When Sunni Chauhan decided to take a two year break before jumping into med school, she figured she’d be a management consultant. But if it really was going to be only two years, she realized she'd see a lot more from a deal perspective in banking where the cycles are shorter. Somehow, the two years turned into 16 and the MD her parents thought would be medical doctor turned to managing director. And that was just the beginning of the surprises. Find out how keeping open to new things can lead to unexpected joys.
Although Sunni Chauhan had embraced the idea of becoming a doctor, as she knew she loved both problem solving and helping people, she thought if she was going to in medicine the rest of her life she’d take pre-med classes alongside something else that interested her. She became an economics major. At graduation, she decided to take a two-year break before jumping into med school and figured she’d be a management consultant. But if it really was going to be only two years, she realized she'd see a lot more from a deal perspective in banking where the cycles are shorter. Somehow, the two years turned into 16 and the MD her parents thought would be medical doctor turned to managing director.
Her love of mergers and acquisitions allowed her to see a lot and learn a lot over those many years. When given a chance to reinvent herself, she took those skills, found ways to acquire new ones, and landed in new spots a few times over.//In this episode, find out from Sunni how keeping open to new things can lead to unexpected joys …on today's Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Sunni Chauhan is a strategic business leader with more than 25 years of experience advising leaders on value creation through talent, strategy, M&A and corporate finance, sustainability and stakeholder engagement. Currently she is exercising her broad skillset, gained over a wide range of professional experiences, as a consultant in the board and CEO practice at Spencer Stuart. She and her family live in London.
For another story about someone who thought they’d take a two year break and go back to the plan (and also about taking a new path after a long run) listen to our epsiode with Cameron Turner.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Sunni Chauhan: Who knew? I mean, this is never a career that you'd write down on a piece of paper, much less me, because it’s all very corporate. But, you know, I just reflect on how privileged I have been to have had the experiences and to be able to connect these sort of random experiences into the future.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: When Sunni Chauhan decided to take a two year break before jumping into med school, she figured she’d be a management consultant. But if it really was going to be only two years, she realized she'd see a lot more from a deal perspective in banking where the cycles are shorter. Somehow, the two years turned into 16 and the MD her parents thought would be medical doctor turned to managing director. And that was just the beginning of the surprises. Find out how keeping open to new things can lead to unexpected joys on today's Roads Taken, with me Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Sunni Chauhan and we're going to talk about things that drive us and things that move us and where we end up. So Sunni, thank you so much for being here.
SC: Thank you, Leslie. I've really enjoyed listening to all of your conversations.
LJR: Great. Well, we are going to have a good one, I'm sure. And I will start it, however, the way I start all of these, with two questions, and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
SC: So when We were in college. I was a first generation Indian American girl from a very average high school in New Jersey and really excited to be around other people who wanted to learn and make a difference in the world. I was curious to learn as much as I could explore the world. I had spent a bit of time in Japan, so I knew that there was a big world out there and I came to Dartmouth. Just wanting to learn, I thought I was going to be a doctor and that was where I started.
LJR: Yeah. Was the doctor thing because of family background or expectations or pure interest in science? What was it?
SC: That's a very smart question. So as you well know, coming from an Asian family, education is everything. And the only sort of three career options that your parents would give you is be a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor. I loved solving problems and I loved helping people. And so that was quite a natural answer about it. So I didn't resent it at all. I was really excited about that career and everything that it would lead to.
LJR: Great. Well, I think I have a foreshadowing knowing that you retained that for a good spell. And so what did the pre med life look like at Dartmouth? What did the other things look like for you?
SC: So at Dartmouth I did all the pre-reqs and I became chair of the Nathan Smith Society and Was curious about all things medicine. I thought I wanted to either be a pediatric oncologist or go into genetic engineering. But because of the breadth of the opportunities at Dartmouth, I decided that if I was going to do medicine for the rest of my life, that I could major in something else. So I killed my GPA quite literally in the wrong way with all of my pre med classes, but decided to major in economics because it was applied and something different, still analytical. And so I did all the pre med stuff. I did the MCATs. I spent a summer at Yale Med School, but I majored in economics which opened up a whole new world.
LJR: Particularly when corporate recruiting came around.
SC: So the premise was I still very much wanted to go to med school, but I wanted a break in the real world. So I'm a little bit masochistic if I call two years in banking a break, but I decided that actually two years…and I thought it was going to be consulting. So I, in my economics classes, there was a lot of people who were born to be investment bankers. And I said, if that's what they want to do, that's probably not for me. So I thought I was going to do consulting. But as I went through kind of the process, I realized if it really was only going to be for two years, I'd see a lot more from a deal perspective in banking than I would in consulting where the projects are generally longer. And I happened to sort of have met my husband now, boyfriend at the time, when I did my semester abroad at Dartmouth. So I happened to interview for a British bank, which had a New York office and decided why not? Made a whole lot of sense for two years. And so that's what I did.
LJR: And did the two years stay two years? I think not.
SC: The two years became 16 years of banking. My husband will say that his greatest achievement was convincing me not to go to medical school. I will tell my parents I married a doctor and became an MD at Morgan Stanley instead of becoming an MD and graduating from medical school. So so I, I, look, I, I loved it. I was really lucky on what I worked on and who I worked with. Mergers and acquisitions is still a passion. I still read the papers. I'm still very curious and companies and transactions and everything that goes beyond it. So it certainly wasn't the med school doctor plan, but it was something that I think the breadth and confidence that Dartmouth gives you kind of enabled me to navigate a different path.
LJR: Yeah. And it still had that kind of problem solving and people helping and, and kind of all the elements that you had been interested in from the beginning.
SC: Absolutely. It was a super learning journey, and I still recommend it to anybody whose kids I talk to as, you know, two years in banking or consulting gives you just this amazing real world grounding, and yes, you work hard, but it sort of sets you up for being able to work hard when you need to. But also an amazing diversity of experience. So yeah, no regrets. No regrets whatsoever.
LJR: Yeah. And how did that 16 years split between New York and London?
SC: So I started in New York, so two years of corporate finance in New York, and then had the opportunity, as a lot of people do, including some of our classmates, to go to the London office for two years. And so that's what I did. And then it was really the decision that I loved M&A, that made me then move to Morgan Stanley in 2000. So that was a very clear, okay, this is no longer temporary before I go to med school, making a sort of investment in my career for the future. And then I spent the next 12 years at Morgan Stanley doing UK M&A.
LJR: Nice. And said boyfriend was already in London, you were there, and that became life.
SC: Absolutely. So, so I met him junior fall when I did a semester here. I think we were together for maybe six weeks before I went back to Dartmouth. And he carried on here. So it was three and a half years long distance, which kind of was perfect because it was sort of a holiday romance. Because I didn't have to compromise sort of my time at Dartmouth I didn't have any time to compromise when I was working 80, 100 hours a week in New York, but it did mean that when I came here and we were actually in the same city, it took a little bit of time to get used to. But he's a keeper, so I've still got him.
LJR: And you have other benefits from him as well, the family bigger than two.
SC: Two teenage boys, so they are 16 and 14 now. And it was, it's a funny story actually, because when I, as much as I loved working, I kind of had to figure out how to have kids in that process. And I thought it was fine if I moved back to the U.S. and I had my parents to look after them. But as it happened, he's a doctor in in London and it's not so easy for him to move to the U. S. and I was getting older. And so it became time to have kids. So whatever leverage I might've had to go back to the U.S. I gave up when I had kids here.
LJR: Yeah. But it works out all, all the ways.
SC: It absolutely works out. And I think it's, you know, one of the things is where there's a will, there is. Away. We've had the same nanny now for 16 years, if you can believe that. So she's part of our family and she does more than just nannying, but she's there for the kids as much as I think as she is for our marriage, but it all works. It's all good.
LJR: Right. Right. And so at the 16 year mark in the career world, what, what were the options. And what was the pivot moment at that point?
SC: So there was another pivot as I've gotten very senior in the bank. And I had never intended to be a banker for my entire career. And so I had the opportunity to take a very nice package and just reinvent the rest of my life. I started with time at business school. And this is a funny story because I sort of recruited, I spent a year doing analyst and associate recruiting, so I recruited a lot of MBAs, but didn't have one myself. So I decided to go back to school to figure out one, what did I miss from not doing an MBA? Two, could I survive in a world that wasn't investment banking? Cause that was all I knew. And three, could I commit to one corporate? Because my thesis was that I'd go into a corporate strategy role. But were the opportunities and challenges of one corporate interesting enough? And this experience blew my mind. The dean said it was going to be transformational. I said, I'm not looking for transformation. I just want one, two, and three. But it was a brilliant time. I'd left my two young ones in London with my husband and my mother-in-law and was free in a way that I hadn't been free since probably Dartmouth of just time for me, time for learning, time to invest in relationships, time with professors. And so it was a really a magical time. It was only seven weeks on campus, but if you can imagine how impactful that seven weeks was. Really, really, just rediscovered that I love learning. And it was a whole initiation into kind of the world of technology. And really gave me the confidence to figure out that I did want to do something else and not go back to banking.
LJR: That's great. And so how did that materialize for you?
SC: So how did it materialize? It was actually a friend from Goldman who put me in touch with one of his clients who was looking for kind of M&A and strategy support. It was a defense company, which is very not like me. The boys thought it was very cool that I got to ride in tanks and work on deals with sort of fighter jets. So it was a different world, a hugely insightful window into a very old school corporate, as you can imagine in the UK. But I realized I had a lot that I could contribute across finance, strategy, investor relations, capital markets. And so when I got approached about a full time role or a permanent role rather running a corporate development team at a packaging company no less I knew that it gave me the platform, the visibility, the influence I wanted. And so that was my sort of next career step. Who knew you could get passionate about aluminum cans? But we Made a lot of aluminum cans and sort of did deals in Panama and Saudi Arabia and loved just the opportunity. I took over risk and insurance. So the operations was really fun. And the other real learning was about sustainability. And so I always cared about world peace and relatively altruistic, but I had no idea what sustainability meant sort of 10 years ago. And working for a packaging company, you realize how important it is. And so that was really the start of one of my next learning journeys around sustainability and the importance to every company, every industry, and every stakeholder which has shaped a lot of what I've done since.
LJR: Yeah. And at the same time, and we go into that certainly, but at the same time, you have a young family, you're juggling a major role in kind of a major new type of setting for you. That's a lot. And yet I know you also get involved in other causes and other things that are happening. So kind of tell me this, the fullness of your life at this point.
SC: So the other thing that I had done, one of the first things that I did after I left banking was get involved with a charity. And I had always wanted to find time and there was never any time, but when I left someone said, the Sunday Times has sort of interesting job adverts and maybe you'll find something that's interesting for your life outside of banking. There was nothing ever from a professional perspective. But one Sunday, and I pretty much stopped buying the Sunday papers when you have young kids and you love reading papers, but you never have time to go through them. You just stop buying them. But one Sunday, I bought the paper And there was an advert for trustees for what was then called Breakthrough Breast Cancer a charity focused on breast cancer research. I didn't know a lot about how charities run. I had no real idea apart from sort of presenting to boards about sort of what the role of a trustee for a charity would be, but I wrote a really hokey application and was sort of privileged to be invited to have an interview. And that was actually my first board experience, which is fascinating to be able to lend experience around strategy and M&A and finance to them. It was a cause that hadn't affected my immediate family, but had taken away two aunts when I was growing up. And you know, to your point around sort of scratching this itch around wanting to give back, it was a way to translate my corporate experience into something that I cared a lot about.
LJR: But that's a lot to take on.
SC: It was, I mean, serving on a charity board is, never feels like a lot and you always want to do more. Although I've now created a development board for the charity that that's become and chairing a group of volunteers is rather hard. So it's stressing me out now more than it was before, because I feel like it's, there's a lot on me to drive forward, although I have this amazing, amazing group of women and that was all about knowing that there was women in the city who wanted to give back, so how could I bring them together to accelerate awareness and fundraising and create partnerships in a way that we could through our networks. But I think going back to one of your questions around, how did I do it all? I mean, there was one decision I had to make when I was in banking, coming back from maternity leave around whether I was going to be an M&A or whether I was going to be in the UK team. M&A was all about Russia at the time, and I knew that that was not going to be sustainable. So I've been lucky in that my career has largely been focused in the UK and in the UK, that really means London. So travel has not been a huge part of what I've had to manage, which I think would otherwise make life a lot more complicated.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. So now at this stage, you've done like multiple careers, it feels like, and where are you in that balance? You now have kids who are eventually going to go off, but still at home and kind of at a pinnacle of maybe what you've done. So what is, what's the future look like for Sunni?
SC: So, I'm now in my fifth career, so there's two more careers to walk through. So, one was having left we ended up selling what was Rexim to Ball Corporation in the U.S., and so that gave me more time to think about what comes next. And I got invited to join the board of a soft drinks company. And I was still looking for a full time role. But everyone says how hard your first sort of commercial board role is to get. I've had a taste of it through a charity and through a tech advisory board I joined before. And so I... Kind of then got to sit as a non-executive director for, it's a company called Britvig. They are the Pepsi bottler for the UK and Ireland, and they also have a range of family soft drinks and really cool mixers, London Essence, if you ever come across it. And so that was fascinating to have that perspective into the full agenda of the boardroom. And that made me realize that actually there was a whole world of stakeholders and even though I'd seen and done a lot already that there was more to do, and it actually led to a very left field career move, which was joining a strategic communications firm where I got to build the sustainability practice I sort of mentioned before, spend time with activists and understand their motivations and how they were able to add value around companies. And then went back to my days of advising on M&A and IPO situations. So for me, communications is very left field. Communications has never. I kind of can't lie or I can't exaggerate, nevermind lie. But actually taking a really strategic approach to a landscape, which has changed and then even more so through COVID of where understanding the two-way dialogue that needs to happen between a company and its different stakeholders was really critical. And so it shaped some of my own development around learning about the simplicity of communications and learning that even if you have all the information, other people don't have the benefit of that. So how do you listen and translate in a way that gets cut through with a range of people who don't have as much knowledge as you do is really, really, really relevant. But all of that experience added up to, I guess what I'm doing now, where I've joined the board and CEO practice of Spencer Stewart. So coming back to that theme of leadership and boards and really being focused on evolving boards for the future. So there's a lot of talk right now about diversity and sustainability in the boardroom, which are hugely important. But I think my overriding mission alongside the privilege of being able to basically have licensed to be curious about people and companies all day long and find the perfect matches is the importance of value creation and performance for listed companies. So there's obviously been a huge sort of shift towards private equity and private capital, and there's good reason for that. But at the same time, I think listed companies are really important fabric in our communities and our lives and our pension funds and work opportunities. And so for me, a lot of what I do right now is focused on how do we get not just the right people, but the right culture and mindset into boardrooms to drive progress and create value.
LJR: That seems so full circle, back to this idea of problem solving, people, helping, sustainability, all of those things that you've been interested in forever and have just added along the margins. Like, it's now coming together.
SC: Who knew? I mean, this is never a career that you'd write. But it's been, you know, I just reflect on how privileged I have been to have had the experiences and to be able to connect these sort of random experiences into the future. So I'm still early in at Spencer Stewart, but I'm really excited about the work that we do, the access that we have, and then talking to people around, you know, in this next or last stage of their careers. People don't retire and do nothing, especially the people that we know and had the privilege of going to school with and working with. It's how do you translate that experience into not just commercial FTSE 100 companies, but third sector organizations and advisory roles and charities and all the rest. So hugely privileged and really enjoying the impact that we can have at the top of it. FTSE 500 companies as much as we can through a range of really important organizations.
LJR: Yeah. And so Sunni, when you think back to the 20 something version of yourself who said, I know what my future is going to look like. I'm just going to take this little break and get a new taste of something. And you'd said, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let me just give you a little taste of what it's going to really pan out to be. And you'd laid all of this out for her. What do you think? I feel as though her eyes would be big as saucers, but what, what do you think she would say? How might that affect her?
SC: I think she would say, you must be kidding. I was pretty single minded at the time. I don't think that anyone would have thought that I would sort of go into investment banking nevertheless 16 years. I was pretty shy. At Dartmouth. So the idea that I could do as much as I've done would have been sort of anathema. In the end, my curiosity generally gets the better of my shyness, but it is sort of incredible. And I think it's I love talking to young people. So if I didn't have to earn a living, I would be a guidance counselor, a career counselor in a high school or a university because there is so much that anybody can do. I don't think I would have believed it though.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in effect, you're doing that now just with people at the other end of their career, telling them what they can still do and, and how they can add and, and what value they can have. And it sure is evident that you've had a lot of value along the way and all of these opportunities and you keep reinventing yourself and all for the better. So, Sunni, thank you so much for sharing this with us. We'll keep looking to see what the next chapter holds for you.
SC: I'm hoping this is the last chapter. And it's all about defining things that other people can do.
LJR: I pretty much guarantee it won't be the last.
SC: You’re very kind, Leslie. Thank you so much.
LJR: That was Sunni Chauhan, a strategic business leader with more than 25 years of experience advising leaders on value creation through talent, strategy, M&A and corporate finance, sustainability and stakeholder engagement. Currently she is exercising her broad skillset, gained over a wide range of professional experiences, as a consultant in the board and CEO practice at Spencer Stuart. She and her family live in London.
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