Leaders of Modern Finance Ep. 25 – Professional and Personal Scaling, Hosted by Ben Murray ft. Rachita Sundar

On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO, interviews Rachita Sundar, Senior Vice President of Finance at HubSpot.

Pursuing Growth

Rachita has been part of some form of business expansion in the vast majority of her prior positions. Whether it was building a team from scratch, or taking an existing team into a greater scope of responsibility, Rachita has consistently pushed the organizations she’s worked for onward and upward.

The bulk of her career was spent at Microsoft, where she bounced between various positions as the business and its industry evolved. She began as a marketing controller at a time when advertising was shifting from print to digital. She was on the ground floor of growing an arm of the marketing department that had previously been nonexistent. 

From there, she joined a small team specializing in Office 365, a Microsoft product. Her focus on this team was driving business model transformation, making decisions with a cross-functional team that affected the whole of the organization. Her final role at Microsoft was as a part of the team developing Microsoft Azure. This brand new service began with just two team members besides Rachita, and she would eventually scale it up to over 3000 employees and a billion dollars in revenue.

These experiences would eventually lead her to HubSpot. Rachita joined HubSpot as a way to coalesce her prior experiences into a singular, company-wide mission. Rachita had worked as a financial leader in marketing, software, and engineering, and had helped scale individual pieces of a larger organization. At HubSpot, Rachita saw an opportunity to use her inter-departmental understanding to grow the whole of HubSpot. To her, the finance department, under her leadership, could become a strategic partner that helped HubSpot scale as an organization, rather than scaling any one department.

With all the company’s resources and information metrics flowing through the finance department, Rachita was uniquely positioned to help HubSpot see continued success as it scaled upward.

Scaling an Organization Successfully

One of the primary characteristics a growing business should hold, according to Rachita, is agility. Scaling a business is its own kind of entrepreneurship, and is not dissimilar to founding an organization. Planning and preparation are of course essential, but adaptability in the face of the unexpected is equally as important.

Expanding into new markets, or growing to take advantage of a greater share of an existing market, will inevitably include some element of building the plane as it’s being flown. According to Rachita, progress is more important than perfection, and refining newly scaled systems and procedures can be done after the fact. This of course doesn’t mean that an organization should recklessly leap into a structure they’re not prepared for. Rather, a well-established company should already possess the people, processes, and tools needed to be successful, and they should be able to trust those people and tools to adapt to a new environment and continue to be successful. 

Rachita has a strategy for implementing this agility and adaptability into her financial planning. She sets out her vision for the next two to three years and makes targets she wants her organization to shoot for in that time. Rather than doing an annual review on goals met, she measures progress in quarters. A scaling business can be a lot like a new startup, where the pace is extraordinarily quick. Challenges and successes can rise and fall quickly, and so doing quarterly check-ins on these long-term goals maintains a quick-footedness that allows Rachita to adjust systems and structures to respond at an appropriate time.

In making those adaptations, Rachita considers the load on what she calls the “Three Pillars”: the aforementioned people, processes, and tools. These three areas are going to carry the business’ whole operational structure. Understanding their individual weakness and strengths, and how those interact with each other, is foundational to maintaining an adaptable posture that can respond to the many fluctuations present in a scaling business.

Scaling a Career Successfully

Rachita has been successful not only in promoting the growth of the businesses she’s been a part of but also in creating personal growth opportunities for herself. Rachita attributes her success in advancing her career, and expanding her skill set, to three key principles she has sought to implement in her work.

First, future opportunities come from doing great work in the present. For Rachita, this meant getting extremely efficient at performing her daily tasks. Being able to do her assigned work efficiently opened up bandwidth for her to be able to go above and beyond, and add value to her role. She endeavored to always leave her role with more value than when she started. This philosophy tended to create chances for advancement as she expanded the scope of her original position.

Secondly, Rachita always looks for pivot points in taking on new tasks. At prior jobs, she intentionally went out of her way to try something new as often as she could. She would constantly ask herself, “Where is the next challenge, and the next thing that I could learn?” This is how she ended up being so knowledgeable in operations, engineering, and marketing, all while maintaining a role as a financial manager.

Finally, Rachita prepares for organizational and positional shifts at least six months before that transition takes place. It puts her in a mindset that allows her to make the most out of every learning opportunity in those final months, and gives her time to try and leave the role better than when she found it. In this way, she creates a timeline that maximizes the output of her first two principles: work hard where you are, and look for chances to learn new skills.

Grow the Business, Grow Yourself

Scaling a business, whether new or established, can be a whirlwind environment. Constant changes, unexpected new positional demands, and a host of unforeseen challenges can quickly drain an unprepared financial leader. Rachita has lived in this environment for most of her career and has managed it by implementing the organizational skills needed to weather those storms in her personal work.

If adaptability is foundational to growth, then Rachita sought new challenges and learning opportunities to make herself more adaptable. Since scaling places greater demands on the daily operations of a business, Rachita was intentional about making her daily tasks efficient to the point where she was able to meet outside demands in addition to those daily tasks.

To be a valuable asset to her team, Rachita has always pursued personal and professional growth and development in tandem with the growing organizations she supported.

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