Sohi's hands-on approach has helped him master every aspect of the trade. Now he wants CFOs to act smart rather than look smart
Your job is to solve complexity as the business scales up at a faster clip: Ramanpreet Sohi, CFO, Honasa Consumer
Image: Amit Verma
What is the most crucial thing in finance? The obvious answer would be numbers. Right? Ramanpreet Sohi, though, reckons why the traditional answer is not the right one. “Unless you go behind the numbers, they just remain numbers,” says the 40-year-old CFO at Honasa Consumer, the parent company of direct-to- consumer personal care brand Mamaearth. The most crucial thing in a business, he underlines, is to understand the story of numbers. And like all stories, they have a beginning, middle and end. “Wow can only make sense if you know the why,” he smiles.
The quest to know the ‘why’ of everything has been the story of Sohi. A commerce graduate from Panjab University, Sohi’s curiosity in numbers and stock markets started early. His father served in the army and also invested in stocks. “I always wanted to know why stocks go up and come down,” he recalls.
After completing an MBA in finance from Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Sohi started his career in 2005 as an equity analyst with Religare. His job was to track the metals and logistics sectors. The next three years turned out to be his foundation years, when he learnt everything on the job. From reading a balance sheet to understanding how P&L charts work, to how variables impact the financials of a company to slicing and dicing dozens of annual reports, the apprentice got his hands dirty in everything. “Even my MBA did not teach me so much about finance,” he smiles.
Sohi’s second stint, in Dabur, as assistant manager in corporate affairs took him from the theoretical to the practical side of the business. Being part of the team that managed mergers and acquisitions, integration and investor relations, Sohi observed and quickly learnt everything from ground zero. Quite early in his stint, he found himself to be part of the team that bought Fem Care Pharma. One top learning from the acquisition was the value of strategic thinking and how to put value to businesses.
Another buyout for Dabur, which happened to be the first for the FMCG major in the US, brought in its wake a new set of learnings. The most important was how the role of finance leaders was getting reinvented in the US. Numbers and data were being seen through the lens of value, and CFOs were fast evolving as value officers.