I must have been about 15 years old when I started doing miscellaneous work at my father's Investments Advisory business, helping him with paperwork, documentation, and carrying documents to client offices and back. This was my first real experience working for a real business at a very young age.
As a part of this work, I got to travel a lot within the metropolitan city of Mumbai, giving me a chance to meet people across diverse backgrounds: business owners, highly qualified professionals, and everyone else. I traveled by local train, by public transport buses, and sometimes by shared auto-rickshaws to places about 40-50 kms from central Mumbai.
I was pursuing software engineering in those years from 2005 to 2009 and also applying process automation and technology lessons to my father's business. This was probably the precursor to my journey as a consultant.
Post engineering, I got an opportunity to work in the technology consulting practice at Deloitte, where I worked as part of a 100+ member team implementing a CRM solution for one of the largest health insurance providers in the U.S. This is where I got my first real experience working on a technology implementation project at scale.
I worked at Deloitte for nearly two years, from 2009 to 2011, after which I went ahead to pursue my MBA in finance. The decision to pursue an MBA in finance was also significantly influenced by the work that I had done at my father's investment advisory business.
During my MBA, I interned at Sabre Partners, a leading private equity firm based in Mumbai and investing across healthcare and infrastructure sectors in India. After my MBA, I got an opportunity to work with Nomura with their equity research team covering the energy sector, specifically the solar power and oil and gas sectors in Southeast Asia.
I worked with Nomura for a little over a year, up to August 2014, before I decided to focus on building Ascent full time.
Over the past 12+ years that I've been building Ascent, I've got the opportunity to work with some of the sharpest business owners and key decision makers from family-managed businesses and SMEs by helping build workflow automation / bespoke ERP solutions for growth-focused businesses.
I am 39 now and will be turning 40 next year. I came across this beautiful quote from Carl Jung sometime back, and I couldn't resist reflecting on the alignment it has with my personal and professional journey so far.
Life really begins at 40. Up until then, you are just doing research.
- Carl Jung
For as many years, I have been relentlessly plotting the dots, but now, I can see a pattern emerging.
I know the time to connect the dots is arriving soon.