A CFO mandated with value creation, through growth and operating profitability

A commercial airline business, 100% owned by a large global PE Fund, looking to strengthen its Finance function, in a dynamic yet challenging niche market (Maldives)

Details about position

Client: Trans Maldivian Airlines

Mandate Position: Chief Financial Officer

Background

Trans Maldivian Airline is a portfolio company of Bain Capital, a multi-billion-dollar PE Fund. The management was tasked to execute the strategic roadmap for the successful growth journey leading to value creation and exit.  Strengthening the Finance function was a key requirement of the plan and hence the company decided to onboard a high performing and a strong finance leader.

Challenge

• Airline being a highly operations intensive business, day to day financial controlling was critical. Monitoring cash flows to ensure healthy liquidity and short & long term sustainability
• Presenting and reporting accurate, meaningful and timely financial information, MIS Dashboards to the management
• Supporting the leadership in product/services strategy and organization wide cost optimization initiatives to drive value creation
• Data analytics and decision support for pricing, costing, negotiations, budgeting and contracting for daily operations as well as strategic objectives such as capacity expansion

Our approach

• Role definition and strategy creation: Keeping the client’s objective in mind, along with the challenges of the unique nature of the role & geography, a team led by Suresh Raina narrowed the search field to include senior professionals from the Consumer, Airline and Telecom sectors, supported by a broad geography selection of SA, Asiapac, Middle East and Africa for the sourcing strategy. We made sure that every potential candidate had prior experience in an operations intensive business and successful demonstration of cost optimization and value creation.
• Leveraging our network and leadership assessment: With the role requirements clearly defined, we tapped into our wide networks, while scouring the entire market for potential candidates. With the partner leading every step of the execution it was a difficult search and finally, shortlisted candidates, across companies/functions, were presented to the client, along with relevant and timely business insights on leadership and functional assessment, personality profiling, motivations and more.

It was a difficult search, and we were able to close it successfully-Because of our understanding of the role, deep and focused research, effective selling strategy to attract the right candidates, and sustained effort by the executing team.

We placed Avnish Jindal, a strong and highly experienced finance professional, with well-rounded experience, working in Xerox, Airtel, & Hitachi, including an earlier stint in Maldives working with the local Telecom player Dhiraagu.

Impact

The chosen candidate will be soon completing an eventful and most challenging year with the company. In addition to working on establishing a robust framework, he is now closely working with the leadership team and the PE Fund on business continuity, scenario planning, along with an acute focus on cost rationalization to deal with the Covid-19 induced crisis.