Editor’s note: In today’s A Day in the Life interview, Ashutosh Agarwal (pictured), Head of Customer Success at APAC, SS&C Blue Prism shares with FutureCFO audiences how high-altitude trekking helps him grow both professionally and personally as well as what his typical work day’s like.
FutureCFO: What does a typical day look like for you?
Ashutosh Agarwal (AA): I currently head the customer success function for the Asia Pacific region for SS&C Blue Prism. We are an intelligent automation software product company while the customer success function is focused on helping clients maximise value through their investment in our technology.
A typical day for me starts early as I am based out of Bangalore, India while my team and the customers we cover span across different time zones as far as Australia and New Zealand.
In the morning, I usually have meetings to review the progress across different sub-regions we cover. I also have meetings with my team members or my peers in the leadership team to ensure the teams on the ground are working together and collaborating well.
In the afternoon, we’ve meetings with customers or teams in India while we usually have internal meetings with colleagues across the global team in the evening.
Since almost all our work in customer success is client-facing, there are also a lot of customer workshops to deliver or plan.
This also involves travel locally in India and also across the markets in Asia Pacific. I immensely enjoy these opportunities to meet customers face-to-face, which allows me to connect with customers to understand their challenges and opportunities and discuss ideas to do more with our technology.
It’s fascinating to see themes across customers in various stages of maturity in terms of their technology adoption in the space of intelligent automation.
As we deal with fast-evolving technology, it’s important for us to invest in upskilling ourselves all the time. So, I also try to spend some time every week reading and learning new developments in the industry.
Slow or fast, I need to keep going and focus just on the next step ahead—not on the long arduous path to the summit. I draw several parallels to it in real life and it has been very helpful.
FutureCFO: What excites you the most when you work with CFOs and finance functions ?
AA: This is a very interesting question. There are two broad areas of conversations that I end up having with CFOs and finance function leaders.
First, given that enterprise technology needs to provide compelling business benefits, a lot of the intelligent automation programs are assessed for the value they bring to business through various levers such as efficiency, cost reduction, improved working capital, enhanced customer experience, and risk reduction.
All these benefits need to be calculated by enterprises to ensure they continue to see compelling returns from the investments in these technologies.
Sometimes we find that enterprises might not be tracking or reporting these benefits, so we work with customers to help them build a framework, partnering with their business and finance teams.
It’s always good to discuss with our CFO customers how they could track benefits in dollars and cents and leverage the capabilities of the our solutions to achieve ROI and break even in weeks and months rather than years.
The second conversation with most CFOs is around their own departmental programs for intelligent automation programs.
In most cases, finance is usually the first department in an organisation to leverage intelligent automation technology to drive efficiency.
Given the finance function deals with many numbers that are structured data, its processes are a great fit to start an automation journey or to expand further and dig deeper.
Historically most organisations have a large number of human workers doing high volume of repetitive tasks across various systems, which can easily be automated to free humans to focus on decision making and other key activities.
FutureCFO: Can you share an experience which was key to your professional growth?
AA: I’d say my years as an entrepreneur. Almost a decade ago I co-founded a consulting company and that experience was unparalleled in terms of enabling professional learning and growth.
Not only did it require building on past knowledge and expertise in terms of what we brought to the table for our customers, but it also helped me appreciate various financial aspects of running a company from working capital, cashflow and everything in between.
The importance of financial discipline was also a lesson we learned very early on. That experience also stood out in terms of building a deeper capacity to navigate through uncertainties.
There were a lot of learnings when it came to taking risks. While we had several successes and did very well, the most profound learnings came from the failures than successes.
FutureCFO: Is there anything outside work—such as a travel experience, a book, participation in a sport event or any volunteering experience—that serves as an important inspiration to your work or life? Can you tell us more about it?
AA: I’ve found joy in the adventure of high-altitude trekking in recent years.
Being in India, we are lucky to have the majestic Himalayas up in the North, which presents so many opportunities to explore the mountains.
For a few years by now, I go for at least one high-altitude trek annually. These typically last five to seven days when we are out of civilisation—without any networks and amenities but opportunities to be only with nature.
It also takes a lot of preparation to get myself ready for this physically and mentally.
This endeavour has helped me in several ways both on a personal and professional level. The top two inspirations include:
First, it has helped me appreciate the value of perseverance. Up there in the mountains, there is no short-cut and the only way to make progress is to keep moving.
Slow or fast, I need to keep going and focus on the next step ahead—not on the long arduous path to the summit but just the next step. I draw several parallels to it in real life and it has been very helpful.
Second, it has reiterated the importance of teamwork and collaboration. Every day up in the mountains, there are times we need to help each other.
Together we’re able to do much more than we would individually. That lesson remains important to my everyday life.
