Kshiteesh Phansalkar — CA — ISB — EY — Crisil — PwC- Accenture-Indigo

(Career Conversation) Kshiteesh Phansalkar — CA — ISB — EY — Crisil — PwC- Accenture-Indigo https://www.linkedin.com/in/kshiteesh-phansalkar-aca-78039321/ Senior Manager, Corporate Strategy at InterGlobe Aviation | Accenture, PwC, CRISIL, EY | PGP (ISB), CA, M.Com Presently managing the Consulting group within the Financial Analysis and Projects team at IndiGo. — 2 years with the CFO & Enterprise Value practice within Management Consulting and Operations Transformation practice at Accenture — 2 years with Financial Effectiveness & Management Consulting practice at PwC — 3 years with the Valuations and Research practice at CRISIL (a Standard & Poor’s company) — 1.5 years as an Executive and 3 years as a Trainee with Assurance and Advisory services practice at Ernst & Young Educational qualifications: — Management Graduate (Finance & Strategy) (Indian School of Business) — Chartered Accountant (ICAI) — Master of Commerce (Pune University) — Bachelor of Commerce (Pune University)

Q1. Are you the first-generation Chartered Accountant in your family? What exactly were the trigger for your CA decision?

Ans: My family is full of engineers and my dad is also an engineer and he went ahead to do his PhD, so I am the first-generation chartered accountant in my family. What really attracted me to this field was primarily the opportunities that open up; be it in the finance world, consulting, so very early on in my college days I decided to make a career in the consulting domain, specifically it was financial consulting and hence it was essentially the stepping stone towards the process. If you ask me what my inspiration was — it was my goal towards management consulting.

To start up, I decided to build my career with audit, so that is when the real core understanding of financial statements happened. I started with EY, spent 5 years there and EY is a place which makes you go through the grind and makes you work those 12–13 hours as a regular routine even while during internship, so that really sets the tone for career and makes a really strong base. I decided to start with statutory audit, post statutory audit, I moved to research and that is when I really started thinking about management consulting as a firm career option, but it was always at the back of my mind. After 3 years at Crisil, I took the plunge to for the full time MBA course, primarily with the intension of having a career in management consulting. So the seed were sown right, when I started thinking about CA course, it was a gradual process of reaching the decision of finally making the plunge towards management consulting.

Q2. When you took the MBA decision in 2014–2015, was ISB the obvious choice?

Ans: If you ask me, the best place to sharpen your skills if you have consulting, it’s Indian School of Business. It also made a lot of sense because it was one of the premiere B-schools in India, having a close competition with IIM Ahmedabad. By the time I decided to do an MBA, I already had a work-ex for 4–5 years including my internship for 3 years. I was already in the bracket where IIM Ahmedabad wouldn’t have added much value to me, I wanted to be among a cohort of students that come with the similar work-ex with more diverse backgrounds. Most of my classmates were engineers, be it IIT grads, be it students from top universities and colleges from the country. So the main deciding factor was: a) the fact that it is a premiere school for consulting career, b) my experience was in a bracket which made ISB make much more sense, c) I did give a quick thought to schools in Singapore, I also went to Singapore to visit couple of schools, I was in NTU and NUS, the professors were kind enough to give me a chance to attend classes, taking around the school, met the students there, did some bit of understanding of the course and the career opportunities, etc. Finally it came down to the finances, although I really liked NUS, I would have gone ahead and applied but it came on the finances. Applying abroad elsewhere to the US schools didn’t really make much sense in the point in time. So I decided there’s probably no better place than ISB to pursue a consulting career.

Q3. Did people at home raise questions about you for walking out of the well-settled life?

Ans: I was lucky in that sense, even if I had decided to go ahead for another post graduate degree, my family won’t really stop me. They are supportive as long as they know I am clear I am going for that particular course. Although, back then they had the comfort of knowing that I have done my research, so I was planning an MBA since 2010, that’s around 4 years I was planning my MBA, I did a detailed plan in those 3–4 years, so they knew I was pretty confident about my decision, and I would go ahead and do it in a serious way.

Yes, it’s a huge financial decision, given that the tuition fees are not really affordable these days, but then if you have that admit letter, I think banks would be on top of each other, so it does not really make much of a difference if you have an offer letter from ISB but it’s a huge career decision because it’s an opportunity cost your 4 year of salary. It’s a leap of faith that students should take, but be clear as to why you are doing an MBA.

Q4. How was it rebooting life as a student, walking into a classroom with a backpack?

Ans: Well, MBA is all about unlearning to be honest. I used to think myself as someone who has the chartered accountant, so I was the only 25 chartered accountants in a class of 700–800 students at that time combining both the campuses. Walking into the school I found out most of the guys were as smart or maybe much smarter than what I was, so it was a humbling experience; going for simple study group meeting and find that there’s a rank holder from IIT, there’s a doctor, army, a colonel who has 20 years of work experience, so the cohort was so diverse that it makes you really humble. It makes you really look at yourself and say now is the time to unlearn stuff that you learned the wrong way over the years, get to know these people, understand their experiences and get the most of the cohort. The first challenge was to unlearn and be coachable. You cannot be coachable if you have a fixed mindset. Thirdly, it’s all about enjoying the experience. The faculties we got were world-class, so sitting through a class of these professors is just an experience in itself. It’s different since we used to carry a laptop bag, then we were carrying books, sitting in the library, meeting professors to ask doubts, so that makes you humble and makes you realise that if you be in the corporate world for a long time, you need to unlearn, relearn and get the most out of what’s offered.

Q5. There are professors from Wharton and Kellog, so many assume that these professors lay it out of the suitcase, as compared to a professor who will be a full-time resident on campus. Do you get the same bond with that kind of professors?

Ans: First of all, the course is short — it’s a 51 week course so it’s a fast paced course. To be honest, you don’t have that kind of time to develop that kind of affinity towards the professors, but whatever facetime you have with these professors they will give their fullest. Every course is around 10 lectures, and each lecture is about 2 hours, so around 20 hours of facetime with these professors. The most you can get from it is visit professors during the office hours, or catch hold of them in cafeteria, but beyond that you really don’t have a lot of time to spend with the professors. There is so much course work that you really don’t have much time in between classes to gel that bonding. Since it’s a 51 week course, so there is not a concept of senior as well, so you are all on your own, since there is a shortage of time, so that level of personal connect may not happen, but whatever time you get with the professors, what you do is get the most out of it. That is easily achievable by doing some pre-reads, extra reading, doing your homework and class assignments. Also you can get your professors do your projects, that’s how you get the most out of it.

Q6. You were VP education at the Toastmasters Club of ISB, you won a case study competition at IIM Samantaram, so what were those kind of experiences?

Ans: Toastmasters is a global organisation that trains public speaking aspirants. So we had the Mohali campus, I was thoroughly interested in being a part of the Toastmasters Club, primarily because grammar and English is very close to my heart, and that was a very exciting experience because we also organized a few public speaking competition and students from in and around the Tricity in Mohali. We had a club which had around 15–20 participants and we had a very experienced speakers in class who would come down and give us their feedback as to how the body language should be, what your hand gestures, eye contact, where do you take pauses, so little things like that we got excellent feedback about. So that was a stage or a platform where you can really get out of your stage fear, and really develop your public speaking skills. So that was a fantastic experience.

Coming to the B-school competition, it was the inaugural B-school competition organized by IIM Bangalore and this was about an educational institution in somewhere around the rural area of Madhya Pradesh. The story behind that is very inspirational; an IT engineer guy from Bangalore, the founder of this institution, gave up his lucrative job, came to his hometown, and set up an institution called SSIN which works towards the upliftment of underprivileged children, and gives them the basic vocational courses, and certain graduation courses as well. The story itself was very inspirational and it came onto the campus and they invited applications so two of my friends along with me participated in that and all the three of us were very passionate about the fact that education is probably the solution of all social problems. We got in touch with the founders and the case study competition was naturally about developing a viable and sustainable financial plan for the education institution. We gave them some very real life solutions and that ensured that we really stuck a chord with the founders. What worked well for us that: a) it was a subject which was very close to our heart, b) we gave them some very implementable solutions. That was our first stage of consulting so to speak right in the middle of B-school and the solutions were found to be very real by the founders and luckily the founders themselves were a part of the judges panel, so there was a consensus of who the winner should be.

Q7. During placements, what type of roles do typically come for chartered accountants, etc. and are there corporate roles also apart from management consulting, the MBBs of the world? Is large batch size an advantage or a disadvantage when it comes to an individual bagging a good job?

Ans: Looking back at the placement season, it was a thoroughly exciting experience. The way it works for ISB is the entire batch from all the campuses come down to Hyderabad and the placements happen in a unified way. All the recruiters come onto the Hyderabad campus simply because it’s a larger campus. It’s basically like a job fair; there are classrooms and people cohorts at an interview room, most people are running one place to the other. So there were people with multiple shortlists, I had a friend who had 9 shortlists so he had 9 interviews spaced out in the matter of two days. Exciting stories will come out; funny stories about how people turn up for interviews, with not enough sleep, they turn up at the wrong interview places, sometimes they even come up with wrong CVs for that matter. One of my friends came for an interview with the CV of his friend, so funny stories like these happen and it’s just a part of the whole interview process. Around 500–600 people at the same time in one campus creates a chaos. The best part of it is it’s very well organized and career counsel at ISB is very professional with the arrangements. The students are made to feel comfortable, the arrangement for interviewers are excellent, there is a very high level of process orientation, so they have a number of volunteers who would go around arranging interviews and coordinating interviews for students who have multiple interviews on the same day, so all the complicated stuff was managed well. There is some clarity in the chaos which is thanks to the career counsel.

Coming to the opportunities of the finance professional, yes there are corporate finance jobs that come onto campus. Apart from that you have openings around general management, there is a bit of leadership profiles as well. Although when to comes to investment banking and private equity, the forays that has been made into these areas is slightly less, but we are getting there, so primarily everyone looks at us like we are a consulting school which is true but it is not entirely true. There are plenty of opportunities for finance professionals, be it corporate finance, be it transaction advisory services, financial consulting and young finance professionals will have plenty of opportunities for leadership programs, general managing programs, and this is all in addition to the top consulting jobs. So consulting forms do look for chartered accountants and finance professionals, but they primarily want people who can think out of the box. CAs are sometimes looked as people who are very rule bound and people who are not capable of thinking out of the box, that’s a perception that the industry has. I had some very good chartered accountants with me and couple of them got placed in top consulting firms. Apart from MBB, you also have the other two firms, you have Big Four and Accenture. There are other startups which would really want finance professionals, so the opportunities are plenty. If there is any doubt about finance professionals not having enough opportunities, those are completely misplaced.

Q8. What is the post-MBA salary in general? Do people have a 2X jump in salary to compensate the huge cost incurred?

Ans: If you look at the median salary, for my class it was around 19 lacs which has gone up significantly. You will find people who have bagged amazing offers for around 35–40 lacs, although those numbers are few, and these guys would easily get a jump of sometimes even 3X but the numbers are very few. Typically, you will have a jump of at least 60–70%. I myself got a jump of around 60% in my pre-MBA vs post-MBA salary, but to be honest it’s a bit myopic to look at an MBA course purely in terms of pre-post.

Q9. Take us through your life as a consultant — you were a CFO in one and one was more into finance effectiveness, so how were the roles different? What did you do on a day to day basis?

Ans: At ISB I got placed in PwC, this was in the finance effectiveness practice. So the practice essentially revolved around a lot of shared services advisory work, a lot of process transformation and process standardization work. We also did a lot of HR and IT and operation transformation so this was more support services transformation role. It was a client facing advisory role but the first couple of years I spent at PwC I got a chance to travel to multiple occasions, do a lot of shared services advisory, did a lot of assignments on process transformation within India as well. The opportunity at Accenture was a little different. I had a profile change at Accenture, I started off with the operation consulting team, so the prime reason for making that shift was getting an idea on the automation space. The last piece of process transformation is automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. So that was the experience that I wanted at Accenture. This is what I keep telling guys who want to move to consulting is finance transformation is a very dynamic space and that is what Accenture gave a very good exposure to and I got a chance to explore a lot of digital transformation areas and that really set the tone around new aspects of consulting like AI, NLP, robotic process automation, so that is something a finance professional should know. You can’t restrict yourself to the typical, traditional ways of consulting and process transformation. This exposure was something that Accenture specializes in and that’s why I moved to Accenture.

The second team I moved to Accenture was pure management consultant. I work profile as such did not change but then there were some more aspects of it that came into picture like zero based budgeting, and some bit of more advanced robotics. That was more like a step up, so in PwC I started with operation consulting, continued but handed a flavor of automation at Accenture, and then took it a further level ahead in digital transformation and the allied areas and the whole gamut of opportunities that come with it at Accenture itself.

Q10. Is consulting actually about doing things on the ground and transforming things?

Ans: It’s a little blurred in India, if you go abroad, you will find strategy and management consulting are very distinct. In India, you will not really find teams that are doing just your core high level strategy and going out, you will find the teams are doing the strategy work and then doing the support to implementation as well. That is what clients are looking for these days; they want a consultant who gives them the whole spectrum of services, and that’s how the contracts are designed these days. It will have an ideation phase, execution phase, have an implementation phase and a support phase. So the work that Accenture typically did spanned across all four spheres but we had multiple teams working at the same time — we had study teams, technology teams, process transformation operation teams, so any big assignment would be an amalgamation of multiple teams working together, but then there would be project manager who would be managing the overall assignment as well. A lot of the value that is delivered is driven from the fact that you work right from the first phase to the end phase and do not just give high level solutions and then move out, that is not what consulting is these days. It’s all about hand-holding a client till the implementation phase.

Working long hours didn’t really come as a surprise or as a cultural shock when I moved into consulting. At the same time, work life balance is a bit of a problem. You are travelling a lot, you are working on weekends and it takes away precious time from family, so what I often tell aspirants of management consulting are the pros of consulting are also it’s cons. If you say that the pro is that you get to travel a lot, stay in flashy hotels, and get to travel business class, that’s the pro but the con is you stay away from family. We get to do scaly and neat work yes, but at what cost; the cost is the work life balance. So, the pros are also it’s cons so if you are really cut out for it, one should really understand that it’s not just the glitz and glamour and grandeur of it, but a lot of hard work that goes behind building successful consultant career.

Q11. Recently in March, you shifted to Indigo in the strategy function, so what really drives the decision of shifting from management consulting to the strategic function of industries?

Ans: The exit options are endless — once you have that diverse experience and with a strong B-school backing, industries across the sector, companies across various domains would love to have you on board, especially the strategy and planning piece of it. My inspiration behind going to Indigo was: a) it’s a very exciting industry, very fascinating industry, although it’s going through a bit of a strife recently, but the kind of opportunities you get to learn are just unparallel. In my mind aviation is one of the most complicated industries, every department that I work with everyday is like a separate project in itself. Every area you touch is a consulting assignment in itself. Indigo is a low-cost airline and it’s doing really well as majority know. One of the primary objectives of me and my team is cost optimization. So when you talk about cost-optimization, there are hundred things that you could do to optimize the cost wherever possible, so that opens up a lot of consulting opportunities. I looked at this as a consulting profile itself which it is in an industry which is overgrowing and dynamic, so there is no slow news day so to speak, it’s always a fast knowing environment with multiple people working, multiple projects, smart guys working around you so the entire team that I have of around 10–12 and all of them are either IIM graduates or ISB graduates, so you have a group of really good people working for you so there’s a lot that you can learn from them and give back to them as well. A fast-moving company, an exciting role and of course a well-paying role so all these three things came together and fortunately it worked out, I was at the right place at the right time. They were looking for someone to lead the financial analysis team and things fell into place, so I was pretty lucky to get this profile at the first place because the kind of opportunities and limelight that we get on everyday basis is exciting.

Q12. What do you do for fun and do you have a fitness regime?

Ans: Back in the day, before I got into the chains of corporate life, I was very active with badminton and cricket, but even today’s age and day I find that youngsters tend to work long hours and develop physical conditions like back ache, obesity in their 20s or 30s which is very unhealthy trend that you can see around you. what I try to do is have at least a small 20–25 minute run in the morning and that’s the first thing that I do before going to office — that just sets the tone for the day. on weekends, I do ensure that I play at least a couple of sports, what I am currently doing is play cricket on Saturdays and Table Tennis on Sundays. I try to ensure that I have enough physical activity. There are times when the weather permits and me and my wife go cycling, so that’s something that helps as well.

This is a pertinent question for today’s world where we are expected to do long hours, the stress needs to be managed, on specially a fast-growing company, things are going at a speed, there is no room to drop the ball. So, maintaining the physical aspect is as critical as doing well at work and to be honest, if you are fit it shows up in your workplace as well.

Q13. What would be your final advice to future aspirants?

Ans: For CA aspirants I would say that it’s very important to keep yourself updated. You cannot restrict yourself to the traditional audit, tax services, all of those places to start off with and of course you can build successful careers around those but if you really want to learn new stuff, you need to have an idea of the latest trends. Digital transformation and finance transformation are the real latest trends that are the buzz works, be it robotic process automation or be it artificial intelligence. So finance as a profession has really grown leap and bounds and audit as a profession has grown leaps and bounds. I am not very sure about taxation but I am sure given the dynamic environment around the statutory changes that are happening in that space. It concludes me to say that it’s important to keep yourself updated and keep learning always. You cannot rest and think I have done my CA so that’s it, I am best in for success — that’s not true. In today’s day CA has become a hygiene factor, if you really want to grow in the finance world, CA is probably just the first step. The next step could be an MBA in finance or maybe doing more specialized courses. Evolve yourself; you cannot be stagnant, you have to learn throughout your life.

As far as the MBA aspirants, I won’t encourage student to cling off 3 things — why do they want to do an MBA, why do they want to do it now or at that particular point of career and why a particular school. If you have the answers to these three questions, I think you are sorted. If you figure the why, the what and how will follow. Answering the why is very critical because if you don’t know why you are taking particular step in the career, you would take the leap of faith and then probably ask if this what I really wanted, am I repenting, is there a way back? You do not want to be in that kind of a position after taking a huge financial decision. So have the why very clear, the what and how will become a piece of cake. A lot of introspection is necessary, you should know what exactly MBA will put onto the table, what exactly would you contribute to the student co., what will be your takeaways and how exactly will MBA help you to bounce forward. It’s very necessary to know that an MBA is not just a financial decision, it’s a huge opportunity cost. What is very important is you should weigh the pros vs cons, are all these probable promotions and a moment to on-site a client or on-site location, are these sacrifices worth it. That’s the call you have to take and to make that, you have to do a lot of introspection.