It took me more than 30 years to understand what I was actually good at.
My journey as an entrepreneur did not begin with a business plan. There was no MBA. No entrepreneurial framework. No carefully identified niche. I didn’t sit down and ask myself what my unique value proposition was. I became an entrepreneur because I needed to survive. I had stepped out of my marriage. I had children to raise, educate and provide for. I needed to build a life, and I needed to earn.
That was the strategy. Survival and perhaps because I had no established playbook, I began with the one thing I knew I could do reasonably well: Solve problems.
First, I became a consultant.
In the early 2000s, a close friend, an engineer and MBA working in consulting, helped me understand that what came naturally to me could actually become professional work. I could walk into a business, understand what wasn’t working, connect seemingly unrelated dots and suggest what could be done differently. So I started consulting. Small businesses. Different sectors. Different problems. I wasn’t an expert in their industries.
I was becoming an expert at understanding problems & for many years, that was enough.
Then consulting became advisory.
Around 2011, as India’s startup ecosystem began gathering momentum, I found myself increasingly surrounded by entrepreneurs. As the community I was building grew, founders started coming to me with questions.
What should I do here?
How do I solve this?
What should my next move be?
My role began shifting. As a consultant, I had largely been brought in to diagnose a business problem and recommend a solution. As an advisor, I was increasingly helping founders think through decisions. Understand the situation. Look at the choices. Identify the next problem that needed solving. Then let the entrepreneur go back and execute.
Advisory eventually became mentoring.
When I moved deeper into mentoring around 2019–20, another shift happened. I was no longer who the founders called only when they had a problem. I became part of their journey. Week after week. I worked with founders and their teams across startups, growth-stage companies and mature businesses. The conversations became more strategic.
Where is the business going?
What is stopping growth?
What needs to change?
What should leadership prioritise?
What is the next milestone?
I was no longer merely solving today’s problem. I was helping leaders see tomorrow’s business. For several years, I called myself a Business Mentor and it was accurate, but it still wasn’t complete.
Then I discovered the gap between knowing and doing.
Over the last couple of years, my involvement inside businesses became much deeper. I worked alongside founders. Sat with leadership teams. Entered businesses where growth had stalled, teams were struggling, positioning needed to change, revenue needed momentum or execution simply wasn’t keeping pace with ambition and I began noticing something, most founders don’t suffer from a shortage of advice. They often know what needs to be done. They have consultants. They have advisors. They have mentors. They have strategy decks, business plans, reviews and enough ideas to fill another ten presentations, yet the business remains stuck, because between knowing what needs to happen and actually making it happen lies one of the biggest gaps in business:
Execution.
It took a coach to help me see my own strength.
Interestingly, after more than three decades of working with businesses, I needed someone else to help me see what had become obvious in my work. Through my own coaching journey with Cherian Kuruvila (CK), I began looking more closely at what I actually brought into a business. My strength wasn’t merely diagnosing the problem. It wasn’t giving founders another answer and it wasn’t even strategic direction alone. My real strength was what happened after the conversation.
I stayed. I worked alongside the founder and the team. I helped translate the strategic direction into priorities. I challenged decisions when necessary. I helped remove bottlenecks. I brought people into alignment. I pushed execution. I watched the outcomes and when something didn’t work, we went back, recalibrated and moved again. That realisation changed how I defined my work.
Business Mentoring became Growth Execution Mentoring.
There is an important distinction. A mentor can help you see what you cannot see. A good mentor can challenge your thinking, bring experience to the table and help you make better decisions. A Growth Execution Mentor goes one step further.
The question is no longer only:
“What should we do?”
It becomes:
“How do we make this happen?”
And then:
“What is stopping us?”
“Who needs to own it?”
“What needs to change?”
“Is it actually moving?”
That requires a very different kind of involvement. Not running the founder’s company. Not becoming another employee. Not taking away leadership ownership, but standing close enough to the business to ensure that strategy begins moving.
Thirty years later, I can finally name what I do.
There are many excellent consultants. There are many experienced advisors. There are many capable business mentors. I have been each of them at different stages of my journey and each stage taught me something I needed for the next.
Consulting taught me to diagnose.
Advisory taught me to guide decisions.
Mentoring taught me to shape direction.
Execution taught me to stay until something moves.
Today, those thirty-plus years come together in the work I call:
Growth Execution Mentoring.
It is where strategy meets action. Where conversations become priorities. Where priorities become execution and where execution must eventually become measurable growth. Perhaps the greatest evolution in a professional journey is not learning something completely new. Sometimes, it is finally recognising the thread that has quietly run through everything you have done.
Mine was never simply giving advice.
Mine was always about helping businesses move. It just took me thirty years to give it a name.
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