The story
Becoming an advisor was never the plan. I set out to build and run real businesses — carrying the number, the team, and the consequences that came with both.
It began in sales and marketing — seven years across engineering solutions and mechatronics businesses — followed by fifteen years as Managing Director of Sartorius Group companies in India, leading the business through genuine scale and complexity. I also carried an additional mandate from the board in Germany as Global VP for the Integrated Solutions business, building it into a properly structured, professionally led, sustainably profitable operation with engineering competencies across India and Germany.
What made it possible wasn't the mandate — it was building conviction. I believed Bangalore should become the group's Centre of Excellence for Engineering and Engineered Solutions — since it made business sense. And getting there meant winning over the board in Germany as much as it meant developing the budding leaders on my team in India who would eventually run it. Approval came in 2006; execution followed — ten acres of land, and by 2009, the Sartorius India Campus, built and running.
By 2017 it had grown strong enough to stand on its own — I hung up my managerial boots and let the team I was proud of carry it forward. It's the same arc I walk leaders through today, as a strategic advisor: facilitate the vision, build the strategy, and stay close through execution until it's real.
Across the many roles that came my way, one thing became impossible to ignore: the leaders who struggled weren't short on intelligence, ambition, or opportunity — they were short on clarity, about what they stood for, how they decided, and who they needed to become for what came next. I saw it in boardrooms and in one-on-ones alike, capable people stuck not for lack of ability but for lack of a clear enough view of themselves.
That's what led me, in 2017, to found ChoiceEx Partners — as a Strategic Advisor to family-run businesses aiming to scale, and an Executive Coach to senior managers at their own inflection points. Not an outside consultant who hands over a deck and moves on, but a partner who has stood exactly where you're standing and stays until the work is actually done.
