I joined the family manufacturing business in 1996. Cemetile Industries, started by my father in 1964, making interlocking concrete pavers, tiles, retaining wall systems and precast items. My brother and I still run it. Thirty years in, I have learnt most of what I know the slow way, by making the mistakes an owner makes and paying for them.
For much of that time I was doing something else alongside it. I was a certified facilitator with Round Table India, running leadership workshops and training other facilitators. I enjoyed it, and I learnt a great deal about how a leader grows.
Then I would come back to my own company and find that most of it did not fit. The thinking was sound, but it was written for large organisations. None of it told me how to run a small manufacturing business in Pune.
In 2016 I met an ActionCOACH coach here in Pune and sat through one of his workshops. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about growth in the language of an SME owner. My brother and I took on a coach for our own business for the next year and a half. It changed how we ran the company, and it gave me back my time.
That is when it became obvious to me. Most owners never build the business they first imagined, and it is rarely for want of ability. It is that nobody ever showed them how to run it with structure, systems and process. I had seen the gap, and I had seen what closing it did for my own company. I wanted to give that back to the community I came from.
So I made it my purpose. I went to the United States, trained and certified as a business and executive coach with ActionCOACH, and started my coaching firm, Keystone Excellence Services. I did not leave the family business to do it. I still run it, which means that when a client describes their week to me, I am not imagining it.
