#Ayushree #CA #CS #MBA #ManagementConsulting | Senior Consultant at The Parthenon Group

Ayushree Agrawal Senior Consultant at The Parthenon Group https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayushree-agrawal-2a391317/

Q1. Parthenon is the consulting arm of EY which deals specifically into the education space?

Ans: Parthenon is a strategy consulting firm and deals in a lot of sectors; however the India branch of the Parthenon office globally is the education sector. Parthenon is a strategy consulting firm much like McKinsey, BCG, headquarter in Boston and we have offices around, and in 2013 they merged with Ernst & Young.

Q2. Tell us about your family life, how were you brought up, your academic interests, etc.

Ans: I grew up in Nagpur. I grew up in a joint family, typical Marwari business family environment. I did my chartered accountancy and company secretary back in 2011. After that I was working with Deloitte for some time in audit, then with international tax team of McKinsey, after which I went to Spain to do my international MBA for a year and then I came back and started working with Parthenon.

Q3. Have you always been a good student in your life academically?

Ans: As my friends would call me, I have always been a nerd, I have always been very academically oriented, which was a very different environment in my house because in my house dad is a business man so there was never as much emphasis on being academically good and getting into jobs. I think me and my cousins who are younger than me, we were the first generation of kids to have ventured into the job market but typically in Calcutta it’s more common for Marwaris to get a job to business. So it was a very different environment growing up when none of my other cousins, at least my older cousins were as academically focused. My mother was very academically driven so she had some influence on me, like getting top marks or coming first in the class mattered a lot to her and then eventually to me. When I was growing up, I used to study a lot.

Q4. You first worked for Deloitte for some time and then in McKinsey but not in the management consulting part, so was that the trigger for MBA? What were you exactly doing in McKinsey, accounting taxation?

Ans: After chartered accountancy, the main professions that are available to you are generally audit, accounts, tax; tax also becomes slightly a more coveted profession within your chartered accountancy field also where taxes are slightly more interesting than audit, accounts, etc. McKinsey is a pure management consulting firm so for the consulting arm they generally hire engineers and MBAs because McKinsey themselves form their in-house accounts team and tax team would require chartered accountant so that’s why I joined the international tax team of McKinsey and that’s when I realised that the consulting aspect of it was a little more exciting to me and with CA degree your options are limited so they don’t typically hire as many CAs, they usually hire CA rank holders that too one of them. So in a batch of 20 there will be one CA as opposed to 18 engineers. The other kind of hiring they do is of MBA so that triggered that aspect of having more opportunities or access to more kind of career choices.

Q5. When you decided to go for an MBA, instead of the 2-year MBA, why did you go for the 1-year MBA? If you chose the 1-year MBA, why didn’t you choose IIMA, PGPX or ISB?

Ans: Essentially after CA, there is a lot of overlap of the subjects that you study in CA and the MBA in terms of accounts, corporate finance, it’s already covered in CA and that’s why for a lot of CAs, MBA is not a must-do option unlike engineers. For me, that was one of the reasons wherein I didn’t know how much value a 2-year MBA will add to my profile given that I already have a CA degree. Second was my main goal for MBA; basically you do a MBA for professional and personal reasons. Within professional reasons, if you want to change your industry or job function, I wanted to change my job function. There were like a lot of personal reasons as well and those personal reasons were more aligned to a 1-year MBA wherein I wanted to live internationally by myself for some time. A 1-year MBA economically, depending on the stage of career I was, it just made a lot more sense.

Q6. How much was your cost for 1-year MBA? Did you get a scholarship?

Ans: I had taken my IE, it has it’s own internal exam as well so I had scored well in that exam. Basically, you get your MBA based on 2–3 things; one is your entry point which might be the GMAT or the IE internal exam, second, your overall profile: what you have done in the past, the kind of organisations you have worked with. It was a function of these two things. Initially I had a scholarship of only 5000 Euros. My overall cost was 60000 Euros which translates to about 50 lac rupees and I had a scholarship which wasn’t enough for me because I knew I would come back to India most likely and then I established a case for an increased amount of scholarship which was based on my academic background. The fact that I am going to come back to India and a couple of other factors, because of which the scholarship was further increased to 20000 Euros. Then my overall cost for MBA was about 36–37 lac which made sense to me.

Q7. Tell us about your MBA stint. How different is it from doing it from the US or India and how does that nationalities of having batch size of 350 and having people from 70–80 countries? Is there something meaningful that emerges out of the interactions?

Ans: Just to give you a little background, IE Business School had people from 60 different countries so the ratio is basically 93% of the students are international and 7% of the students are from Spain. Within that 93% there were people from 60 different countries. So in was a batch size of 250 students, there were 10 Indians, so you are automatically put in an environment where you are interacting not just with people of your nationality but people from other nationalities as well. To add to it, if you are living in a country where you don’t speak the national language, none of us spoke Spanish, so you automatically put in an environment where you have each other and that is why you end up going out more and end up socializing more and Spain has cultures very social, so initially it just started off with networking where you are getting to know each other on a superficial basis, but then soon you realise that people at the end are same, they have the same aspirations, everyone wants a similar kind of jobs, everyone wants similar things in life, and those are the things on which you connect. Couple of months down the line when everyone is in the same boat, going through the same struggles, same fears, having the same aspirations, you start connecting on an actual basis and this was the first time in my life where instead of prioritizing studies, I prioritized relationships. Earlier, I always used to prioritize my studies, getting those 2–3 hours just with my books, being on top of my coursework, but this time the coursework was relationships, strong relationships, getting to know people and how they think and so I ended up spending a lot of time with my friends and then our batch turned out to be very close batch and specially we were like a group of 13 girls who turned out to be really close and everyone had very similar values and we used to connect very well, in fact we did a zoom call the other day in this quarantine period. The function of being in an environment which is challenging and just investing time in each other; the relationships are sustainable, like when I was doing MBA someone had given me this statistic that I would be in touch with maximum two people but thankfully it’s not been true. We are almost close to 5 years now and I am in touch with almost all my class girls and work groups as well. The first work group, we were from 7 different countries and it was one of the best work groups I ever had compared to my consulting or other work groups in MBA.

How does one benefit now — economically, well not so much yet because we are still at that stage in our careers where we are in mid-management, moving into senior management and still growing. However, say job opportunities are available. Personally it’s very satisfying, you get to learn so many perspectives about how people view the world differently and when you move on in your career and realise it’s all about managing people at the end of the day, it starts getting less technical and more about people, so it just helps you in becoming a little more empathetic, you start putting yourself in other’s shoes and start valuing other perspectives and okay with the differences, so the value has been more in that sense for me. It’s a lot of fun, 5 of my class girls have got married now so it’s always fun to attend different culture weddings. Having these kind experiences also add a lot of value to your life rather having the same mundane experiences.

Q8. In spite of academics not being your focus, relationship being your coursework, how did that happen — chartered accountancy gave a lot of advantage that ways?

Ans: Exactly, like the only technical subjects that you study in your MBA are accounts, corporate finance, which already I was comfortable with. Some of the non-technical subjects doesn’t require as many hours, it’s more about being familiar with the case method like going to class, giving your views, so definitely having an advantage in CA helps.

Q9. Did you have any international stint also?

Ans: Since it was a 1-year MBA, there was an option, we had like multiple tie-ups for 3 months but 1 year is not enough even if you want to solidify your relationships, or experience the place in it’s entirety. It was already a 1-year MBA so I didn’t want to shorten the experience much, I thought I will get more out of just spending time in one place as opposed to going to another place.

Q10. Back to India, how was the job search experience? Did you try for jobs in Europe or did you straightaway had in mind that you are going to come back to India?

Ans: I didn’t have a strong inclination towards Europe because I knew I wouldn’t get the job of my preferred choice in Europe, first language is a big barrier, so a lot of consulting jobs, anyway become difficult because we need to be aware of the local language like if you are trying to solve someone’s problems or interacting with the locals. My Spanish was basic but wasn’t fluent enough to be good enough in professional world. I was getting some offers but they were mostly in the corporate finance department itself of say Vodafone so I had like few conversations with them and they wanted some diversity but their profile wasn’t that interesting to me. More than just living internationally, my intension was to do something which I like or to take up more challenging role which is why I decided to come back to India. In India, job search was not easy and I hadn’t thought it to be supremely easy but I encountered a lot more hurdles and just because you are form a European business school, why should you get a premium over Indian business schools. Someone graduating out of IIM would get an average salary of 18–20 lacs, though I hadn’t paid as much for my MBA because of the scholarship but still the cost of living combined plus my prior experience combined. Since, I was changing the industry as well, it wasn’t very easy, to some of the most coveted jobs like McKinsey, BCG, etc. I would be a lateral hire to them, I wouldn’t be a campus hire to them. So they first prioritize the campus hires and then they go to lateral hires. Lateral hiring process is very slow, very unstructured, so I started my job search in January and initially it was just overwhelming to start and not know, not having a very structured environment. In CA, at least you make contacts, but here it was just starting off on your own and that is when I connected with you which clearly helped me. It wasn’t easy; however it was just speaking to people and in my mind I wasn’t even sure whether it was consulting or something else, so I was open to consulting, investment banking, lot of other profiles and then finally when I started meeting and speaking to more people, consulting sounded a bit more interesting to me and then I applied to all the big companies and again the lateral hire process was slow so I was asked to wait. Until that time, I had applied to few startups as well for the finance role, for the finance in strategy role so I started getting offers from them and I had to take a decision fast on whether I need to keep these offers or still keep looking. Then finally one of the consulting firms which was Parthenon, one of my top-choice firms from the list, they called me and the HR there really fast-forwarded the interview and over the course I met like 7–8 people and then things worked out. It’s a long process, but in like 3 months, you generally start getting.

Q11. What’s the typical day in consulting? What do you do there and what is the growth part?

Ans: Management consulting in Parthenon we typically do due diligences which is, if a fair investor wants to buy an asset, we help them give a view on whether or not it’s the right market they have to invest in or asset within the market will be the right asset, that’s like 60–70% of our work and 30–40% of our work is like market entry, growth strategy, etc. The due diligences’ time frame typically is 4 weeks, within 4 weeks we have to understand and we work mostly in international market so we have to quickly form a view on what do we think of the market. If an investor who stays in South-East Asia and knows nothing about Africa wants to invest in Africa, so we help them give a view on whether Africa is a good geography to invest in. Once we form that view, we would segment the market, find the key competitors of the asset and benchmark and give a view on whether it is a good asset. So the typical one and a half week of the work involves, lot of hypothesis building based on our understanding, we would form our own hypothesis whether it’s a good market or not. There will be a lot of activities we will do and the last week will typically be making slides, and presentations so that we can articulate it. In case of market entry and growth strategy again depending upon the type of work, first one and a half week you go with some hypothesis, we have publishers around the world, then we do deep dive into the research and start analyzing the data, and last week again is presentation. This is the broad breakdown of the broad activities done in Parthenon.

Q12. What do you do for fitness?

Ans: Two things that I have done on and off are — I had one yoga instructor since 2011–12 who keeps coming to my house on and off and that’s the easiest I find because it’s more manageable since he comes in the morning and we get done with it. There’s other fitness centres also so one such centre has opened in front of our office so a lot of people would go there in the evening, do their exercise, come back, bathe and again get to work. At Nariman Point, a lot of people would go running. I personally like yoga and sometimes I like the dance fitness workout so I go for that.