IAM2642 – CEO Helps Large‑Scale Business Problems in Finance, Insurance and Retail

Transcription:

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Rohit Garewal 00:00
We take really difficult business problems. Every business problem today is enabled by some sort of technology. And so ultimately, what we've done for 30 years is enable different kind of large scale business processes in finance, insurance and retail, leveraging technology, and then ultimately driving that margin and revenue for them.

Intro 00:21
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Rohit Garewal. Rohit, excited to have you on the show.

Rohit Garewal 00:58
Hey, thanks, man. Appreciate it. I don't want to I don't want to set expectations too high by being an awesome guest.

Gresham Harkless 01:06
Well, it's too late for you to set expectations too high because I'm going to make them even higher and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. So we're going to have a phenomenal conversation.

Rohit is phenomenal, and he's the CEO of Object Edge and a leading voice in reimagining enterprise business workflows with AI, digital transformation and B2B customer experiences. He's focused on building scalable AI workflows and pragmatic growth systems for global brands.

And Rohit is definitely known as a thought leader in the customer service and data-driven commerce business, and often explores how data culture can optimize revenue and efficiency for business.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I read something about your leadership style. It's very unconventional. You have a background in kind of DJing and in bringing those specific roles and ways into being a great leader.

So I'm excited to dive in here about all the awesome things. Rohit, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Rohit Garewal 01:57
Yeah, looking forward to it, man. Let's go.

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Gresham Harkless 01:59
Awesome. Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started with a what I call your CEO story.

Rohit Garewal 02:06
Yeah, well, I don't know how far back you want to go. But so I was born in India. But my dad was always kind of on the cutting edge of computers. And when computers were just kind of getting started back in the 70s, in India, and so he got recruited out of college and out of his job.

And so when I was young, we moved around a lot. So I lived in Iran, I lived in Italy, I lived in Australia, and then moved to the States when I was around eight years old. And then I got that standard immigrant story that I'm so proud of, like my dad worked his butt off, gave us the best life that he could. great, great education.

So I'm one of the real lucky ones, man, and grew up in the Bay Area. So if you want to talk about being in tech and being lucky growing up in the 80s, 90s and 2000s in the Bay Area is not the worst place to be.

And yeah, I went to school did I majored in economics, like my first love is business, but I was always around computers. And my dad encouraged me to want to think analytically.

And, you know, looking back at my career, I think that's one of the best things I ever did. So double majored in computer science as well. And then went into big five consulting and loved the challenge of working with different clients continuously and new challenges rather than getting stuck in kind of the same role at the same job for a long time.

Consulting just really called to me, getting to work closely with all these different customers year after year, solving different problems.

Gresham Harkless 03:41
There you go. You got to stick to it. So I guess to drill down a little bit, I would love to hear more on like how you're working with and serving your clients and making that impact and helping them to make sure that you are serving them as best as possible.

Rohit Garewal 03:53
They were really, really good at large data, right? So 30 years ago, when you're in finance, it's about bringing together all this, this data from all these different systems. And we built custom applications on top of that data.

So bringing the data together, aggregating it, data governance, all the stuff that's sexy today, we were taking that data and building applications on top, we did that in banking, we did that insurance, we did that in retail and in commerce.

And I mean, it's really lucky, but what's the number one thing that people are looking for today as they try to figure out how AI can really impact their workflows? It's, well, how do I leverage my data?

How do I make my data AI legible? How do I use the data within an enterprise to feed an AI so that an AI can be a bigger and bigger part of my business?

So we're kind of natively in that world. But if I were to kind of zoom out, that's what we do for our customers, man. We take really difficult business problems Every business problem today is enabled by some sort of technology. I mean, if you take a look at a business, right?

Every for-profit business is really trying to just do two things. They're trying to optimize for revenue or they're trying to optimize for margin.

And so as you look to any company that's producing something that's optimizing for revenue or margin, you have a series of people process tech, right? It's a cliche, but these people process tech come together in these business processes.

Ultimately, what we've done for 30 years is enable different large-scale business processes in finance, insurance, and retail, leveraging technology, and then ultimately driving that margin and revenue for them. It's part strategy and then enabling that strategy through technology.

Gresham Harkless 05:32
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And so one of my favorite books I read is called Range. It talks a lot around how the problems of tomorrow can be solved by people that have a range of different experiences.

So I almost wonder if that might be part of your secret sauce, maybe even the company as well, too is being able to kind of understand not just this silo, not just this one thing, but how everything's interconnected, how the who, what, where, when, how all those things are interconnected with the technology, with the data, just how they're not separate, but they're all combined.

Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce or even the company's secret sauce?

Rohit Garewal 06:05
Well, look, I think one of the most important skills that companies should be hiring for today are people that have really strong analytical skills.

Forget about tech, forget about all that stuff. This concept of a business engineer, I think is going to be something that a lot of people talk about.

Somebody that can, they have to have high IQ, they have to have high EQ, and they have to have a A strong enough tech background to be able to extrapolate what technology can help what process.

So let me kind of dive a little bit deeper into that because maybe some kind of not so clear words there. An ability to go into an organization or within your own organization, be able to clearly articulate the how.

So even though the why and the what, they set the strategy, the how is how you're doing things.

And if you want to optimize, if you want to do something better, how can you make something better if you don't know where you're starting from, right?

When you go on Google Maps, you don't just put in your destination, you gotta put in where you're starting, right?

Every single optimization is really pointless if you don't know what you're optimizing. And you'd be amazed about how many people, I'd say most, organizations don't have enough analytical thinkers that get what we call decompose an end-to-end process, articulate it in a way that everybody can understand what's going on.

And then the next 2025 skill, this was hard enough. The 2025 skill is now being able to say, OK, based on what technology is out there today, you can optimize this, this, this, this, and this in this way.

And this is what you're going to achieve when you do it. So my secret sauce is no different than what any secret sauce might be.

The more people you have in an organization that can do what I just said, the more unstoppable you're gonna be because you can continuously optimize in the right ways rather than starting and stopping, starting and stopping.

Gresham Harkless 08:27
Yeah, that's such a huge thing. And as you said so well, if you have that ego sometimes when you start something to feel like you can do something, but you don't allow that ego to overtake you to where you're not allowing resources or people to be able to kind of take things to another level, that's when you really are in that leadership spot.

Rohit Garewal 08:44
An ego is simply a natural reflection of insecurities. Like the bigger the ego, the more insecurities that someone is covering up. The less ego that someone has, they've worked through their insecurities. And as we grow, we kind of started with like me talking about my dad and stuff.

We, as parents, inadvertently pile on and then the world piles on all these little things that turn into a little insecurity. If you've got a big ego, if you've got this thing where you've got to be the top dog, you need to get all the credit, there's usually a lot of insecurities somewhere in there.

I'll tell you, I sometimes, not sometimes, there's a part of me that still likes the spotlight. There's a part of me that likes getting recognized for succeeding in something, that desire to have a recognition.

Probably means I've got some sort of level of insecurity still in there, right? That need or the desire to be recognized. And that's okay, like we're humans. But I'm just saying like, you wanna keep that in check.

And the way that you can get check of your ego, if you're a leader in an organization, bringing this back to like, how do you build the best org, is do some work on yourself to figure out, okay, what are those insecurities that I need to break through?

Because that's just gonna make you a better, not just a better person, but it definitely make you a better kind of leader of an org.

Gresham Harkless 10:12
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you so much in sharing that. And that sounds like a phenomenal hack in and of itself. So you might have already touched on these as well too, but what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget?

A little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your young business self.

Rohit Garewal 10:31
As a business owner, overspend on best talent. You know, if you're a poker player, you know, they have this concept called pot odds, right?

At the end of the day, you want to put yourself in the best position to win by just betting on the things that are, you wanna double down on the things that are gonna make you the most, that have the highest probability of success, right?

So that's why, unless you're bluffing, right? The better cards you have, the more that you're putting down, because you got a higher probability of winning.

In an organization, until, we haven't really even talked about AI, which is awesome in 2025, right? It's all we're talking about.

Until agents are doing everything, human beings are the X factor in an org. Every company in the world prior to AI, and still in today's world because AI is not there yet, to take over what I'm talking about, every single business in the world is a function of human arbitrage.

And what do I mean by that? At the end of the day, if you had a machine and the machine runs for X amount of hours, thousands of hours, there's a fixed cost.

And if you just look at your tax code, you depreciate that down to zero because it's going to do a certain amount of work at a fixed price. And every output or every part of the output that the machine is a part of the marginal cost keeps on lowering.

So if I spend $1,000,000 on a machine and it produced $1,000,000, okay, I made zero, but if I produce $2,000,000, now I produced a million. At the point I'm producing $100,000,000, that cost of that thing is just 1%, right?

So what's the X factor there? The only thing that doesn't depreciate down to zero is human capital. And so, yeah, I mean, nugget, I guess, outside of everything we just talked about, overspend on the best talent. Don't go cheap on the talent and then hold that talent to incredibly high standards.

Don't overpay for the talent, but hold the standards of someone that doesn't have that talent. Like push the talent to the edge and demand really, really hard things from your best talent.

Gresham Harkless 12:38
Yeah, absolutely. And so when I ask you now, one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, our goals are different quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So Rohit, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Rohit Garewal 12:50
What does being a CEO mean to me? Well, I can give you the book answer, and that is I think a CEO in an organization really has four high-level responsibilities in a for-profit business.

Grow the business. make sure that you're, you're operationally scalable, make sure that you're fiscally disciplined and make sure that you're building a great culture.

Right. Those are my four kind of broad buckets of work that I do every day. Um, but what does it really mean to me? Yeah.

It just means that I have a, I have way more discretionary decision-making power to build the environment that I want to work in. Right, and, It allows you, so if you have these theories, because everything that we talked about today is my opinion, right? It's my theory.

So I build an organization that is a reflection of those theories and opinions. Somebody else may have a completely different mindset. And then if they're the CEO of that company, they get the freedom and flexibility. to build an organization in that vision.

So ultimately then, now that I'm talking out loud about it, the freedom to build and create, the role of the CEO has the most purview and grace to shape an organization. And that's an awesome, fun thing to do. So, yeah, it's the most fun role I've ever had in my life. It's the most educational role I've ever had in my life.

Because I believe education is so important, it gives me the grace to be educated. Like, I sometimes feel guilty. Like, I'm sitting here reading, and I'm sitting here listening to podcasts, and I'm taking meetings with incredibly smart people like yourself.

I'm like, it doesn't even feel like working. These kind of conversations sharpen, iron sharpens iron, right? Steel sharpens steel.

And so, yeah, it's fun, it's energizing, it's empowering, and it's challenging. So all those things that I love.

Gresham Harkless 15:21
Rohit, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know about how best people can get overview, find out about your team and all the awesome things you guys are working on.

Rohit Garewal 15:35
Make the world smaller and make your relationships deeper. And so I moved my whole family to Barcelona just actually just quite recently. What an amazing decision.

My wife supported me in it and we're out here. And so In terms of getting a hold of me, well, if you're in Europe, if you're in Spain, you can get a hold of me. My email address is, I'm sure you'll post it, but it's rohit.garewal@objectedge.com. On LinkedIn, I'm at rohitgarewal.

Message me, reference this podcast. Let me know if you would just want to have a chat. Happy to share anything I can.

Gresham Harkless 16:13
Awesome, awesome, awesome, Rohit. I truly appreciate it. And just like you said, we will have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Rohit Garewal 16:22
You got it, man. I appreciate you having me on. And I've really appreciated talking to you. Great job today. You made the conversation easy.

Outro 16:28
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at bluesixtymedia.com.

This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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