Secret to success: Telling it like it is - even if the baby is ugly

Ashish Gadnis claims the secret to his success as a business consultant is that he's good at being an S.O.B -- only he didn't exactly say S.O.B., referring instead to an anterior portion of his anatomy to describe his hard-edged approach.

Unlike some advisers who simply tell you what you want to hear -- Gadnis calls it "stealing your watch, then telling you the time" -- he promises to "tell you if your baby is ugly."

However, a more amiable description was offered by Cary Deacon, CEO of Navarre Corp., the New Hope vendor of PC software, DVD videos, video games and other home entertainment products.

"He's a great facilitator," Deacon said. Gadnis was hired in 2006 to help senior management chart a long-term growth strategy and, among other things, to decide to sell a music distribution business that had attained "untouchable" status as one of Navarre's original profit centers, but that was part of a faltering industry.

"The internal management process was entrenched, not really in a position to deal with the future," said Deacon, who succeeded the company's founder as CEO in 2007. "Ashish brought an ability to extract varying viewpoints and help create consensus on a strategy for the future."

After which "he was relentless in his follow-up to see that our decisions were being enacted," Deacon said.

Whichever view of Gadnis is accurate, the fact is that the 39-year-old native of India has built his five-year-old consulting business, Forward Hindsight, to a 2008 gross of $2.3 million. That's an 11 percent gain, even as the economy collapsed. And revenue so far in 2009 is up 7 percent. He founded the company with Jill Kolling, an operations executive of a software company where Gadnis once was president, but she sold her share to him in 2006.

This year, he added an IT outsourcing service for smaller clients that includes all back-office applications plus assistance with compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and a maze of other data privacy and business practices regulations.

But this is just one chapter in the Gadnis story. His activities outside the business, including projects to promote international cooperation, won him a place among 230 business, government, academic, media and nonprofit leaders from 73 countries named as 2009 Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum.

A talent for bluntness

He joins a group that includes the COO of Goldman Sachs, the vice president of National Geographic and Mark Lippert, a senior foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration. Oh, yes, and the rather well-known founder of the Tiger Woods Foundation.

Gadnis has labored to create working relationships among Minnesota business leaders and those in India. He also spearheaded creation of the new India Center at the University of Minnesota and was a fellow with the National Committee on U.S. Relationships with China. And now, his latest effort under World Economic Forum auspices is an effort to help women carpet weavers in Jordan to gain access to world markets for their goods.

"But we remain friends," Gadnis said, even though he was summarily fired as the company's consultant.

He has fired more than one client himself because they "lacked the courage to make hard decisions. CEOs aren't very good at applying the blunders of the past to avoid them in the future," Gadnis said, a belief that explains the name chosen for his company.

A native of Mumbai, Gadnis grew up in a middle-class neighborhood near the area pictured in the award-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire" and played on some of the same streets. He graduated from Bombay University with a degree in systems engineering.

He came to the United States in 1994 and worked as a systems developer and a consultant with a human resources firm before taking a painful first step into entrepreneurship with a business that marketed software that allowed business execs to do back-office chores on their cell phones.

It was well ahead of its time and wound up costing Gadnis all of his savings. So he signed on as a senior director in the technology section at UnitedHealth Group, then headed a software development team at Play Learning. In 2003 he was offered a job as president of a software development company but was laid off a year later after what he called a "dispute" with the owners.