Sixteen people arrived to do the work at one company. At another, a chief financial officer came in for two days a week. When Venkat S described those two arrangements in 2015, he offered a compact explanation of the business he was helping to build. A company could buy the finance capability it needed, in the quantity it needed. The org chart did not have to come as a set menu.
That small detail makes a useful entrance into Venkat’s career. Before becoming a founder of the business now called Practus, he had worked inside large professional and corporate organisations. He understood the authority of the CFO title. He also understood that companies needed different amounts of its holder’s time, and that a title alone would scarcely close the books.
The view from the other side of the desk
Venkat’s professional background includes eight years at PwC. He became CFO of Aon’s Indian subsidiary at 28, and served as director of finance and corporate affairs at Hines India. His qualifications span chartered accountancy, cost and management accountancy, and risk management. This was a career spent close to the machinery of financial decisions, before he began selling help with that machinery to others.
The consulting opportunity emerged from his experience as a corporate CFO. He had seen the space between receiving advice and getting a business to act on it. His cofounder, Deepak Narayanan, brought his own experience of professional services. Together, they developed a proposition concerned with implementation and a measurable return on the client’s expenditure.
Their biographies also describe middle-income upbringings in which value mattered. That is an ordinary word with demanding implications when attached to an invoice. A customer paying for help will eventually want to know what became of the payment.
A cousin, a client, a longer assignment
The partnership had a family connection: Narayanan is Venkat’s first cousin. Their early business, MyCFO, worked with clients whose needs extended well beyond a temporary vacancy. At fragrance business SH Kelkar, the firm’s involvement ran across several years, from finance leadership and investor diligence to systems, budgeting, and management reporting.
In 2013, MyCFO was called into Gokaldas Exports after departures from its finance department, including the financial controller, just before quarterly numbers were due. Over the following months, the engagement included audit closure and improvements to reporting, data entry, and inventory handling. These were company assignments, carried out by the firm’s team. They show the working territory in which the founders’ idea took shape.
A missing executive might be the immediate problem. Once people began working inside the business, the assignment could reach into the processes that executive would depend on. A vacancy, in other words, had a habit of bringing friends.
Buying the capability by the problem
By March 2015, MyCFO was described as having about 130 people and having served roughly 200 companies. Those figures belong to that stage of the business. Its offer addressed owners who could not attract a suitable full-time CFO, needed an interim replacement, or wanted support for a specific project.
Venkat called the service “a good midway path for these companies.” The two-days-a-week example gave that phrase practical meaning. A business could obtain senior judgement without creating a permanent position; another could receive a larger team when the assignment required it.
There was a constraint that expansion plans could not wish away: finding capable people. MyCFO was training professionals who might develop into CFOs over time. The service’s flexibility depended on a pool of experience, and that pool had to be built.
“We are a good midway path for these companies.”
Venkat S, on MyCFO’s service model, 2015
The talent problem does not disappear in a spreadsheet
Venkat’s writing on finance recruitment returned to that shortage. He described a shallow market for experienced professionals and the difficulty of matching a CFO’s expectations with candidates available at an acceptable price. Communication skills mattered, but technical fundamentals and attention to detail remained requirements.
His argument was directed at the people doing the recruiting as well as those requesting it. A finance leader might believe the right candidate was somewhere out there. The recruiter had to work with the supply actually available. The gap between those positions was a business problem of its own.
For a founder selling access to finance expertise, this was more than an observation about hiring. It concerned the material from which the service itself was made. Expertise could be shared across clients, but it still had to reside in people.
A business grows past its original name
The MyCFO name eventually gave way to Practus, bringing MyCFO, MyCXO, and Practus under one brand. The work had expanded into business functions beyond finance, including operations, supply chains, and technology-enabled change. The company’s customer base included family-owned businesses, investor-backed companies, listed firms, and multinationals.
Venkat’s public explanation of the company emphasised aligning systems, processes, and resources with changing organisational goals. That is the point where a finance story becomes an operating story. Numbers describe what is happening across a business; improving them can require changing what happens outside the finance department.
The broader name made room for that work. It also left the original question intact: when a client asks for an improvement, who will carry the change through the organisation?
A diagram of Practus’s stated Build-Operate-Transfer approach.
The surname needs a written job description
In his writing about family-managed businesses, Venkat makes a case for putting expectations on paper. Owners should document their direction, assign responsibilities, and decide which choices an individual can make. He recommends a family council with a defined remit and clarity about the final decision maker when priorities collide.
His example is recognisable: the relative responsible for purchasing wants to buy more at a favourable price; the relative responsible for finance wants to conserve cash. Each can have a reasonable argument. A shared childhood offers limited assistance with resolving the trade-off.
He also separates ownership from leadership. The family member best placed to lead need not be the oldest or the largest shareholder. Read alongside his own cousin partnership, this advice puts written arrangements beside personal trust. Familiarity still has work to do.
The shareholder who cannot walk into the office
Venkat’s comments on IPOs focus on the responsibilities a company takes on when public shareholders arrive. He stresses protection of minority shareholder interests and the increased need for transparency, explanation, and forward guidance.
The CFO must balance that visibility with business uncertainty and competitively sensitive information. Communication becomes a larger part of the job. Investors who are outside the organisation need an account they can understand, without being given every commercially delicate detail.
This extends the same concern with responsibilities into a different setting. A family business needs to make decisions clear among its owners. A public company needs to make its performance intelligible to people who cannot simply walk down the corridor and ask. Both place demands on the finance leader’s ability to explain.
Cash needs an assignment, too
In a joint article with Ravikanth Rao, Venkat turns from generating cash to deciding where it should go. The authors describe owner-managed companies that devote attention to revenue and profit but less to allocating the surplus those efforts produce.
They ask owners to connect spending decisions with the business’s direction and expected outcomes. A new office, a sales system, or an acquisition competes for a finite resource. The allocation deserves a plan and regular review.
The interest here is in making the decision explicit before the money leaves. Finance provides a way to compare uses of cash and to revisit the assumptions afterward. For Venkat, the expenditure is part of an operating choice that people will have to execute. The spreadsheet gets a vote; it does not acquire a passport and open the office.
The technology has to meet its users
Venkat and CFO Amit Kikani’s writing on digital transformation puts adoption at the centre of the discussion. They emphasise communication, user participation, training, and continuing feedback. Installing a tool leaves another task: helping people make it part of their work.
Their examples include an engineering business where lengthy site reports became far easier to complete through a mobile application. The useful change addressed the employee’s actual circumstances, including poor connectivity and the time required to report progress.
That practical concern also appears in Venkat’s LinkedIn account of conversations with owner-managers in Boston. They understood the excitement around AI, but wanted to know where to start and what it could do for their companies. His response points to specific operating uses, from demand forecasting to sales effectiveness. The questions have become more technological; their appetite for a useful answer is familiar.
Between Atlanta and the next conversation
Venkat is based in the Atlanta metropolitan area, part of a business with an international footprint. A public event introduction described his regular travel between the United States and India, and Practus’s partnerships with consulting and accounting firms.
He also hosts cruX, a series of conversations with business leaders. Guests include Ved Krishna of Pakka and Madan Dodeja of Vashi ISL. Here, the finance founder takes the interviewer’s chair, asking other entrepreneurs to account for the choices behind their businesses.
A purpose that people can work toward
For someone whose business talks so much about returns, Venkat’s writing makes room for purpose. He argues that a clear reason for the organisation’s existence helps attract people, align effort, and guide resource decisions. Profit remains part of the ambition; purpose gives people an objective they can work toward.
Practus now describes a delivery model of building, operating, and transferring a function. It also states an ambition to become a global consulting leader with a billion-dollar valuation. Those are the organisation’s declared approach and aspiration. Venkat’s public work supplies the smaller, more tangible questions beneath them.
Who decides? Who uses the system? Where should the cash go? What does the shareholder need to understand? They are questions with people attached. His career has moved from answering them inside a corporation to helping other businesses answer them. Somewhere behind the consulting vocabulary, there is still that CFO coming in two days a week, with work to finish.