Sakshi Gupta | CA AIR 1 in IPCC | Deloitte | HUL | BCG | TA | LinkedIn

Q1. What have been the interesting snippets of your career?

Ans: I wouldn’t call it remarkable but I have had the opportunity to work with one of the few best organizations in the world. I think AIR-1 gave me this leverage to work with Deloitte and I think its been a fantastic experience. There you start to talk to clients who are large, there you understand where exactly is you want to work post your grad. This was the time I started interacting, meeting a lot of people where my thoughts about joining an organization, not in a Big Four but something. I understand that CAs are meant to do more than auditing and accounting, that’s the learning I got by meeting a lot of people who were working in an industry, so the idea was to explore a bit more and hence I decided to do industrial training with HUL. HUL was one of the best experiences because there I got exposed to this set of people called the MBAs, which I didn’t have the exposure while working at Deloitte. There I understood more about what are the other fields, whether I want to do an MBA, I don’t want to do an MBA, what is it that MBAs do, what are the potential career options and I think there was the time when I was working in that supply chain finance which is more like internal consulting division of HUL. My plans to chase consulting as a future career option sort of got finalized and that’s how you know BCG happened. With BCG I worked in a few cases which were deals for dude diligence for private equity firms and there I understood the kind of business knowledge you get in a very short duration of time on those projects is very essential and in a way very fast-learning process and that’s how TA happened and at TA I was looking at FS and tech as my co-focus areas of investing and at that period I spoke to a lot of companies and their tech startup space and that’s how my knowledge of tech developed. I had the pleasure of working with people like TA who had been overseeing tech for a vast number of years, so that gave me the leverage to actually work for a tech company like LinkedIn where I look at business strategy, the idea is to make LinkedIn how to holistically align India’s strategy of LinkedIn with Google, so that’s been interesting snippets of my journey so far. I think at that point when I am in a particular organization, I never knew what the next would be but now when I look back, I think everything just ties up to a perfect sense.

Q2. Being a CA, how does the tie-up in terms of your past experience, in terms of academics not hang up with what you are doing. Is that a limitation or works to your advantage?

Ans: Essentially I think my experience helped me a lot to be in this career for example. If you move to management consulting, there is nothing you would do. At HUL, only few parts of how budgeting happens, how we should do zero budget accounting, and how budget, etc. controlled as something which is related to your CA final syllabus, but its completely unrelated and its very interesting because you are working along with summer interns from IIMA and there the scope is vast, and I think those are the skills you start picking up. I think everybody who just steps out of their career whether its from MBA or CA is equally unprepared, so that’s like the best time to get the skill of learning to deal with ambiguity. If you go to management consulting, you serve quite bespoke problems, they are unrelated to any CA or financial stuff you come across, and are solved quite logically and there you understand the importance of team-building, collaboration, relying on past experience and just being entirely logical in the problem solving process. I think being a consultant turns you into a very great problem solver. TA was a little close to what CA is because you end up doing a lot of valuation and prepare three statement models and there being a CA is an advantage because you tend to understand things a bit better, you don’t feel very bogged down if you have to read a lot of annual reports or read a lot of other financial documents but I would say overall that being a problem solver and being creative and learning to deal with ambiguity are more important skills than what you have learnt at academics.

Q3. As a student, how were you? Are you a first generation CA or you got a lineage in your family?

Ans: I used to study a lot to be honest, but it took me time to figure out how exactly to make study effective. I think the big boost I got was in 10th standard when I topped India in girls in CBSE board. Commerce was probably a choice because my dad was a CA and somewhere down the line, maybe even he was the only example I got in my family as somebody whom I could look up to and pursue, so I think he’s played a lot of role in shaping what I had wanted to be. I wanted to be like him and maybe CA was a part of it. Hence, even though I got 98%, and there were a lot of questions from relatives on why not me taking science, I had chosen to pursue commerce because at some point I wanted to align myself to what my dad was. I scored well in 12th as well, CPU rank happened, that actually gave me a boost to study harder for the IPCC rank. My rank was something which happened surprisingly, I mean I did expect to rank but not top India to be honest, and I think that gave me a lot of confidence in how hard work, how self-belief goes a vast way in going far in whatever you decide to do and I think that’s how Deloitte happened and with Deloitte experience I started leveraging, so I think its like you start with one plate and it moves on to the other one, so I just tried to do that often. People who know me since college knows that I was very studious so during my CA IPCC times I used to study 16 hours a day, there were no compromises on that. I am a big believer of self-study so subjects I could cover by myself I would do that. Occasionally, I would take my dad’s help because even though he cleared quite a long back, I just felt his insights were quite useful, so I used to do a lot of self-study and I used to study a lot alone which actually helped me because I used to sit with a module in one hand and read three lines and just think about it as opposed to somebody who is forcefully sitting in a class when there is a law lecture supposed to be happening if I don’t want to learn law today. I think that’s how I have studied, so far it has helped me in achieving what I have. I haven’t actually reflected and gone to see whether that was the right approach. I think people have their own approaches to doing things, I have known people who have done really great with group studying or with going to classes and studying or by writing a lot of papers, so I think different approaches work for different people. I generally tend to sit with a book for entire 12 hours and just think about the pages I am reading and then I try to write my thoughts on it, so that’s how I functioned so far.

Q4. After an AIR in IPCC, one would expect a rank in finals as well, so what really happened, was it hectic articleship and industrial training or was it randomness of few marks?

Ans: I think at that time I pondered over that question a lot because I was myself expecting a rank in CA final, obviously not top 30 or something, but generally in the 40–50 range; my papers had gone well, so maybe I should get, but looking back if I had to answer this question hindsight to distill the reasons why it happened, it could be multiple reasons. First, when you are studying and not doing articleship, your focus on subjects are equivalent because you were in the basics and you needed to know all of it. What happens in IPCC and after articleship is you realize what you like and as a human tendency you tend to spend a lot of time knowing that. In articleship, I used to spend a lot of time auditing and accounting so those are still my favourite subjects and I have scored very nicely in them. As far as HUL goes, it exposed to me a vast variety of how actually finance functions. I was a part of this finance group and I understood that a lot of things you learn in theory are actually very outdated concepts, there are better things which exists, or how a theory works in practical is very different from what you are learning, and that was a big learning for me and spending more time there sort of I wouldn’t say sidelined me, but obviously the time remaining for studies was quite less and studying all by self I think it just got piled up at the last moment which could have probably been a reason. Overall I believe the papers went well and in all fair circumstances I think it would have been an equal possible situation.

Q5. Did you take tuitions for IPCC?

Ans: I started going to classes in IPCC. When they start IPCC, they take the basic chapters, so I did go for like a good 4–5 months but after a while when you got used to the things working then I just stopped taking it.

Q6. Would you now in hindsight recommend someone to go for industrial training right before CA final? Why or why not?

Ans: I think it totally depends on interest. For me, I believe a lot of my career was shaped because I did industrial training. In the hindsight if I just remained at Deloitte, I wouldn’t have known when I had cleared CA on what is the industry like, what is the particular function I want to work for, hadn’t met so many people I would have done, so in the hindsight I would do it all over again. However, if I feel that in the first 2 years of articleship, if you haven’t covered a lot of CA final portion, if you think that you really need the last year to build your basics to clear your CA final, obviously clearing it in first attempt is a priority, so for people who haven’t done studies in the first 2 years, I would suggest that don’t do it because you are actually learning a lot of things like the way you had your first year of articleship, you will have your first year of industrial training and its not like you will be joining in a batch of 20 people, you are just alone in that organization who is supposed to learn along with a batch of MBA students, if you are joining something big like HUL or Nestle. So, in the hindsight I would do it because I met a lot of people who shape what I would be doing in the future and I am still in contact with them and they are my mentors in careers right now but I would say take your own call when you are in articleship whether that’s the right thing for you to do.

Q7. Supply chain finance for sure is not that exotic, but its still not that mundane accounting and auditing stuff, so was that the same thing you were doing with industrial training?

Ans: I think in industrial training my profile was in supply chain finance and I continued to work for the same team post qualification as well. Supply chain finance as people would understand is merely a good way of saying it’s a costing team but more than that it’s a cost consulting team, so essentially people have cost targets that this is the profit margin you need to make and obviously there is a revenue angle and cost angle to it. The cost angle is entirely the ownership of supply chain.

Q8. How did you get the break? Would you recommend MBA in hindsight to people that really want to get into management consulting?

Ans: CA rankers at least get called from McKinsey and BCG. What I learnt in my career is the importance of reaching out to people and I think that’s been most fundamental quality I tell any youngster right now, because essentially when I know BCG was calling rankers, I had emailed BCG HR saying this is my CV, and I got a call not on basis of I got a rank, but they valued my experience more than my academics at that point of time and that was essentially a big learning for me because I wanted to work for such organisations who value what I do more than my academics or degrees. That said and done I think every CA ranker has got an equal chance to be called at McKinsey or BCG for a CV shortlisting. The shortlisting there is quite different. Apart from academics, they see a lot of personality traits, so their things like Big Four articleship, your extra-curriculars, what else have you done apart from your academics, play a big role, and if you have spent a lot of time doing that in your three years of articleship, you can be sure to get a call and obviously after that it’s a meritocracy process. It’s a very logical interviewing process and you will make it through.

Q9. Is management consulting very hectic?

Ans: I think its quite hectic and I am not sure how people function, but if you are used to Big Four articleship, its somewhat like similar because you are on these projects which have scrunched deadlines. But I think it teaches you a lot of things at that time, it teaches you prioritization, the ability to ask people for help, how to be a quick problem solver, how to shift things faster, those are a lot of things we learn. Initially I think it’s a difficulty phase, the working hours are bad, not bad but long, and if you like hustling, you will enjoy management consulting because it’s a very intellectually intensive role and you work on very ambiguous problems. I think it fills you a lot of self-confidence after you have done a project in let’s say an XYZ industry you never thought of, but after 2 months you really know a lot about the industry, so that way I think it shapes your mindset of approaching things which is very important in my view.

Q10. How did LinkedIn happen?

Ans: My experience with CA has been very fundamental, so I wasn’t very tech-focused, I didn’t know how tech industry functioned and working with TA made me understand a lot of these terms from basic. At LinkedIn the role was very much similar to understand what drives profitability of the business and sort of take levers to move that. The team is quite small because usually don’t need so many people to just drive such things but yes, generally engineers in MBA are people who tend to be more heavier in these roles. Even I don’t know a CA who is in a similar team as me, but I think as I told, after a while your academics or which college are you from or what sort of academics you had have a very less role, I think majority becomes your experience and that’s why I have always felt like doing things from the best perspective of experience is more important than scoring more marks, but I think there are people who will fairly disagree with me and its just a personal opinion.

Q11. What did you do in your US stint?

Ans: The idea there was to just catch up with the broader team to understand how they view India and how we can leverage the global learnings to drive some of the initiatives.

Q12. You publish these notes to yourself in LinkedIn. So what is the rationale of publishing these notes per se?

Ans: I think notes to self started at a point where I was feeling quite low in my career and in personal life so it started with understanding a lot more fundamentally about what drives me and what makes me happy and that was the time I actually started reading a lot of these practical psychology books and I understood that I am not different, there are many people like me and I just started with this random exercise of putting my thoughts down and because it would be a better way to remember them and so I started sharing them. After the first article, the response was quite high, there were lot of people who had personally written to me saying how they agree with the particular point and this is what they think is additional and this is what they have been feeling. Obviously I didn’t create a forum out of it like start answering questions or become a psychology guru, but I would just probably reply back in emails and things which helped me in my personal lows to get over things and I think that’s been the rationale behind doing this. Obviously just because I recently joined I am a bit busy to write but at some point I want to continue that thread and continue writing.

Q13. What is your advice to future aspirants from commerce stream?

Ans: Every degree has its own value education and its on people to take what sort of things they would like to add to their profile. The only thing I would tell to anybody is there is a possibility that you might get things, you just have to try. I know a CA who really wanted to do management consulting and got shortlisted in a BCG round as well. He went through but he couldn’t make it, he was very passionate about management consulting so he decided to give CAT and go to a MBA school and got back to BCG again. So there are always alternative ways to reach to your particular destination, just enjoy what you are doing right now and just reach out to people. I think there is no problem you are facing which hasn’t been solved or faced by anybody else before. So just by reaching out a lot of these what you think are hard and specific to you can be really solved and that’s the big advise I would give to people. Try to look at your problems from their lens and you will realise that this is not a big problem after all and its something which can be solved very easily, and just be open and try to understand. If you are getting something, try to do a good job at it, try to learn from it. I always believe that there is a way to get to where you are, and I think passion is something just learnings across your journey. So just trust in the process and it will happen to you.