Reflection · your first note
What teaching taught me about advising
A 300-word reflection in your own voice. Suggested title only.
My story
I am a Chartered Accountant by training and a builder by temperament. For twenty years I have worked where finance meets operations: closing books, designing reports, setting up controls, structuring deals, and more and more often, helping to run the businesses themselves. This page is the longer version of how that happened.
I.Early foundations
I was a studious boy, and from early on I knew what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to bring my head for commerce and my creative streak to real businesses, and to contribute to them in a way that showed. I completed my B.Com and M.Com at [institution], [years], and chartered accountancy was the natural next step.
Looking back, the role I grew into was always going to be the virtual CFO. It is the one position that lets me contribute to many businesses at once, combining the discipline of finance with the creativity of building something.
II.Becoming a Chartered Accountant
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2006. The articleship years taught me what textbooks could not: that every ledger reflects a set of human decisions, and that most errors are process failures before they are accounting failures. Add one story from articleship or the exams that still shapes how you work.
III.Lessons from the corporate floor
My first role was as Assistant Manager in the accounts and insurance functions at Torrent Pharmaceuticals, from 2006 to 2008. Working inside a large organisation showed me how scale depends on routine: closing processes that run on time, insurance cover that is reviewed before it is needed, and controls that people actually follow. It was also my first serious exposure to risk and insurance, a thread that has stayed with me ever since.
“Financial information is only as valuable as the decision it improves.”
IV.Into enterprise
In 2008 I became a promoter director of JS Assignments Private Limited. The company grew in two directions that look different but share a discipline. On one side is finance and management consulting: virtual CFO support, MIS, compliance management and process improvement for owner-managed businesses. On the other is execution: road works carried out as a subcontractor on infrastructure projects. Running both taught me that a site schedule and a month-end close fail for the same reasons, and succeed for the same reasons too.
V.Teaching alongside working
From 2010 to 2020 I was Associate Vice President at ICA Edu Skills, and I have taught at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and at ICA. Teaching forces clarity. If I cannot explain a GST credit rule or a cash-flow statement to a first-year student, I probably do not understand it as well as I think. That habit of explaining things simply now runs through my advisory work, and through ARTHA ASCENT, the foundation programme we have built at JS Assignments.
VI.From accounting to systems
My DISA qualification in information systems audit changed how I look at finance teams. I stopped asking only whether the numbers were right and started asking whether the process that produced them could be trusted without me in the room. Much of my recent work is exactly that: expense approval portals, billing systems, daily book-closure checklists, accountability trackers, and reports that tell an owner what to do next instead of what happened last quarter.
VII.Engineering, energy and consumer brands
Since 2018 I have been a director of A&W Engineering Works (India) Private Limited, which works in ultrasonic and medical-device engineering. In 2021 I joined the board of 7E's Industries Private Limited in the energy sector, and in 2023 Artkart Lifestyle Private Limited, an art-and-craft business. I am also CFO of Hyderabad Strikers in the Tennis Premier League, and act as CFO for engineering, infrastructure and consumer businesses, and I am closely involved with Avyukt World, a Krishna-themed devotional and lifestyle brand that is as much a personal passion as a business.
VIII.Risk, insurance and the long view
Risk has been a constant. After DIRM, I went back to study fourteen years after qualifying as a CA, completing an MBA in Insurance and Financial Planning at Chitkara University in 2022. I also advise families and business owners on life insurance as an agent of Life Insurance Corporation of India. I see insurance as a risk decision before it is a product decision, and I try to keep the conversation in that order.
IX.People, trust and discipline
Across every role, the lesson that repeats is that systems do not run businesses; people do. The best system is one that makes good work visible and makes it easy for people to do the right thing. I value straight answers, written commitments and follow-through, and I try to offer the same. Optionally name a mentor or a turning point that shaped this belief.
X.The years ahead
I am now a founding member of XCo, The Execution Company, and I am spending more time writing, mentoring and turning what I have learned into repeatable systems that other businesses can use. I want to help more owner-managed businesses in India make decisions with the clarity that large companies take for granted. Add one personal aspiration for the next decade.
