WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host Wayne Brown and welcome to the ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this live broadcast for executive talent all over the world whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today we’re starting off in Singapore to chat with Sirish Kumar, the CFO turned founder, CEO and board member. Sirish leverages his two decades of experience at the intersection of finance, technology and regulation across multiple geographies. He has held senior finance and commercial roles at Cargill, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens Networks and PayPal where he served as CFO for Southeast Asia and India before founding and exiting a profitable B2B payments company. Most recently he has founded Sirrista and SaaCash, a cashflow and forecasting platform. Sirish has seen international finance centers and regulators evolve in their role in the last 15 years and has interacted with supervisors as a member of the board of commissioners in Indonesia and set up entities in Dubai. He has engaged with leadership teams in India during his formative years which gave him a front-row view of how emerging IFCs are designed and sequenced. In Singapore’s tech ecosystem, Sirish has been active with SGTech and the Singapore FinTech Association and his first venture started in Block71 in Singapore almost 12 years ago. Over his career he has been in core teams launching new technologies and business models across logistics, ports, telecom and technology industries. He has integrated hundreds of banks across the US and Europe via APIs leveraging the open banking ecosystems. Needless to say he has designed business models that balance innovation with governance, data privacy and financial literacy. Today through Sirrista and SaaCash he helps fintechs, SMEs and policymakers build pragmatic technology-enabled financial solutions that are globally connected yet local. Team, I’ve had the pleasure to meet with Sirish in person on multiple occasions and can attest to his depth of knowledge, his passion for what he does and to being a genuine all-around great guy. Therefore, I know that you’re going to take away a ton of valuable lessons as you enjoy this conversation. 

INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

WAYNE BROWN: Hello team, thanks for joining today’s conversation. This is one that I know many of you are going to resonate with. Let me start by framing it this way, for many of us, including myself, our careers grew on the back of a belief that the path to success is somewhat linear; we need to climb higher, we need to get that title. But what happens when growth demands something a little bit messier? It’s what one leader calls an intentional demotion. And today’s guest traded the clarity of the CFO seat for the certainty of a founder’s journey, or the uncertainty I should say, not the certainty but the uncertainty, he moved from being a guardian of the numbers to the owner of the story and from being a decision maker to the chief meaning maker. And today he’s building a tech company without writing a single line of code. With that little introduction, let’s welcome our guest Mr. Sirish Kumar and we’ll dive into the conversation. Sirish, welcome to the ET project. 

SIRISH KUMAR: Thank you Wayne for having me and a big hello to everyone listening.

WAYNE BROWN: Now you’re based in Singapore, right? 

SIRISH KUMAR: I am indeed. 

WAYNE BROWN: How long have you been there?

SIRISH KUMAR: Well, it has been almost, I would say around 18 years. It’s one place that you take every day something to learn, there is such a great agglomeration of different nationalities. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. 

SIRISH KUMAR: If you see it geographically, it’s a very small country, but the activity around innovation, the way there’s a synergy between the government and the private sector. And what does actually forward-looking mean and how do you convince yourself that you need to completely reinvent yourself every one year, two years, and five years. I can say we are living in a very large startup environment, which has very good sponsors at the same time, always thinking about saying what is the future and how can we make the future become current today. So, yeah, it has been a fantastic and it still is in this country. 

[00:05:00]

WAYNE BROWN: And that’s such an important question in the scheme of where we are in the world today with everything that’s going on, and particularly with technology, which is where you are. But prior to moving to Singapore, the listener if they’re not looking at the video, they might pick up the accent, being an Indian accent. Where in India did you hail from?

SIRISH KUMAR: My family has been a family of educators, and they’ve kind of moved around in the country of India. In fact, my father started with North India, he was an educator in a premier technology institute called IIT. And my mother was an English professor who was more spending time in the western part of India, which is where I was born, which is Rajasthan. Then both of them decided to move to South India as they had different objectives, particularly around… there’s a Ford Foundation project running in India so my dad then moved to South, and then my mother decided to say that we all should kind of stay on in South for a while. So, it has been a journey of North, Western India, and Southern India. 

WAYNE BROWN: Our audience, we have a large percentage coming out of India, so I’m sure they’re very interested on the journey. I myself have a deep love for the country, I’ve spent a lot of time over there as well, so I can visualize all the locations you’re talking about. Let’s jump into the conversation today, which is effectively looking at your journey, moving from corporate into becoming an entrepreneur, et cetera, but looking at the insights and the learnings that came out of that for you. I thought we’d start with identifying the catalyst, identifying why the shift from a CFO into this entrepreneurial journey, particularly in the scope of you’re sitting as a CFO in a large corporate organization, that comes with clarity, status, probably a clearly mapped out career path. Was there a specific moment or a realization that helped you decide to walk away from that and become the founder of your own company and an entrepreneur?

SIRISH KUMAR: A fantastic question. I’ll try to answer this by, first of all, saying that I started getting engaged with the entrepreneurial community when I was in Motorola for a while and then, of course, at Nokia as well. What happened is that I kind of landed up having a zero-to-one kind of stage of how do we back our emails on a cloud and how do you back up your files on the cloud? And there was only just one company called Dropbox, which was very well-known. And I think being a CFO and having that regular understanding of both packs and dashboards and all that stuff, what I was trying to figure out is how do I convert this idea into something that’s more tangible and can be understood? And I think that was a one-and-a-half year to two-year interaction with one of the founders and it started resonating, we started getting excited. And at the time I had moved on to PayPal and then I basically said, “look, I have an idea and there is also this idea of backup storage. Why don’t we get the right person?” We then brought in a person from Google and this company continued to then flourish on its own and then got listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. But that laid a seed in me of saying, “can I become an entrepreneur?” If I have to just give a little bit of context, I had been a CFO for the region for different companies and primarily I would spend time in dashboards, board decks, and PowerPoint presentations and then make decisions of whether should we enter a new market, Should we restructure a business? Should we enter into a new commission model with a new enterprise or ensure that do we want to pivot into a new business line? But what happened is that when I moved on to being a regional CFO for a large payment company, I started seeing small and medium enterprises through the dashboards and the pivot tables. My large part of the job was sitting down with the data and analytics team, assessing how do the small and medium businesses are contributing to our growths.

[00:10:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: Which segment of the small and medium enterprise business was up, down, which is contributing to the take rate and margin. But interestingly, Wayne, I never met those SMEs, I knew those SMEs through dashboards, I could see a pattern in the numbers. And I didn’t have a real feel of what is going on the shop floor, what is going on in the warehouse, what is going on in the SME owner’s mind or in the founder’s mind. So, when I actually moved on to the corporate world, moved from the corporate world into the startup world, it changed completely. I’ll take a pause here and let me know if you want me to continue. 

WAYNE BROWN: No, I think that’s a great segue actually into what I was leaning towards next, which is if you walk us through the first several months as an entrepreneur, stepping out of that corporate role into this new world, we’ve all been through it, many of us have been through it. What was your experience? 

SIRISH KUMAR: Yes, so when I really entered the startup world and I made a statement that I had interestingly never met the SMEs and I was looking at the SMEs from dashboards and pivot tables. But now, being as a co-founder, I was sitting across the table from founders and some of the other founders had also left the corporate world and started a venture. Take an example of the founder of Careem who is now a part of Uber. What happened here is that I started having the experience of being in the front row seat into their journeys and how they hired, how they price their product, all the trade-off between growth and survival. And this was now a very exciting thing because if I was running a payments company, the whole idea was to sit down with them and see how do we help in their growth and in their whole expansion phase. That was one experience and once we made it profitable, I exited that and it continues to run on its own today. Then I moved on to a lending company and it was lending to millions of consumers, we had a large loan book to really monitor. The first thing that we thought about is that, how do I bring my technology experience and finance and try to operationalize the business from a cash flow perspective. So, there were various metrics that were being measured and reviewed across many functions. But there was a huge variance of 30% to 45% between forecast and actuals. So that is one thing that was the start of the second innings. Then I pivoted to then, or took on the role of the revenue growth. Now, this is very interesting, Wayne, because I was now interacting with the last mile, warungs of what we call as small stores in Indonesia, sari-sari stores in Philippines, or they are also called as kirana stores in India. That basically was a very interesting phase for me because one of the things that I asked the finance team, for example, to really say is, hold on, let me go back to the sales field team and let me ask them to ask certain questions with these entrepreneurs. And remember, these are people who are very innovative, who are literally contributing to the GDP, but they’re relatively small businesses. So, my question to them would be, “why would you draw down profits for your personal needs?” Or, “why are you stocking units which are moving a little slower? Why don’t you invest in those units of inventory which could move faster?” Or, “how long is your runway when it comes to investing in salaries and fixed costs and electricity?” Et cetera. And more importantly, “if you are planning to borrow, why would you borrow and would that money be used for funding the fixed expenses or to really fill the mysterious holes in a bucket?”

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. 

SIRISH KUMAR: And that, Wayne, I think was a very interesting way to scale up the business. And if you see the journey where it started with interaction with large enterprises and through the payments venture, it was a little larger and medium enterprises. 

[00:15:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: And then you go to the last mile wherein you’re interacting now with them, who basically can show very high growth in sales, but they are under permanent cash stress. And this is where the thing still starts coming to my head saying that they understand revenue very well, but they don’t necessarily understand cash flow so much. 

WAYNE BROWN: That’s my observation with many of my colleagues as well, to be honest. It’s all about the top line, but they don’t actually understand about their day-to-day and the movement of the money through the business and many of them find themselves stuck. So, I think that’s an interesting insight. I’m wondering, Sirish, when you first moved into, I don’t know if you ever had the experience of being a total solo entrepreneur or solopreneur, but many of us, myself included, suffer from an identity crisis. So, we’ve moved out of the corporate role, we have this nice big title, and then all of a sudden, we move into working with ourselves, trying to do 10, 20 different functions. And we start the question, who the heck am I now? Did you have anything like that?

SIRISH KUMAR: Absolutely, Wayne. And one of the things I would say to everyone is that you’re not alone, everyone goes through this. In fact, when you talked about moving from the corporate world, I’ll tell you my journey of CFO to a co-founder. Now, what happened there is that I gave away a large team, I gave away a predictable compensation, I gave away a brand. And at the same time, I misjudged, for example, I thought that when you enter a startup world, the pace at which you launch products and the pace at which you’ll acquire customers is going to be dramatically higher than what you see in the large corporate world. The important thing in that transition is that you’re basically starting to trade off. What will you trade for? You will trade authority for persuasion and influence. And I think this is a leadership muscle that we all gain when we pivot from the corporate world to becoming a founder or a co-founder. And I think that’s the biggest leadership muscle that you actually acquire. And in the process, you do have so-called hurdles, but then you start saying, are these actually hurdles or these are events of lessons? And it does take a little bit of time for you to start saying that we need to react differently to that opportunity or to that risk that we need to convert into an opportunity. This is one of the best times for people to move from working for someone if they have that desire to make a difference by leveraging their experience and at the same time learning. I would encourage everyone to do that, because I think you’d be amazed at the capabilities that you didn’t tap before. And then you’d say, “wow, well, I’m going through a tougher path, but I guess it’s making me a little happier than before.”

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, right. One of the things that I recall when we first met, you said you transitioned from being the decision maker to the chief meaning maker. And I guess a lot of that statement rings true what you just said then. One of the traps that I see many of us fall into is we get so busy, we get so caught up in the urgency of the everyday activities that we don’t often pause long enough to even think about that, to become the chief meaning maker. How did you have that presence, that focus to be able to say, “hey, you know what? I have to make this pivot here and I have to really have this callback moment.”

SIRISH KUMAR: A very good question, Wayne. I started realizing when I moved from a CFO to co-founder that when I was looking at both decks and sitting down with data analytics teams in large corporations, it allowed me to make decisions and that chief decision making was a part of a rhythm that you, with the help of your bosses, your supervisors and colleagues, you acquire and kind of harness those skills. 

[00:20:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: However, when you’re a guardian of those numbers, there is more to it and that is how do you now convert this into storytelling? Simply because of the fact that earlier I used to think when I used to look at marketing departments and functions, storytelling, I always thought was a fluff. And it was basically something that marketing guys would talk about and I would never kind of understand that. But as I stepped into the role of pitching, we all now, I think, would realize that we pitch every day to someone, whether it’s at home, whether it’s with your colleague, whether it’s with… even in a social gathering. The important thing is that, and I’ll tell you a story, when I moved on, the first thing was to raise money and the important thing there was, can I just say that I would like X amount of millions of dollars and I come from this company and please help me, give me cash? The first thing that struck was the title is of the past, the company that you come from is of the past, so, how are you relevant now and what is the value you’re going to create? So that’s one question that starts hitting you and this comes back by meeting many people who are asking you this question in different ways. And you start getting rejected when you are getting to one room, some people say, “okay, it’s wonderful meeting you, let’s talk,” and that call never comes back. So, I think the important thing was first to convert a CFO mindset to start saying, what is this story? What are you solving that for? What are you really having that particular vision that could resonate with potential investors? The talent that you want to onboard and who can ride with you in this journey. So as an example, if I said to you after one year or one and a half years, and I learned it the hard way, I would say when I would try to say, what am I doing or what am I running or how are we contributing? I would say that if you get up in the morning and you order breakfast and then you take a ride heading to your office and during the break in lunchtime you go to the gym and in the evening you’re basically then looking at ordering some stuff for your home, here’s where we are with you and you would have touched us in all these activities during the day. And then I would save from that, that we kind of have a 16% to 18% of all the transactions in a particular region. So that’s how you would then convert the numbers into storytelling, that was one part. The second part is that when you move from a CFO to CEO and to your point about chief meaning maker, are you also starting to look at trade-offs? And the trade-off, for example, is, are you aiming for a short-term efficiency or growth? And sometimes the decision that you take is only after you derive some meaning in that. What is that end goal that you’re achieving? And is it going to be something you need to do in the three to six months? And then while it happens, you’re then bearing yourself for an opportunity that will come up over the three to six months that you’re planning, whether it’s a conversation having with a large enterprise or whether you’re actually building a product in your roadmap that will take some time for you to roll it out and ship it to the customers. 

WAYNE BROWN: Let’s talk about the product. So, we’re introducing a product to a marketplace, now that marketplace already has its own stories, it has its own heroes, it has its own way of doing things. What’s your process for learning the story of a market before you try and insert your own story? Because I think that’s where a lot of people have a tendency to trip themselves up. 

SIRISH KUMAR: Wayne, what I would always recommend, and this is something that comes by a lot of trials, a lot of going back and forth, start being a good listener first. And when you listen, there will be certain elements that will become an opportunity for you, that’s one part. 

[00:25:00]

SIRISH KUMAR: The second part is, I think on the story or the pain point or the challenges being faced by your existing customer or by a potential customer or a potential partner may not be necessarily articulated in the way you would like them to articulate. But I think what you need to then do is ask back the questions to say whether you’ve understood it properly. And then I think try to see that you don’t get the solution mode immediately, because that might not necessarily be what the other customer or the other person is ready for. But I think it is important to go back to the drawing board and say that could we then embed some kind of a solution? So, I’ll give you a simple example, we had started gaining a lot of share in the gymnasium industry and what we were seeing is that there were certain entrepreneurs who had started expanding their gym outlets to different places in the same city and then were planning to expand beyond one city. What was happening is we saw that there was a time gap of three to six months when they would say that we’re launching and they would say that hold on for a while and then they would take around three to six months to launch. So, I got into a discussion with them and said that, look, just let’s have a founder to founder discussion, for example, and see if I can just help you with anything that comes as an idea, because I may not have the legacy or I may not have the insight of your industry, but maybe it could be an entrepreneurial mindset from a different lens that could help you. And we realized that they were looking at a concept of invoicing to their customers, which could be either one time or they could actually build a customer every month on a particular day of the month. And if you come for a trial in a gym, you would then decide, okay, let me now get onto the next session. Will I pay you? And then I might sign a recurring contract for one year. And we then said, “look, this is a little bit closer to what we do in terms of payments, could we help you provide something that could solve your problem? At the same time, you don’t have to spend three to six months and it just expedites your launch.” And we took around a few weeks to figure this out, design it, and then kind of offer it to the gym company. And that became very relevant and that allowed us to then replicate this offering to the other players in the gym industry. So, this is one example to showcase or illustrate a point when I answered your question about saying that I think it’s very important to kind of listen, kind of then come up with some proposals and then see whether it kind of resonates and then try to commit to making it happen jointly. 

WAYNE BROWN: We use a philosophy of being a curious listener and a curious questioner, and I think that fits very nicely into that realm. One of the things that I know through my own experience is even though we might listen intently, we might question, and we might go into it with full agility, not every entrance or every attempt is going to be successful. I’m curious therefore, how do you pivot in those times? Like you go down the path so far and you find, you know what? This is not really the right way, we need to make a transition here somehow. What’s your experience there?

SIRISH KUMAR: I would tell you that when I was told to… let me give you an example, this was a situation where we were lending to various, a number of, maybe three to four million consumers, and what we were seeing is that every time there was a discussion between forecast and actuals, there would be a 35% to 40% variance. And initially, I thought that coming up with very good analysis and presentation decks and having some discussions with the country heads and business people, the variance could be brought down from 35%, 45% to maybe 20% and slowly bring it down to 10%.

[00:30:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: And the first two, three months didn’t yield any results. And it went back to saying that, what do I need to do from a very simple, basic perspective, which is that your forecast and actuals today there’s a variance and are we necessarily looking at the right metrics? 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. 

SIRISH KUMAR: And this is where I think what you start looking at is that largely the accounting and finance teams do reporting for the past periods, they are backward-looking. So how do you then try to convert yourself into forward-looking and then start contributing to the business proactively? So as an example, an accountant would make the payments to the vendors, raise invoices on the customers, a finance controller would do the reporting for the entire financials and present the report at the end of the month. A business finance person would do it a little differently. And what happened is that my first question was, could we then convert this into a cash flow lens and run every operation of the business from a cash flow perspective? Now, obviously, if I just said that it will never resonate with anyone because a country has a business that would say, “look, this is a finance job, you figure it out and tell us what is needed to be done.” So, we then converted a monthly rhythm into first to weekly rhythm. The second point was we then said that every function needs to be their work and their activities need to be converted into a simple line within a cash flow tracker. And this started, it took around three to six weeks for everyone to start understanding the new process, but there wasn’t an understanding of the impact. To move the story fast forward, after six to nine months, what had happened is that we had started mapping the operation and collection team into what was it impacting? Was it impacting an outflow or inflow? When you would, for example, when there was the app that was shut down for a particular reason, what is the impact on its dispersals of loans? If the regulator, for example, required capitalization of an entity, the business was now made aware that all the bank balance that you see cannot necessarily be dispersed to the borrowers. And then the business starts understanding that, okay, if we start also negotiating contracts, we need to now look at the timing of inflow and outflow. And step by step, what happened is that there became a weekly rhythm where people would get their work done and kind of populate their inflows and outflows. What this also did is it gave us a lot of time to then negotiate with lenders and investors in terms of timing of what is the inflow required and how would it be used in terms of deploying that cash. So, what happened? What was the outcome? That finally, the ownership of running the call was then moved from finance to country heads and business people. Second, we renegotiated contracts with customers. And number three, we also renegotiated covenants favorable to us with the lenders. So, I think that is one example to showcase, saying that, yes, you will have bumps, you will have hurdles, you will fail, but treat that failure as not a failure, treat that as an event of lesson. And how can you then turn that event of lesson into an opportunity? And for a long time when we have been told about mistakes should not be repeated, I think we should kind of replace that with saying that, let those be events rather than mistakes, then we can actually use them for our learning and then, of course, leverage that as an opportunity.

WAYNE BROWN: One of the things I was hearing you say then, Sirish, and maybe it wasn’t the intent, but that’s one of the things I took away, is the importance to really understand the operational side of the business and not just always look at it from a high level. It’s the old expression; the devil is in the detail. In your example, when you don’t fully understand the day-to-day workings, you can easily miscalculate or make assumptions that aren’t always correct and lead you down the wrong path. Is that a fair comment?

[00:35:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: I would say you’ve captured it quite well, Wayne. And in fact, I think even if you’re seeing someone else needing help or someone else having a challenge to decipher what should be done to come out of a crisis or come out of a scenario, I think it is important to really get to saying that why don’t we get into the core and see where exactly is an improvement needed? And it might be just a process issue, it might not be an ownership issue and if you then figure out it’s not a process issue, then you of course talk about accountability, but I think both are very interrelated. 

WAYNE BROWN: I made the statement at the opening that you’re building a tech company, but you’ve never written a line of code. If I talk to your CTO or whomever you have around you, your inner senior team, what would they tell me that you bring to the table that they can’t?

SIRISH KUMAR: It’s an evolution, Wayne, in the last seven, eight years. In my first venture, the technology team and what they were doing was a black box for me; I didn’t understand scrum management, I didn’t understand architecture, I didn’t understand the prioritization of tasks, the dependency of backend software work and the front-end software work. So, I think what has happened in the post-AI era and also trying to figure out how do you convert a very complex technical term into something that can be understood by everyone? I went back to numbers, and you know numbers is a language which can be understood by everyone, they don’t lie. And that’s why cash also doesn’t lie. In that, what happened is that if you now start looking from a perspective of the user, the narrative is here’s a user who basically would like to understand the gap between his inflow and the outflow, that’s one. And second, the timing, when does the cash inflow come in and when does the cash outflow happen. If that is the problem that we’re going to solve, then we’d start talking about the narratives around if the user does this, can the user be given this option? So, you don’t necessarily focus on the buttons and you don’t focus on the fonts and you don’t focus on the syntaxes, so that’s one part where you’re clarifying the responsibility. The second is you’re building a trust with engineering team where when there’s a trade-off to be done, then it’s my responsibility. And I would focus more on the outcomes, but I would not focus on how are you getting this syntax right or why are you doing this in terms of the API response between the backend and the frontend. So, over a period of time, what has happened is that the ability for then also getting the development team and the programming team to do beyond just coding was super critical. You can take an example of a designer who always would complain that developers don’t understand what they have designed. And the developers and the programmers would always complain the designers want everything perfect and it’s something not reasonable in terms of the expectation. Now, we’ve got a situation where we are able to convert a business requirement document into a technical requirement, this technical requirement is then able to be given for discussion to both designers and to the programming team. And in fact, the programming team is helping in the first design, and then from that, the designer is able to build on further, now you see that there’s a synergy between the design and the technology team. So, I think the important thing apart from owning trade-offs and earning trust from them, the other is also kind of upskilling the programming team and the development team to see that they are able to see a little bit of the adjacent side of what they do and be able to contribute and align very fast. So, I think at the end of the day, the way I would see is that while the journey was from a CFO into a startup world, I think that step towards moving out of the comfort zone and leading the technology and product was an exercise which went through a lot of iterations. 

[00:40:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: And I think in the post-AI era, it has become easier for even the non-technologists and the non-technical teams to now run tech environments and to run tech companies. 

WAYNE BROWN: I love the fact you mentioned trust, I think that’s such an important ingredient. But I also know that you mentioned one time with me that you’re currently emerging from being a consultant to being a capability partner, and you’ve introduced that very nicely just there by saying we need to look at the upskilling, the reskilling, how do we ensure that the people in the team are continually evolving, I think that’s also a second important ingredient that you’ve highlighted there. Anything else that you would say we need to really ensure… it helps we as the leader of the organization to be grounded with the team that we’re leading? 

SIRISH KUMAR: I would just say that the evolution from taking the cash flow or CFO clarity, which I realized was only designed for large companies, and taking it now to small, medium enterprises, taking it to the last mile stores, taking it to the freelancers, taking to the fractional experts. This whole movement of bringing the CFO level clarity had also brought in a concept where how can I actually ensure that the technology, the design, the DevOps, and the quality assurance teams, they’re able to understand the larger picture, not necessarily just come in and do their work and get out. So, while we are rolling out improvements and continuously tweaking the offerings through SaaCash, what we’ve also figured out is that for the larger enterprises, they would not just like to have a tool-based approach. So that’s why what we do is we try to bring in the CFO entrepreneurship mindset before talking about technology. So, in that capability partner that you talked about, there’s Sirrista.com which basically would look at companies and say, if you’re expanding to markets, let’s talk about aligning on the strategy and the how. And second would be, if you’re looking at license application and strategy, then how do you ensure that the business plan, the headcount, the architecture, everything aligns? So that’s one part which comes in, which is a little larger picture. But then when you’re doing all this, you need to understand your cash flow. And while the great vanity metrics continues to be the attraction for many, I think the cash flow then gets embedded in the whole discussion. And whether you do a forecast which… if you do a forecast without cash inflow and outflow, there’s a lot of optimism bias, so we try to remove that. And to your point, what happens in this is that you are also removing a lot of uncertainty and insecurity. Going back to that pivot that when I was moving from being an employee to an employer or to an entrepreneur, I was basically redefining insecurity or security. Earlier security was predictable compensation, now it was optionality and reputation. And that’s how cash flow does bring that to this consulting plus a toolkit approach. So, when you are looking… so we have an example here where a company wanted to enter a new market and they wanted to apply for a license. Now what we basically said is, why don’t we rehash your business plan and that might give you certain extra options. And now they’re expanding the company into new markets without a license while they get ready for applying for a license. This is one example of how the consulting approach can help in the automation of workflows, particularly from a cash flow perspective. 

WAYNE BROWN: What’s the feeling that you want the SaaCash clients to have when they use your product?

[00:45:00] 

SIRISH KUMAR: Look at four or five outcomes when you are looking at SaaCash, one is the mismatch in timing between your cash inflows and outflows. And also, the mismatch in the amount, how much is your deficit between your cash inflow and cash outflow. This has an impact on the runway that you have for a particular project if you’re in a large enterprise or in a new business line that you’ve started or you’re completely a founder running a startup from scratch. Because of that, what you’re able to do is then you’re able to decide whether you need to change the payment terms with your vendors or you change your collection terms with the customers, you may want to change the pricing. The other outcome is you may want to decide to borrow money, but plan when to borrow so that you have enough room to negotiate and figure out. So, you’re more ready yourself to make that decision rather than someone coming to you like a lender or investor and saying, take this money, I know you need it desperately, these are my terms. And the outcome here is, take an example of an e-commerce seller, if now I see in SaaCash that I have surplus cash for the next three weeks or two weeks, can I do one more purchase of linen or garments and sell it on Shopify or on eBay or on Amazon so that you can earn an incremental margin. You might say you don’t have enough cash, then you can borrow, but then you also be very clear that the cost of your borrowing is lower than the margin that you’re getting from the purchase and sale. So, I would say this is the benefit of SaaCash. And more importantly, I think look at it as kind of a co-pilot to your business where you’re able to see this as an evolving companion. And as your business evolves, it is able to give you insights about various other elements that you need not lose sight of. At the same time, it helps you to ensure that your basics around cash flow management are never, never forgotten and ignored. 

WAYNE BROWN: From your own perspective, Sirish, you’ve now evolved through multiple phases, CFO to founder to storyteller leader to a non-coding tech leader, what’s next for you as the individual? 

SIRISH KUMAR: I think as my personal vision, I would like to see that it’s not just a story about a product, but it is, have I been able to reduce the number of businesses that fail due to lack of cash flow management. Today, I mean, it depends upon the countries you talk to or look at the research, but it’s anywhere between 30% to 40% of businesses are failing due to lack of cash flow management. It is not because they have a bad idea, it is just because cash flow has stopped happening or cash is not coming in. 

WAYNE BROWN: Right. 

SIRISH KUMAR: The other part of the vision is to see that whatever I’m able to build is able to then outlive from a perspective of the community of customers, the community of channel partners, and the community of various other people in the team, continuously expanding its purpose. Because I think what I’m talking to you today or the vision about the next two years or three years may get completely enhanced with the people who are starting to see the value in this off-rank. I think the next story, the way I see it is moving from a CFO has helped me to get into also experimenting on how to get into beyond my comfort zone and how to lead in product and design and technology and I think this learning will never stop. And from my perspective, I think if I’m able to say even to the people listening here, if they feel nudged, that can I go back to numbers and can I understand the story behind these numbers and can I know that whom am I serving these numbers to? If I get these answers to these questions, I think this conversation has been very helpful and it’s worth it.

[00:50:00]

WAYNE BROWN: Very nice. Sirish, such a fascinating topic and your journey is enthralling. Where can people connect with you to find out more about what you’re doing and what your company is all about? 

SIRISH KUMAR: Sure, they can obviously reach out to me and it is sirishk@saacash.com or they can also send an email at connect@saacash.com. We also have a WhatsApp they can connect with which is +6597230779.

WAYNE BROWN: Perfect. An excellent conversation, thank you for being a guest on the ET project.

SIRISH KUMAR: It’s wonderful talking to you, Wayne, and thank you for everyone listening.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]