From owner
to leader
There is a version of your business that runs without you standing in the middle of it. This is the work of getting there.
For business owners in Maharashtra and across India who built something real, and are now spending their lives running it.
India does not run on funding rounds
A young company raises fifty crores of someone else's money and the newspapers call it a success story. A company that has met its salary bill on the first of every month for eighteen years, through two recessions and a pandemic, gets called a small business.
Somewhere along the way, we started measuring the wrong thing.
Drive out to Chakan on a Tuesday morning. Walk through Waluj, or the industrial belt beyond Nashik, or the foundry lanes at Gokul Shirgaon. You will find men who employ two hundred families, who have trained three generations of fitters, who can tell what is wrong with a machine by the sound it makes. Nobody raised capital for them. They built something, and then they held on to it, which is considerably harder.
These are the businesses that hold Maharashtra, and India, together. They are also the businesses nobody writes about, nobody advises, and nobody teaches.
I have spent sixteen years inside them. Not on a stage describing them from a distance. Inside them, with the ledgers open on the table.
I did not begin with money. I began with a reason.
My father could not see. For most of my childhood he was unwell in other ways too, and my mother worked on a farm so that our house could keep running. I learned early that being poor is uncomfortable, but being helpless is what actually breaks people.
My working life started in a classroom, teaching at coaching classes for a small salary. After that I sold products door to door, on foot, in the afternoon heat. Most doors closed. A few did not, and those taught me that selling has almost nothing to do with talking.
Then I joined the corporate world, and eventually ran the largest vendor partnership unit of the Mahindra and Mahindra Group in India, under Mahindra First Choice. That is where I understood something that changed the direction of my life. Large companies do not win because their people are cleverer. They win because they have systems, reviewed numbers, defined roles, and somebody accountable for each of them.
Meanwhile I was meeting hundreds of owners who had none of that. They worked harder than any general manager I knew. Many were sharper. But a large company has a finance head, an HR head and consultants on call, and the owner of a five crore unit is all of them himself.
You already know something is not working. You may not know what.
Growth rarely stops for dramatic reasons. It stops quietly, in two or three places, while everything else looks fine. Most owners can feel it long before they can name it.
01"The turnover is there. The money isn't."
Your accountant shows a profit. Your bank balance disagrees. The money is sitting in stock, in credit you extended, and in customers who pay when it suits them.
Check my business →
02"Nothing moves unless I am standing there."
You have not been properly unwell in years, because you cannot afford to be. The business has grown for twelve years, and not one of those years did it grow without you.
Check my business →
03"I train them. Then they leave."
Eight months teaching someone your work, and they take it to the unit down the road for two thousand rupees more. So you stop teaching properly, which makes the next one leave sooner.
Check my business →
04"Four years at the same number."
Five crore. Then 5.2. Then 4.9. Then 5.3. Meanwhile your effort has doubled, your team has grown, your costs have risen, and the number has not moved.
Check my business →
05"My son does not want this."
You built it so he would never struggle the way you did. He has watched what it cost you, and would rather take a salary elsewhere. That conversation has not gone well, so you have both stopped having it.
Check my business →
06"When did I last actually stop?"
The last full family holiday was before the children grew up, and even then the phone did not stop. Diwali is the busiest week of your year, not the calmest.
Check my business →Owners who were where you are
Not actors, and not before-and-after stories with the numbers taken out. Business owners from Maharashtra and across India, in their own words, saying what changed.
What owners say on Google
Public, unedited, and not ours to control.
Four ways in, depending on where you are
Each one contains everything below it. Most owners start with three hours and decide from there.
Business Excellence
Three hours outside your business, looking at it properly, with a written ninety day plan when you leave.
Learn more →Business Sanjivani
The full growth plan built with you, the systems to support it, and two months of mentoring so it is still standing after the enthusiasm fades.
Inner Circle
Long term coaching, implementation support and accountability, alongside a small group of owners at the same stage.
Scaling Up
Our team comes to your business, studies how it actually runs, builds what is missing, and stays until the results are measurable.
Anyone can hand you a report. We come and do the work.
There is a limit to what can be fixed from a stage. You can learn a system in a hotel conference room, but installing it in a working factory, with the people you actually employ, in a month with dispatches pending, is a different job entirely.
So we come to you. We walk the floor. We sit with your accounts. We meet the supervisors, including the ones who never speak in meetings and know the most.
We follow a single order from enquiry to dispatch to payment, and by the end of that we usually know where your money and your time are going. Then we build. And we stay until the numbers have moved.
How Scaling Up works
In an Indian business, nothing is decided alone
The decision to work on your business will not be made by you in a quiet room. It will be made with your wife, or your brother, or the CA who has done your books for fifteen years. Everyone in that room is carrying something.
Dilip Auti takes the business. Strategy, sales, systems, leadership, team and scale.
Komal Auti takes wealth and mindset. How money actually grows, how to read your own numbers without flinching, and the honest question of what the business has been costing your family.
Most owners arrive wanting a bigger turnover. A surprising number leave saying the real change was something else. Sleeping properly. A Sunday that belongs to them. A son who has started asking questions about the business instead of avoiding it.
If you are going to open your books to someone, check him first
Honoured at the World Economic Forum Global Impact Forum in Davos. Appreciated by Hon. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Hon. Dr Uday Samant, Cabinet Minister for Industries.
See media and recognitionThis is what a Dilip Auti session looks like
Unedited clips from the hall. Full auditoriums, and owners who stay behind long after the session ends.
Letters, certificates and the press
Good wishes from the office of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, appreciation from police training centres and Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and coverage in Marathi and Hindi newspapers.
Read them all
This is not for everybody, and we would rather say so now
This is for you if
- You already have a running business
- Your turnover is ₹2 crore or more
- You have a team, even a small one
- You are willing to change how you personally work, which is usually the hardest part
This is not for you if
- You have not started your business yet
- You are looking for motivation, which is available cheaper elsewhere
- You want results without changing anything
- You are not willing to open your numbers
No motivation. No slogans. No shouting.
Nobody will ask you to stand on a chair. There will be no loud music and no photographs with a trophy. You will spend the time working on your own business with your own figures in front of you, and you will leave with something written down.
Where we are next
Begin with twelve questions about your business
You do not have to decide anything today, and we would rather you did not. You will get a one page report on WhatsApp showing where your business is strongest, where it is quietly losing money and time, and which single thing to deal with first.
Start my business health check