asia, you're going to Philippines or India or something, one needs to figure out how exactly you deal with time zone challenges, because it's not fun to be on a work call at 9pm because your team is offshore and you need to... You talk to them and they haven't started for their day yet. It really does mess up, you know, with your circadian rhythm. And especially as I've started to get older, I've gotten way more sensitive about taking late night calls or waking up at an unearthly hour. It really does mess with my quality of life. And so the biggest factor to take into account is if you're going to have an offshore team in a completely different time zone, are you going to be able to farm out work in a way that there is minimal overlap? And the need to go back and forth live, if that can be minimized, by all means, one should explore it because there are perfectly well-talented people, well-meaning people with great work ethics, perfectly good communication skills, except that they live in a completely different continent. So I think one needs to take that into account. At LOP, for example, we experimented looking at engineering talent in, I'm trying to remember, Colombia, maybe, if I remember correctly, but somewhere in the LatAm region. We experimented that model. My assistant today actually came in, she's based in Philippines. Now, the reason I'm able to work with that arrangement is only because she works US hours. And it turns out that in Manila, or in and around Manila, it's quite common for people to work throughout the night because the call center industry is huge over there, the BPO industry is huge, and they're perfectly okay working throughout the night. And I don't know how they pull it off long-term, but they are able to, and they're very happy to do that. They're very grateful for this opportunity. And so I'm able to work with them. So there is that talent, but you need to overcome times and time zone issues. The second thing I'll say is just culture and communication skills. I come from India, so I kind of know some of the nuances or the differences between how working professionals operate in a US environment versus India, for example. It may not be so obvious for a lot of other people. If you've never worked with someone coming from a completely different culture, it's not obvious always. If you worked at a company like a Microsoft, usually, typically it's true in the technology industry. I think you work with a lot of immigrants, people who have come to the United States to study, you know, do their masters maybe, and then they've gone on to stay in the country. And so you probably encounter, be it Chinese or Indian people. And so maybe you're kind of exposed to it. But if you're not from the technology industry, if you're from a very traditional, call it retail manufacturing industry, you may not have encountered as many people. And so it's not something that you can just assume that it just worked and everybody's homogeneous. That's not true. There are all these little nuances that one needs to account for.

Megan - 00:31:12: Great advice. So reflecting on your career to date and the evolving role of the CFO, what emerging trends do you foresee impacting the role of the CFO in the next five years?

Madhu - 00:31:24: A lot of people will tell you that CFOs are not just finance people anymore. You're a business leader. You know, you have a seat at the table. You're expected to be a strategic advisor to your CEO and to your board. I think all of that is still true, will continue to be true. You know, I've never really thought of myself as just a finance leader. I've always thought of myself as a business person first and then a finance person. I just happen to have some finance skills. But I've always been fascinated by business. I've always been curious about business. And my advice, not just CFOs, but to anyone who's in the finance function, is to take active interest in the business. Continue to learn about how the business works. Always be curious, not just about your own company or your own employer, but even broadly, look at what's going on in the industry. And there are lots of podcasts out there that are very, very business focused. You know, they will double click on a certain business. They'll talk about why it works and why it doesn't work, what's made it unique and things like that. And I would encourage... I encourage, you know, finance professionals to remain curious and continue to take active interest in learning about how these businesses work. I think that's always going to be true. I think this podcast would be incomplete if the word AI was not mentioned somehow, right? I have to bring that in somewhere. I only say this half-jokingly, actually. You know, I've drunk the AI Kool-Aid. I have Perplexity pinned on my taskbar. I actually open up Perplexity all the time to do research. Anytime I have a question, I always start there. It's either Perplexity. Or Chat GPT. Or you name it, Microsoft's Copilot. Or Anthropic Claude or whatever, right? All of these are perfectly good solutions. You know, I would always start there. I think there are ways in which you can overcome basic ignorance. And at least you can get superficial understanding of a certain topic to start with. So you already have a running start. Of course, you know, these LLMs can hallucinate. So one needs to be careful and don't just take its word as is always. Especially if it's super critical, you might want to consult with an expert, talk to a consultant. Maybe certainly don't rely on it for tax advice or something. Or to interpret law of some kind. Talk to your lawyers. But I think a lot of times I will come across documents, right? It could be a debt financing deal that I've put together. And I will sometimes get these documents that are super dense. And certain terms are still not clear to me. Even though I've been at it for the last, God knows, 25 years or something. But I'm not shy now. Earlier, I would have to Google it. And I would have to go look for actual answers. These days, you don't have to. It's become a lot easier to be able to use AI. To really educate yourself. And so I think that's something that we all have to continue to do. And then lastly, I'll say workflows that were seemingly super manual, required implementation consultants or engineers to come solve for. I think there are lots of lightweight, no-code solutions that are in market that can automate some of your workflows. So if you have spreadsheets that are being manually updated, or super manual work that you're doing within your accounting function, or even within your FP&A function, I think there are lots of... I think there are lots of... Nice little ways to bring about productivity gains. It does not require an engineer, does not require some high-end consultant to come in and bill you $300 per hour to do that work. I think you can, with a little bit of curiosity and exploration, drop off all kinds of little automations within your day-to-day workflows.

Megan - 00:34:39: I do. Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Madhu - 00:34:41: Anytime, Megan.

Megan - 00:34:42: Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking with you. And thanks for finding the time to be here with us today to share your knowledge. And I wish you and Love all the best.

Madhu - 00:34:50: Business can be unpredictable sometimes. So thank you for those wishes.

Outro - 00:34:53: And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.