Driving Efficiency & Profits: CFO Best Practices in FY23

Praveen

Again, hello and a very warm welcome to today's session. My name is Praveen and I head product marketing here at Drivetrain. We are one of the sponsors of today's webinar alongside Spendflow, and we are incredibly excited to have you join us for a very practical and actionable 45-minute session where we'll talk about strategies and tactics to optimize, one, cash flow; two, your business efficiency metrics; and three, your profitability margins, and then some. I'll be introducing our expert panelists in just a minute, but before that I'll quickly cover a few housekeeping items. As you may have already noticed, we are recording today's webinar, and the session will be made available to everyone on demand over the next couple of days. It will be available on both Spendflow's and Drivetrain's websites. We'll also share the recording with you over email, so you can either play it back at your convenience or share it with your colleagues. All right, without any further delay, let's start with the introductions. Naga, Manoj, looking forward to listening to your thoughts on the topic. Over to you both. Would you like to go first?

Naga Subramanya

Yeah, thanks Praveen. I'm really glad to be doing this webinar with you folks, and especially having Manoj as a co-panelist. I think it's going to be really good. My name is Naga, I'm the Director of Finance at the virtual event startup Airmeet. We are based in the US, with a team spread out all over the world and customers all over the world. We do virtual events and webinars, so you can imagine something like this, but on a different platform, or even much larger events. So that's what we do at Airmeet. And thank you once again, Spendflow and Drivetrain teams, for doing this.

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Thank you Praveen, and so glad to be part of this webinar. My name is Manoj Rathi. I'm CFO for a company called FarEye, which is into enabling digital logistics, with a primary focus on last-mile delivery across the globe, but based out of Noida, India. I'm a chartered accountant, which is like the CPA equivalent in India, with 39 years of work experience, mostly in the IT services space and manufacturing, and a couple of startups.

Praveen

Hey, thank you Manoj, Naga. Now, we know almost all companies out there are trying to reduce their spends regardless of the runway they have, and investors especially are expecting some really radical efficiency measures, with the focus being on runway, efficiency and growth, in that order. So what does that require? Let's start with the tactical ways to optimize cash flow. We know that no company is better than its metrics. So when we talk about cash flow optimization, what are the top three metrics that you concentrate on?

Naga Subramanya

So in terms of cash flow optimization, if I'm talking from first principles, it basically boils down to two things. One part of it is your EBITDA, or what trickles down from your P&L. The second part is your working capital, which is how efficiently you collect money from your customers and how late you can afford to pay your vendors. In theory it's very easy to say, "Yeah, I'll just collect from my customers immediately, pay my vendors really late, and have a lot of cash sitting on hand," but the realities of business don't really allow us to do that. So on one hand, what I basically look at is: what are our major heads of expense, and are we really getting the bang for the buck across all of them? Whether it is sales and marketing or R&D, what are the components? And just keep a micro focus on it and ask, "Why is this number changing? Why is it increasing? Why is it going down?" So sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue, R&D as a percentage of revenue, the sales magic number, CAC efficiency. These are some of the metrics that help us on the P&L side of things. So that's a small summary, as well as a short list of metrics that we typically look at.

Praveen

Hey, thanks Naga, that was very interesting. And Manoj, would you like to add to that?

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Absolutely. Just to tell you, FarEye is a Series E funded organization, which we can call a late growth-stage startup. And for us, I won't restrict myself to just three metrics. I would rather bucket a host of metrics into three major buckets, efficiency buckets I would call them: revenue efficiency, operational efficiency and capital efficiency. Pretty much similar to what Naga just talked about. Revenue efficiency would include one of the key SaaS metrics, which is ARR. So we look at the ARR growth on the new sales side and on the existing customer side, upsell, GRR, NRR, net-new ARR growth, etc. We also look at NRR or ARR in different cuts, like regional cuts, vertical cuts, sub-vertical cuts, product cuts, etc. On the operational efficiency side, I'll be looking at the P&L across various operating segments. Operating segments could be a regional cut, a vertical cut, a functional view, an expense view, those kinds of things. I look at expenses in absolute amounts as well as a percentage of revenue, including their trends, and also at a couple of SaaS metrics across various line items. On the capital efficiency side, it's basically the net cash generation or burn in a particular month. Sometimes in a particular month there's actually net cash generation as well. So net cash generation or net burn in a month, how working capital is going, what the cash position is as of date, and capital efficiency metrics like runway, DSO, DPO, that kind of stuff.

Praveen

I really liked a couple of things about that, Manoj. The first is that you touched on a variation of Goodhart's law: when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, because it can be gamed. And of course, when you focus on only one, two or three metrics, that focus comes at the cost of something else, because all of these metrics push and tug on each other. So that was a great point. The second part I really liked is that your points and Naga's complemented each other very well, because at the end of the day, cash flow optimization is one part controlling cost on your major line items and the other part managing your working capital. That is critical to understanding your cash conversion cycles, like you mentioned, because you need to monitor liquidity and the fluctuations in your working capital, which leads to better optimization of cash flow and to managing your accounts receivable much more effectively. So thank you for that. Keeping these metrics in mind, what are the key strategies you've employed in the last 12 to 15 months to ensure cost control and improve cash flow? Manoj, I would like to start with you, since FarEye achieved a tremendous 70% reduction in burn just in the last year. I would love to learn about the strategies you implemented that worked so well.

Manoj Kumar Rathi

That's quite a lot, by the way. It took us a lot of time to put all those things in place and to finally reduce our cash burn by 70%. So let me recollect and give you a couple of high-level things that we did, to answer your question. The first thing: sometime around February 2022, the leadership team met to discuss how to take this company to the next level. We were looking for a theme that aligns very well with our vision and aspirations, and the theme we decided on for the company is predictable, efficient growth: PEG. We said we definitely have to grow, there's no choice, but we have to grow efficiently, and with as much predictability as possible. With that theme, the leadership team started working on a long-term plan for about three years. Then we translated that three-year plan into a P&L and cash positions over the three years. That threw up a lot of surprises. For the first time ever, we sensed that we were actually sitting on a lot of flab. So we took it back to the functional leaders and discussed with them that it looks like we are sitting on some flab, and with the kind of long-term plan we had prepared and this kind of flab, we might be heading towards some sort of disaster, so we need to take corrective actions now. But it was not really accepted by the functional leaders, because they all felt they were not sitting on any flab. Then we had no choice but to look externally. We brought in external benchmarks to validate our thought process and establish that there was actually flab. We picked up data from SaaS organizations of a similar size on headcount in different functions, costs in different functions, etc., and mapped it against what we had. Then we could see that there was flab. Once that got established, the planning and the process started towards reducing the flab, and we tried our utmost to make it as least disruptive as possible. We bucketed the entire cost reduction into two major buckets. The first was headcount, where we adopted a separate strategy to figure out how much to reduce and where, so that it doesn't disrupt operations. The second bucket was costs other than salaries, compensation and benefits. On the headcount side, we looked at the organization structure and created a to-be organization structure with a clear focus on making it very lean, agile and customer-centric. Then we started placing the right people in the right places in that org structure, and that's how we figured out which people we could let go without impacting our operations or productivity at all. We had to do a one-time rightsizing to reduce a bunch of people, and we also did not backfill attrition. The combination of these two helped us beat our rationalization target. On the cost side, we took a lot of actions. First, we looked at our top expenses. Besides compensation and benefits, our top expenses were server and software expenses, travel expenses, marketing expenses, and legal and professional expenses. Those were the top five or six expense categories. We looked at each and every vendor contract to figure out which contracts were not required and which were good-to-have that we could get rid of, and we terminated those contracts. We did price renegotiations with a lot of vendors wherever possible, and we changed some vendors. We looked at our office spaces across the globe and rationalized those spaces, which reduced our rental cost. We tightened a lot of policies, like policies around travel, in a very sensible way. And we introduced a variable component into the salaries of some leadership-level people and linked that variable component to their OKRs. So those were a couple of things we did, and that resulted in a 70% burn reduction in a year's time. In the present funding winter, we are very comfortably placed and we see a very long runway for ourselves. We actually don't need funds for our organic growth at all. If at all we need funds at this point in time, it will only be for inorganic expansion.

Praveen

Hey, thanks Manoj. Honestly, that in its entirety could have been a webinar, because we would have liked to delve deeper into many of the points you just mentioned. Unfortunately, we'll have to keep it at that high level, but there were a lot of practical takeaways. What we generally refer to as sustainable growth, I think you really nailed it by calling it predictable, efficient growth, because sustainable growth at the end of the day needs to be predictable and it needs to be efficient. The second part you mentioned, bringing in external benchmarks, I think is incredible, because you need to compare yourselves not just internally but against your peers: similar size, similar industry, similar sales motion and so on. There are a lot of benchmark providers out there, and once you compare and give that as a target to your internal teams, the entire mindset and alignment actually comes into play. That, plus all the policies you mentioned, makes a lot of sense. Naga, I'd like to understand, in the context of Airmeet, what were the key strategies you implemented to ensure cost control?

Naga Subramanya

Sure. A lot of the things Manoj mentioned are things we ended up doing as well. We also did headcount optimization and all that. So maybe I'll focus a little on the revenue side and what we did to collect money from customers faster. One of the things we did was tie up with a financing partner, so we stopped losing deals with customers who asked for custom payment terms or who wanted to pay monthly when we only offered annual contracts. We looked at all the regions where we get revenue, the biggest being the US, UK and the rest of North America, and tied up with a financing provider who could take our annual invoice while our customers paid that provider on a monthly basis. That's just one example. Then we changed sales compensation so that reps get compensated only when we collect the money, versus at the time of booking, because we were seeing some drop-off due to bad debts, or reps giving really favorable payment terms, and all of that. It's extremely tactical, but these are small tweaks we made to the incentives for the reps and to add more flexibility for them, so they're still able to close deals with the kind of flexibility we want to give. But to come back to another point: I think it all comes down to resource allocation. How are you allocating resources, and what kind of ROI are you getting? Because, like Manoj said, everyone is going to say, "I am the most efficient." That's the reason everybody loves SaaS metrics, because the metrics help us stay true. But sometimes you get comfortable with the metrics, and as finance people we can see through that and try to see if there's any more juice left to squeeze. That's where benchmarks come into play. That's how I would put it.

Praveen

Got it. This is again very interesting. I really like the first part of the answer, where you took annual contracts and let those customers pay monthly, given the current economic situation. I've also heard about companies that have introduced a pause, so customers can retain all their data and restart when the time is better. But that obviously brings up a lot of questions around how you actually process that in terms of ARR. Do you consider it churn, or reactivation ARR, or how does that work? That's a very different topic, and we can probably delve into it deeper if we have time at the end of this conversation. Moving on from there, you mentioned resource reallocation, and this was actually one of the questions people submitted before the session: how did you go about resource reallocation, and is there a framework you can share? When I was thinking about it, I thought this is indeed an excellent question, because it is top of mind for many of us. One, we need answers to where our resources will bring the most value, or, put another way, which areas of our business have the most impact on the company's top line. Once you have answered that, the second question is how much talent and budget to reallocate to new areas. And third, all of this is still on paper, so how do you convert it into action, make an action plan, and drive alignment? Naga, I'd like to put this question to you first, because you brought in this resource reallocation aspect. Would love to hear how you have implemented this at Airmeet.

Naga Subramanya

Sure. Maybe I'll describe how we ended up deciding which teams to focus on when we were doing the headcount optimization. If you look at the two large cost team compositions within any SaaS company, it's pretty much R&D and sales and marketing. On R&D, we also did a benchmarking exercise similar to what Manoj did, but we did it with OpexEngine in the US. They were running a trial for their R&D benchmarks, and we worked with them to understand our entire software development life cycle. Are we developing products faster? How much of our product are we testing manually, and how much can be tested in an automated fashion? What is our product release frequency? What is the magic-number equivalent for R&D? So for every additional rupee you spend in R&D, what are the revenue metrics you're getting out? You spend so much money on R&D: are your ACVs expanding, are you gaining market share with your ICP customers, is your retention going up? Otherwise, what is the rationale behind the R&D investment? Or is it such a competitive category that you need to keep investing in R&D so your product roadmap stays ahead of your competitors and your sales team still has a couple of features to position as reasons to win? So that is how we looked at R&D as a function. On the engineering side, we worked with OpexEngine and looked at R&D benchmarks across the software development life cycle. On the other side, we asked: what features are these teams developing, where is it going, is it having revenue impact, and if not, is it helping us maintain or gain market share? Because it's a feature game, and I always need to be at the cutting edge of the features and products that demanding customers need, to make sure they continue using us. So that was the R&D side. Then the same question on the marketing side. We split marketing into brand marketing and demand gen, and tied every demand-gen activity back to some kind of ROI measure, either in the form of leads or pipeline. Like Manoj was mentioning earlier, a lot of this data doesn't really make sense unless you cut it contextually. When we looked at the demand-gen data, we cut it by the intent of the leads: was it high intent, medium intent, low intent? Where did they come from, and which companies? That's how we figured out efficiency, because I'm trying to measure efficiency within one or two months of doing a demand-gen activity, but my sales cycle could be six months. So I need an early indicator to figure out whether a campaign is on its way to success or on its way to becoming a dud. On the sales side, it was just the standard stuff: how many ramped reps do we have, how are they contributing, are they hitting quota or not, why not, and what can we do to make that more efficient? Also the mix of SDRs or BDRs per AE: was it too much, too little? Again, cut by region and by SMB, mid-market and enterprise, and optimize so that whatever trade-offs we're making, we're aware of them and okay with the consequences. So those are some broad pointers on how we thought about R&D and about sales and marketing.

Praveen

Definitely. Those are two of the biggest buckets when it comes to opex, and I think you hit the nail on the head there. Manoj, would you like to add to that, please?

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Yeah, mostly aligned with what Naga said. We did similar things. One thing: external benchmarking is relatively easy, but you need to be aware of your own landscape too. It has to be very sensible. We can't simply say, "That company of this size has so many people in product and engineering, so you should have a similar size." That may not be true. You might be a different company chasing different products, building different products, with a different kind of experience and a different kind of growth. Many factors come into it, so whatever we do has to be done in a very sensible manner that really makes sense for the organization. For example, in P&E, or product and engineering, you can't directly link spend to the revenue being generated, which makes it slightly difficult. And we have multiple products within the overall last-mile product, like shipping, tracking, experience, execution, etc. So first, we put people into these different buckets: how many people we have on a particular product. Then we did a sort of product-market-fit check, in the sense that we took a view from the sales team: in your respective regions, where do you see sales happening, and in which product? What is the existing set of customers we have against this product, and what pipeline are you expecting against these products? We mapped that: how much revenue a particular product is expected to generate, and how many resources we have deployed in that area. That's one way of looking at the data. The other way, which Naga touched upon and we also did, is looking at how many resources we have deployed on new feature or new product development, and how many are maintaining the existing products or improving their features. We looked at that resource deployment too, and from there we could figure out how we could rationalize headcount. Sales and marketing is relatively simpler because it's attached to new sales growth, so you can put a magic number to it. On the marketing side, you can look at how many SQLs different activities have generated, link to that, and keep improving those metrics so these costs keep coming down and finally lead to profitability.

Praveen

Excellent points, again. Sorry, a quick note before we move on to the next topic. On sustainable growth, or as Manoj puts it, predictable efficient growth, there's a link in the chat to a cost savings guide for navigating a downturn, if you'd like to dive deeper into achieving cost efficiency, since that's the first topic we just covered. Moving on to the second topic, which is balancing the very famous growth-versus-efficiency equation that has become paramount today. Manoj, could you tell us a little about how you have been looking at growth at FarEye, and your top growth metrics?

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Okay. First of all, growth versus profitability also depends on the stage a company is at. An early-stage or evolving startup will focus more on product-market fit, establishing the product, and growing the organization. But from the growth stage, maybe mid or late growth stage, growth is definitely first and foremost, but it has to become efficient growth. Essentially, growth should now come along with profitability. So which one is more important is always a discussion item. For FarEye, at this point in time, both are important and we are looking at both. We are constantly trying to figure out ways to grow efficiently, effectively and profitably. But anything we do should not undermine growth at all. That is the key thing. So how do we generate profitability while not restricting growth at all? On the sales or revenue side: ours is a proven product in the market, accepted by many customers across the globe, and I would say a slightly differentiated product, not really a commodity. So in deal pricing, we look at what our cost is going to be and what markup we should keep, and we should not go below that margin level. So when we're pricing a deal, we are not losing out on money. Of course, there's a lot of competitive pressure, so we look at the deal size, which market we are getting into, whether it's a new market, the customer, the industry segment, etc., and we move our pricing up and down. But we make sure we are not losing out on a particular deal in terms of our margin. That is one side we are very conscious about. The other side is holding on to your costs and not letting your cost levels increase. There are two types of costs, I would say. One is costs that are fixed in nature, mostly G&A spend. We keep a very tight leash on that fixed G&A spend, continue to optimize it, and make sure it is not growing linearly with revenue. For other costs, like variable costs or direct function-level costs, we try to link that spend to some sort of outcome. For example, as I said before, when we look at marketing spend across different channels, we look at how many SQLs that spend is generating, and then the magic number, which is a very straightforward number. We also do that on the services business we have, which takes care of implementation and change requests. There, our intent is not really to make money out of it, but we make sure that business is at least net-zero cost. Whatever revenue we get from implementation and change requests should at least cover the full cost of that team. So those are things we try to do to make sure that alongside growth we are also growing efficiently, so that it turns into profitability.

Praveen

Thanks Manoj, that was a very measured answer, I must say. And Naga, at your end at Airmeet, what were the top growth metrics you've been tracking, and the tactics you employ to find that growth at a sustainable cost?

Naga Subramanya

In terms of growth metrics, I think they are similar for all companies. We're all looking at ARR growth, logo retention and revenue retention. But the point is: what are the ways to enable growth, and what can you do to get that growth in a cost-optimized manner? The interesting thing for us is that we are in a viral category. A lot of times we get customers through someone else who attended an Airmeet event. How many of us knew Zoom before the pandemic? Our entire category, including Zoom, got a big bump from the pandemic, because it has an inherent viral loop, where customers attend, think "hey, this is interesting," and come to us. We came to know that one of the big sources of leads is actually people attending other Airmeet events. So we did a partnership program with some communities. We learned that CIOs and CXOs attend these community events, so we gave those communities large Airmeet licenses so they had a recurring event running. They became unsaid marketers for us, because people attend these Airmeet events, really love them, and find them a lot more interactive than Zoom events. And hopefully you guys will do your next event on Airmeet, but that's my plug for Airmeet in this webinar. Long story short, that was one of the tactics we employed: how do we open up the product to do what it's naturally good at, and have that viral growth by itself, so people can use it, experience it and grow. We also started a free plan where people can run events up to a particular size without having to talk to a sales rep. In the future we're going to do more around pricing, like Manoj said. But one thing I want everyone to understand is that my answers are from a much earlier stage than Manoj's, and that is a nuance a lot of us miss, so I want to re-emphasize it. My answers come from a single product, with few geographical differences; most of our revenue is from North America. The complexity of our business is all around how we achieve or unlock the next level of growth. Manoj's context is a much larger company, much closer to profitability, probably closer to getting listed, so the nuance there is more about different product lines and different regions. If there's one thing people should take away from this conversation, it's that there's no set answer. The answer is always "it depends," but you'll only find out what it depends on when you dive deeper: double-click, double-click and double-click. While some of these strategies, like what we did at Airmeet, might be interesting, they might not be 100% actionable, because people may not be able to go back and implement them at their organizations. The point is to think of the framework and the first principle behind it, and see how you can apply it to your business.

Praveen

That was also a very fair point, Naga. You brought in a very important point there about contextualizing all of the answers being given by you and Manoj. On that front, we've been getting a few questions in the Q&A as well, and we can use one as a nice segue into the next section of our webinar. We've heard from you both on some excellent frameworks, methods and metrics to track to get insight into what needs to be done. But that brings us to how you act on them. How do you drive alignment across the board? That's the question that's come in. How do we do it with rigor and discipline? Does there have to be a top-down push, or not? How do we get everybody on the same page and get them to agree on targets? Manoj touched on this a little when he mentioned benchmarks, which partly answers it, but it would be great to understand how you do it at your companies. Since Manoj already addressed this a little earlier, Naga, I'll put this to you first: how have you driven alignment across the board at Airmeet?

Naga Subramanya

Like Manoj said, we got a lot of insight by doing a long-term plan. Typically we have a long-term plan, which is a three-year plan; then an annual plan for the 12 months; and then you might have a quarterly or operating plan that gets refreshed as the quarter goes on, where you look at your actuals. The answer I'm giving you is exactly what Manoj already said about how FarEye implemented its burn reduction strategy, and it comes down to a few things: incentives, planning, and holding people accountable by tying outcomes back to incentives. We heard Manoj say they took a lot of senior people's comp and tied it to outcomes, converting fixed to variable. We did the same and tied it to a business outcome. But having those conversations with people, I'm going to leave that part open. I would love to hear more specifics on it, for me personally but also for everyone else. The other part is holding people accountable: telling them, "What is it you want to achieve, how are we going to achieve it, and how are we all going to help each other achieve it?" That's planning, and that's where finance acts as a very important pillar. A lot of us work with founders who are engineers or technical by nature, so product sprints, product releases and product calendars come naturally to them, but planning calendars, financial reporting and doing things by the book don't come very easily. There was a quote from one of our VCs, I think from Accel's India team, who said the role of finance is to act like a GPS, as well as a braking system, cruise control and ADAS, all these fancy technologies, to make sure the founders are not driving the car off a cliff or off the freeway in a way that isn't sustainable for the car. Lane-keep assist, basically: making sure we are on the right track, and knowing what that track is. Maybe I'll stop there and hand it over to Manoj to fill in the blanks.

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Thanks. Just a few things I'd like to add. It's a very pertinent question. We can figure out strategies and all those things, but how do we implement them? Unless it's implemented, it has no real effect. The first thing we did was bring alignment at the leadership level that we have to drive efficiency in the organization. We transparently shared with them our current status and what our future outlook looks like, and we regularly maintained that cadence going forward. We also worked to make the entire leadership team, senior leadership, mid-level leadership, etc., feel like one team working towards a shared vision. Once you have that alignment, things are much easier to implement at the ground level. Otherwise there's always resistance. Around that, we also focused strategically, and it's part of any standard organization anyway, on building and developing a performance-driven work culture with an outcome-oriented attitude based on certain core values. It's extremely important that you roll this out across the organization. The performance management system, everything, is built around performance. Only performance will be rewarded, nothing else, but performance has to come with the right attitude too: result orientation, frugality, etc. We also built a lot of R&R programs around it so people are motivated to achieve their targets, along with well-defined, agile policies and processes. The combination of all these factors helped us actually implement what we planned and the steps we thought we could take in the organization.

Praveen

Thank you so much. This is such a great and timely topic, and I know we've just scratched the surface. I'd like to start the final section of our session by highlighting the key to putting all of these practices into place continuously. In that context, we'll pull up a poll right now on the role of tools and technology in all of this. There's also a Q&A question on the same topic about what the finance tech stack looks like, because at the end of the day you need software and tools to make it happen. So we'll bring up a poll on your screen now. If any of you would like a demo of Spendflow or Drivetrain, please let us know. That would be great. Given that we're running out of time, we'd like to move on to closing thoughts, and we'll take questions as time allows. Manoj, Naga: one golden tip you can offer finance leaders trying to drive efficiency and profits during these very hard times. Naga, would you like to go first?

Naga Subramanya

Sure, sorry, I was on mute. The final tip would be to understand the trade-offs of the decisions we're making. A lot of times, myself included, we look at a problem like cost reduction and use it as a blunt instrument to bludgeon whichever functions we think don't really have value. But we really need to dive deeper, understand the business, and break it down to make sure we're not unintentionally breaking something that's working. So understand the trade-offs: by doing something or not doing something, you're losing something. Earlier in the webinar you said metrics tug on each other and act as a balancing mechanism. It's the same with trade-offs and decisions. They have first-order, second-order and third-order effects, and it's our job to think them through. Planning and FP&A are just one way of doing it, but by working closely with the business, we'll also be able to bring them into that thought process.

Manoj Kumar Rathi

Okay, I have one golden tip and also a platinum tip. I'll go with golden first, since you asked for golden. The golden tip is a very tactical one that FarEye actually benefited from a lot. One thing that really made the difference is institutionalizing the process and mechanism of rolling forecasts in the organization, to make it more predictable and proactive. Just implement it and see the amazing effect. Whatever your business, blend it into a rolling forecast. Do your rolling forecast on a monthly basis for the current financial year, month by month until year-end, and maybe the impact on the next one or two years as well. Make it a habit. That always sensitizes management to the impact of the decisions they're taking, immediately, in the short term and in the medium to long term, along with the payback. That's the golden tip. The platinum tip is about changing the mindset and perspective of finance leaders and organizations on how they look at their function and responsibility. More often they look at it as accounting, audit and compliance focused. From there, they should move to become business partners in value creation. With that change in perspective, everything falls into place. You'll know exactly which metrics to chase, where to look at data, and what needs to be done in which situations. That becomes the driving force. If you see yourself as a business partner, it's a different game altogether.

Praveen

I learned quite a bit today, and that was a great way to end the main session. To quickly summarize: we saw some key metrics to focus on and how to act on them to improve your cash flow while balancing growth with profitability. We learned about approaches that balance growth and margin improvements, all to fundamentally create a healthy business where your cost structure is built for efficient growth. We also heard the speakers stress that this journey is an organization-wide effort. It requires strict discipline, a strong top-down push, and good benchmarks, which are critical to driving all of this. And we realized that if you don't have access to all of these key metrics to inform your decisions, it's like going on a trek. I'm borrowing from the analogy Naga used, though he used a car. You're going on a trek, you don't know where it'll end or how hard it's going to be, and you may have a general idea of where you're going, but without the right combination of tools and technology you could easily get lost or sidetracked. That's where software like Spendflow helps you keep a very close eye on your costs and expenses, and Drivetrain helps you make sure you have a map to plan your growth, a compass to track your journey in real time, and even some diagnostics and simulation tools, your ADAS and so on, to course-correct as required and make the trek successful. There's one more audience question, but we are over time, so unfortunately we'll get back to you over email, along with all the links we've shared. We'll have to start wrapping up. Manoj, Naga, thank you again for sharing the practical aspects of implementing effective cost optimization and margin improvements, with all the nuances that come with it. I really appreciate all of the audience participation and engagement. We'll be sending out a link to the webinar, and we invite all of you to reach out to any of us as well. You'll see our email contacts on the slide.