FP&A in Services Industry with Dhawal Parvatikar

On 23 July 2022, I had a very engaging conversation with Dhawal Parvatikar. He may be known to most of you for the guidance, mentoring and coaching he provides to finance professionals. And his popular online course on FP&A, "FP&A Foundations".

We talked about his journey from starting as a CA fresher to his current role as a CFO. He offered advice for those considering a similar career path.

Key message to young Finance professionals

"The best career advice that I got at the very start of my career is to start looking at your career in blocks of 2-3 years. Once you qualify, it's going to be a very long journey. It's going to be a 25, 30 year journey till you retire.Make sure that you attack each block and go from one block to the next. You take it step by step, and within a span of eight to ten years, you'll realize that you have come a long way""        

Dhawal's Journey so far ...

Dhawal started like any typical CA student would start. He completed his CA and then got picked up by Bharat Petroleum (a leading oil and gas company in India) on campus. His first role was in the industrial fuels department where he worked closely on the pricing and profitability of 70 different products.

Next he moved to Trafigura, a shared services center of a large commodity trading company. There he worked on accounting and finance processes for 80 different service companies spread across 70 different countries.

Over the last eight years he has been associated with the advertising and marketing industry. He has worked with one of the largest advertising companies in the world (Publicis). This was also a turning point in his career where he got a role which was directly reporting to the CFO. This gave him a lot of insights about how CFOs think and their leadership style.

Finally, he moved to his present role at Fleishman Hillard as a finance controller and within a year and a half was promoted to the CFO role.

On the CFO role,

"I have always emphasized in all my conversations, is building strong cross-functional relationships." "It is very important for professionals to understand the pulse of the business and keep a check on it. Even today as a CFO, I spend at least 2 to 3 hours with my business teams."

"The interesting part about the CFO role or any senior finance position for that matter is that if everything goes well, the credit goes to the CEO. If something goes bad, then the CFO is to be blamed (in a candid manner).

On managing Service Companies.

"When I was doing my CA internship, I was biased towards manufacturing companies. Whenever my principal sent me for an audit of a service company, I used to hate it. But now that I've been associated with service companies for the last 8 years, I can definitely say that it's equally challenging."        

How does Revenue look like in Service Companies?

Personnel Cost: The biggest expense line in Service Companies

Service Companies KPI's

To learn more about FP&A in Service organizations you can watch the entire conversation here on YouTube.  

For more such career conversations subscribe to my YouTube Channel here.

If you would like to check out the course, here is the course link.

Be sure to follow Dhawal on LinkedIn; here is the link.

Dhawal and I are co-creating a series of FP&A Master Classes where we both together will train and coach you on the skills you need to be successful in FP&A.

We have limited seats for 25 participants. There is a 25% Early bird discount for the first 10 participants. Do check it out here.

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