About Dilip Auti

The house I grew up in

My father could not see. He was unwell in other ways for most of my childhood, and my mother worked on a farm so that our home could keep running.

People assume the hardest part of that is the money. It is not. The hardest part is watching capable people be unable to act, and understanding very young that circumstances do not care how hard anybody is trying.

I also learned the other half of it. A person can carry a remarkable amount of weight, for a very long time, provided he has a reason.

Teaching, selling, and a lesson from a large company

My first job was teaching at coaching classes. After that I went into door to door marketing, which meant walking, knocking, and being told no by strangers all afternoon.

It is the best training I ever had. You learn to hear a refusal without taking it personally. You learn to read a face in the first four seconds. And you learn that selling is not talking, which is what most people get wrong about it.

Then I joined the corporate world and ended up running the largest vendor partnership unit of the Mahindra and Mahindra Group in India, under Mahindra First Choice. Hundreds of partners, real targets, real consequences.

That period taught me the single most useful thing I know. Large companies do not succeed because the people inside them are cleverer than the people outside. They succeed because they have systems. Numbers reviewed on a schedule. Roles defined on paper. Somebody answerable for each of them.

The part that never seemed fair

Working with vendors meant meeting hundreds of small business owners. They worked harder than any general manager I knew, and a good number were sharper. But they were alone in a way no corporate executive ever is.

A large company has a finance head, an HR head, a sales head, and consultants on call. The owner of a five crore unit is all of those people, usually before lunch, between two customer calls, standing on the floor with his phone in one hand and a dispatch problem in the other.

Nobody had ever handed him a system. Nobody had shown him how to read his own numbers with confidence. He was simply expected to work it out on his own.

So I made a decision. I would take what large companies know, and give it to the businesses that need it most and can afford it least.

What the work looks like now

I coach owners of small and medium businesses, mostly in Maharashtra, mostly in manufacturing, engineering, trading and services, and mostly family owned.

The work is easy to describe and difficult to do. We find the real numbers. We identify the two or three things actually holding the business back. We build a plan, then the systems underneath it, then we work with the team who have to run those systems. Then we stay until something has changed.

I do not do this alone. My wife, Komal Auti, is a wealth coach and an author, and she takes the wealth, money and family side of the programmes. For an Indian business owner those are not separate subjects, so we stopped teaching them separately.

The stages, and why I mention them

In 2026 I was honoured at the World Economic Forum Global Impact Forum in Davos, where Hon. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Hon. Dr Uday Samant, Cabinet Minister for Industries in Maharashtra, appreciated the work. I have spoken at TEDx and at Josh Talks, delivered programmes in Dubai, Kuwait, Thailand and Singapore and at the Indian Embassy, and in 2024 received the Times Applaud Inspiring Leaders Award from Anupam Mittal.

In 2025 I walked to Everest Base Camp with more than fifty entrepreneurs and their families, which I am prouder of than most of the certificates.

I list these for one reason only. I could do this work anywhere. I have chosen to do it here.