Welcome to another episode of In hundred days and beyond with Kishen Gajjar having an impressive experience. He is a consulting director, specialises in strategy and transformation, coaches business leaders in C-suites executives and delivers value. His strengths are strategy translation and execution. Experienced in leading PMI, carve outs and regulatory divestments, and IT transformations in the financial services sector. He has also worked in FinTech organisations. He contributes to sales and business development and to practice growth through proposition development and people management, including coaching and mentoring clients and consulting teams.  

Background  

Kishen Gajjar is originally an east African Asian born in Tanzania. He started his career right the beginning in technology as an Internet service provider start-up and a mobile virtual network operator for four years. After that, he pursued a master’s degree and got into financial services.  The first job he got in financial services was in a Standard charter bank as a head of business planning and strategy. He got experience of big data analysis, which was quite rare at that time.  

He moved to the UK in 2008 and started his career with customer acquisitions. He joined Santander right before they were making the announcement of the acquisition of Bradford and Bingley. He was one of the key people in that program. After that they did Alliance Leicester. He was an internal consultant effectively helping with the integration. He then moved into an external consultancy called capital, continued to do similar work but mostly on the separation side and later on decided to go in-house in financial services.  Kishen is a quick learner and can operate in a fast pace and uncertain environment that benefited him in the world of acquisition.  

Acquisition  

Kishen is assuming that we have two boxes of Jigsaw puzzles. You open one box to create a picture with pieces and then a second one to create the picture with pieces. And if you try to join both of them to create one perfect picture it’s never clean. You have to put a lot of effort into making it an ideal one, but it’s never going to be.  

Bringing two organisations together to make one pretty picture, requires a lot of effort, a lot of time and focus needed post-merger integration. -Kishen Gajjar 

Separation  

You take one Jigsaw puzzle and split it up. Saying you take this half and I take this half. It's never going to be a pretty picture at the end of the day.  So Kishen says, people like him have to either copy the pieces that are taken away or see if they can make them good enough on the other side.  

Good attributes of a PMI practitioner  

Some good attributes defined by Kishen Gajjar are knowing your subject area, knowing your expertise and having a good understanding of market trends. Kishen has learned a lot of difficult and valuable lessons along with his journey, creating something that just didn’t exist before. He will always welcome an opportunity to work in this space, obviously and continue to learn & expose himself to the new ways of running an integration program or a separate program. At this moment, he is about to enter the transition period, where he is going to join a consultancy firm again. And is expanded his toolkit to go just beyond integrations and separations.  

Connect with Kishen Gajjar: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kishengajjar  

LINKS: http://mergerintegration.co.uk  

http://www.100daysandbeyond.com  

http://www.skilfulpursuit.com