In 2005, Ashish Agrawal helped set up an office before he had properly arranged his own apartment. There is a particular indignity in calculating an office’s finances while your domestic life remains a work in progress. He remembers the experience fondly. There were premises to choose, staffing numbers to argue over, salaries and billing rates to model. Decisions acquired consequences. He and his colleagues had to live with them.
Two decades later, the founder and CEO of ProcDNA still returns to that first experience of making a workplace exist. The memory he singles out is signing a lease. For a consultant, accustomed to advising people about their decisions, putting a signature on your own obligation has a useful clarifying effect. The spreadsheet has acquired a landlord.
Agrawal now invites other consultants into that kind of responsibility. He has celebrated the colleagues building ProcDNA offices in Boston, Princeton, Alameda, Pune and Delhi. Their work includes hiring and client development, along with the less glamorous business of desks, snacks and getting a room ready. He presents these tasks with affection. Ownership, in his telling, begins well before anyone gives you a grand title.
A shy associate with crowded slides
His professional education included a part-time MBA at Kellogg, pursued alongside consulting work. He also remembers establishing an office in India and working through demanding assignments. In his account, the difficult stretches remain more vivid than the comfortable ones. That is an awkward advertisement for an easy life, but quite a persuasive one for an interesting career.
He describes his early self as a shy associate. Speaking clearly was something he had to develop. So was choosing what deserved space on a slide. His first presentations could be heavy with data and light on conclusions; coaching helped him change that habit. A client should not need a treasure map to locate the point.
The advice he gives new consultants follows from those experiences: practise communication, seek feedback, take unfamiliar assignments and keep learning. He recommends volunteering to speak inside the firm. There is something reassuring about a CEO acknowledging that competence once required rehearsal. People learning to present their first piece of work have more use for that admission than for another immaculate executive biography.
Two founders, one economical pep talk
ProcDNA began in January 2020. Agrawal and co-founder Harpreet Singh had left their jobs and were learning how to win work for their own firm. They had underestimated how different selling would feel when the assignments were no longer effectively waiting for them. Experience was an asset. A first client remained a separate problem.
They briefly considered a business coach. Their bank balances encouraged a less expensive arrangement: a borrowed sporting maxim and encouragement for each other. Sunday-night business-development calls became occasions to renew their resolve. Neither founder followed ice hockey or basketball, which gave their choice of sporting inspiration a pleasing looseness.
Agrawal’s later reflection on that beginning is about practice. Repeated attempts made them better at finding work, leading people and handling the business. Six years into the venture, he reported more than 400 teammates. The distance between those early calls and that headcount is considerable. His account preserves the uncertainty at the beginning, rather than polishing it away once the ending looks respectable.
Growth needs somewhere to sit
The company Agrawal leads is self-funded, with analytics, data and technology consulting at its centre. His base is Princeton, New Jersey; the organization operates across the United States and India. Those geography facts matter because building across locations puts his enthusiasm for local ownership to a practical test. Someone has to make each place work.
In January 2024, ProcDNA announced its Pune office. Agrawal described it as a way to extend the firm’s reach and serve clients, with local talent linked to colleagues elsewhere. The announcement had the usual vocabulary of expansion, but underneath it lay a straightforward operating decision: put people in a city where the business expects to build capability.
By December 2025, he was inaugurating expanded premises in Gurugram. In the photograph, he stands at a ribbon with a crowded office behind him. Balloons fill the doorway. It is a modestly theatrical way to mark a very practical achievement: more space for a growing team. An office opening gives expansion a door handle.
A company built by more than its founders
ProcDNA partner Roshan Alvares offers a useful glimpse of how responsibility is distributed. He has described a senior engagement lead who moved cities, negotiated an office lease and arranged a gathering for prospective clients within a year. Another consultant helped a partner establish a data-governance practice, from research and supporting material to a plan for winning business.
These examples give substance to Agrawal’s invitation to help build the firm. The opportunity includes creating the conditions in which future work can happen. Alvares also describes coaches and mentors becoming part of the company’s organization as it grew. Informal access to experienced colleagues was being given a more deliberate structure.
That progression is easy to understand and difficult to execute. A small firm can rely on proximity: ask the person beside you. A larger one has to decide who is responsible for helping whom. Without that work, the friendly invitation to take responsibility can become an invitation to guess. The office lease is only the first piece of infrastructure.
Even the CEO gets a review
At the end of 2024, Agrawal described a review cycle covering 225 employees. The chief executive was included. His colleagues supplied a substantial list of things he needed to improve, prompting him to adopt the initials CEOP: “Chief Executive Officer in Progress!” A small joke, and a sensible qualification for a job whose syllabus keeps changing.
He used the occasion to recognize ProcDNA’s Boost team, covering finance, HR, IT, business development and office management. The review process itself required coordination across the United States and India. Forms, reminders and conversations had to become a completed exercise for every person.
There is a revealing choice of attention here. Consulting makes client work easy to celebrate. Agrawal spent this particular message on the people maintaining the organization around it. The praise concerned work that can disappear into the background when it goes well. Nobody applauds a working login with quite the ceremony afforded a ribbon cutting. Both can determine whether a Monday begins properly.
“Chief Executive Officer in Progress!”Agrawal’s name for his own continuing education
Show people where the next step is
His more recent discussion of a Path to Partnership program makes the management question explicit. ProcDNA is formalizing how directors understand the standard for becoming partners: revenue responsibility, team leadership and a capability they help add to the firm. Agrawal wants that conversation to begin years before a final decision.
The proposal fits a broader concern in his public writing: people should understand what advancement requires. He treats coaching as an obligation to explain the destination and the work needed to reach it. A promotion committee eventually reaches a decision; a manager has useful work to do long before the committee meets.
This is where the founder’s story becomes especially interesting. Starting a company requires acting before much is certain. Managing someone else’s career creates a different responsibility: remove uncertainty where you can. There will always be judgment in a partnership decision. Clear expectations at least give people something more useful than hopeful interpretations of a senior colleague’s tone.
Understand the business you are expected to own.
Understand the team you are expected to lead.
Understand what you will help the firm add.
An early start, and a longer view
Singh supplies a small character sketch of his co-founder in an essay about timing. He describes Agrawal ready to lead meetings at six in the morning, Pacific time, while Singh’s own working day follows a different pattern. It is a colleague’s observation from that period, and a reminder that a partnership can accommodate quite different clocks.
The contrast is more engaging than the familiar portrait of a founder who supposedly never stops working. Here are two people in the same business with different preferences. Their collaboration does not require identical daily routines. Anyone who has tried to schedule a transcontinental meeting will appreciate this distinction more than another sermon about rising early.
Agrawal’s wider career spans consulting, a large pharmaceutical company and entrepreneurship. His conference biography credits him with 24 years of experience and involvement in 20 product launches. The interesting point is the accumulated change of perspective: advising an organization, working within one, then accepting responsibility for one of his own.
Still turning up to learn
There are public markers of progress beyond the founder’s reflections. ProcDNA placed No. 621 on the 2024 Inc. 5000. The ranking belongs to the company; its significance for Agrawal’s story is that the venture he helped start had reached a measurable stage of growth. A list position makes a useful milestone. The next client still needs the work done.
In March 2026, he represented ProcDNA at Reuters Pharma USA in Philadelphia alongside colleagues including Varsha Eluri. The company described conversations about connecting data and analytics to execution. In September, he returned to Philadelphia for Fierce Pharma Week with Eluri and Rishi Agarwal, meeting peers and discussing commercial strategy and technology.
These appearances keep him close to the ordinary exchange on which a consulting business depends: listening to what people are trying to accomplish, comparing experiences and finding useful work to do together. The founder who once needed encouragement before another attempt at selling now has a larger organization behind those conversations.
His story has acquired more offices, more colleagues and more formal responsibilities. It retains a rather appealing unfinished quality. He remembers the apartment that was not ready, the presentation that needed editing, the feedback that still arrives. A person can become CEO and remain a student of the job. Agrawal has even arranged initials for it.