Change the thinking.The business follows.
Most coaching starts with numbers. Nine years and hundreds of owners later, across coaching rooms and workshop halls, I am fairly certain the block is almost never ideas or effort. It is a way of thinking that keeps producing the same week over and over. I run a manufacturing business myself, so I am not guessing about that.
Pune · 2026
The businessCemetilePartner since 1996
CoachingCertified 2017Coaching and facilitating for close to two decades
CertifiedActionCOACH, USAFranchisee partner
CertifiedDeep Coaching IntensiveCenter for Transformational Coaching, Canada
FacilitatorDale Carnegie Institute15+ years
Advisory boardPineticsPune, hardware technology
01 The real problem It is rarely the strategy
Owners do not get stuck for want of ideas or effort.
In my experience it is almost always one of three things, and none of them are solved by a better plan on paper.
- Old habits
- The same call gets made the same way, because there was never a quiet hour to ask how it gets made.
- Harder, not smarter
- Firefighting becomes the job. Effort keeps the business alive and quietly stops it from growing.
- No way to scale
- What worked at five people stops working at fifty, and nobody notices until something breaks.
So here is the test. If you disappeared for thirty days, would your business grow, survive, or stop?
Pick one of the three
Most common answer
Survive is what most owners say, and it is the most dangerous of the three. It means the business is held together by your presence rather than by its systems. Nothing collapses while you are there, so nothing gets fixed. That is repairable, and it usually takes less time than owners expect.
02 Why me The actual difference
I still run the business I coach you about.
Cemetile was started in 1964. I joined in 1996 and my brother and I run it together today. We manufacture interlocking pavers, tiles, retaining wall systems and precast items, and we take on the laying ourselves, as turnkey projects.
Which means
Communication across a generation gap. Financial crunches. Clients who complain. Teams that underperform. Work that quietly eats the life around it. I do not read about these. I live them, in the same week you do. That is the difference between me and a coach trained in a corporate classroom, and it is why I know the hardest part of this is rarely the spreadsheet.
Why I do this
Every owner I know is surrounded by people and still working it out alone.
Your team needs you certain. Your family needs you calm. Your bank needs you optimistic. There is nobody left to be honest with. I spent years in exactly that position, and the thing that would have helped most was not a framework. It was one person, outside the business, who understood it and had no stake in my answer. That is what I set out to be.
- A companion
- Someone who walks the length of it with you, not a consultant who appears for a project and leaves. Some of my clients are eight years in.
- A sounding board
- For the decision you cannot raise at home because it will worry them, and cannot put to your team because it will unsettle them.
- A safe space
- Where the real numbers and the real fears can both be said out loud, and nothing leaves the room. No judgement, no repeating it back to you later.
- A mirror
- For the belief sitting underneath the decision. Most of the time the problem is not the option you chose, it is what you believed about yourself while choosing it.
- A motivator
- For the weeks when the plan has stopped being exciting and has become simply work. That is where most plans quietly die.
- A guide
- When you are doing something for the first time and it shows. I have usually done it, badly, before I did it well.
- A consultant
- Occasionally. When telling you is genuinely faster than asking you, I will tell you. But that is the smallest part of this work, not the main one.
That is the purpose. Not to hand you a system and step back, but to be the person an owner can put the weight down with for an hour, and leave clearer than they came. Read the longer story
03 The work Four different rooms
Four offerings, for four different rooms.
These are not stages of one programme. Which one fits depends on who you are and what you are carrying. Some of the work is structure, some of it is what you believe about yourself, and that usually has to move first. If you are not sure which you are, say so on WhatsApp and we will work it out in ten minutes.
01
Business coaching
For owners. The people carrying the risk, signing the cheques and unable to hand the worry to anybody else. One to one, always. Vision, systems, team, cash, marketing, and the accountability to actually do it. Every engagement starts with The Alignment.
For business owners 02Leadership coaching
For leaders who are burning out, running on stress, or have lost the thread of what they are actually for. Senior people with real responsibility and nowhere safe to think out loud. This work is personal before it is professional.
For leaders under strain Signature 03Business Brilliance Through Boardgames
My own workshop, and nothing else in Indian coaching works like it. Owners run a company on the LEVERAGE board, round after round, and watch their own patterns appear in front of them. Run in fourteen cities so far, and organisers book it on its own terms.
For organisers and business networks 04Workshops, offsites and keynotes
For organisations, business and social. Team training, quarterly planning days, leadership offsites and keynote speaking. Built around what the room actually needs rather than a fixed curriculum.
For organisations and teams04 What changes Four shifts
Business is not only about profit. It is about building a life you actually want.
These are the four shifts I am working towards with every owner, in roughly this order.
Shift 01
How you decide
Fear, doubt and indecision stop setting the agenda. The decision gets made on Tuesday instead of next quarter.
Shift 02
How you lead
Behaviours your team can predict, because predictable is what makes a leader safe to follow.
Shift 03
How the business holds
Structure that works when you are not in the room, so growth stops depending on your stamina.
Shift 04
What success means
Your family gets the version of you that is not exhausted. That one is not a bonus, it is the point.
05 Proof Results and what people say
Once the mindset shifts, success follows.
Mid sized tech company
Leadership aligned around a 10X vision
One direction the whole leadership team could state in the same words, which had not been true before.
Design studio
Hired right, and kept them
A hiring process that stopped guessing, retention that stopped leaking, and revenue that moved as a result.
Manufacturing business
From surviving to structured growth
Out of permanent firefighting and into a business with a plan it could actually follow.
Client names withheld until each one agrees to be named
It wasn't just a game, it was real business learning in action. Your clarity, energy and practical approach truly show why you are among the best.
Attendee · VitKum ConclaveScaling without systems is chaos. Systems first, growth second. That one line changed how I look at my next two years.
Organiser · VBN KashiSanjay gave me structure, and held me accountable every single step of the way.
Coaching client06 The room Business Brilliance Through Boardgames
Owners run a company for an evening, then see what they just did.
Each person takes a business round by round on the LEVERAGE board, under constraints that feel uncomfortably familiar. The board is not the point. The pattern each owner reveals about themselves is the point. Run in fourteen cities across India so far, and booked by organisers on its own terms rather than as a taster for something else. The full BBB page
Run so far in Pune · Mumbai · New Delhi · Gurugram · Jaipur · Surat · Solapur · Hubli · Raipur · Gwalior · Bhubaneshwar · Guwahati · Vizag · Imphal
07 The first conversation Twenty minutes, no cost
Message me. You will be talking to me.
No form, no calendar link, no assistant. If I am not the right coach for you, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
WhatsApp +91 98230 41842Or email hello@sanjaykanakia.com
- 01You talk, I askTwenty minutes on what is actually going on. No pitch.
- 02I tell you what I seeHonestly, even when it is uncomfortable. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need a coach yet.
- 03We start with The AlignmentA proper look at your business and your life before any plan gets made.
- 04Then a fixed slot, every week or fortnightEither of us can walk away on four weeks' notice. Nobody is locked in.