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Ashish Kumar AgnihotriOperating Partner

India & beyond

I’m based in Gurgaon and work with companies across India — and with the global teams that are increasingly run from here. Nineteen years of operations, most recently as Senior Director, Business Excellence at Publicis Groupe, brought to your business a few days a week.

If you have the operating problem but did not know there was a name for the solution, this is it: a fractional COO is a senior operations chief who works with your company a few days a week, sized and priced for where you are now. Based in Gurgaon, I bring nineteen years of running quality and delivery at scale to companies across India.

India is, quietly, one of the most operations-intensive economies in the world. It runs global delivery, shared services and capability centres for much of the planet, and it is producing founder-led companies that scale faster than their operating models can keep up. Both create the same need — executive operating discipline before a full-time COO is justified or even findable.

That is the gap I work in. Whether you are a scaling Indian business, a global capability centre owning critical processes for an overseas parent, or an agency running delivery at volume, the work is the same: install the cadence, ownership, quality systems and measurement that let growth hold its shape — then hand them back.

01Who I help here

India runs on operations. That is where I work.

01

Scaling Indian businesses

Founder-led companies that have grown past improvisation but aren’t ready for a full-time COO — where the founder has become the bottleneck and quality depends on a few people.

02

GCCs, GBS & delivery centres

Global capability and delivery centres run from India, where quality scores, SLAs and governance across many clients are the whole game — exactly where my Business Excellence work lives.

03

Agencies & media operations

Advertising, media and content operations running at volume, where delivery quality and makegoods directly hit the P&L — the world I led at Publicis Groupe.

02How engagements run

Engagements are remote-first, with on-site time in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru or wherever your operation sits — particularly for the diagnostic and the early operating reviews, where being in the room earns its keep.

Having carried quality and delivery across global clients and time zones, working with a team that is part in India and part elsewhere is familiar ground, not a complication. The cadence matters more than the postcode.

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03In depth

The India operating context.

Why India is a fractional COO market now

Two forces have made operating leadership the constraint for a large share of Indian companies at once. A generation of founder-led businesses has scaled past the point where improvisation works, and the global capability centre boom has made India the place where a great deal of the world’s delivery is actually run. Both create the same need: senior operating discipline — quality systems, governance, measurement — in companies that cannot yet justify, or cannot quickly find, a full-time chief operating officer of the right calibre. That gap is exactly what a fractional COO fills.

Why fractional fits Indian companies especially well

A seasoned operating executive is scarce and expensive everywhere, and India is no exception — the people who have genuinely run quality and delivery at scale are few, and committing one to a full-time package before the role is large and constant enough to justify it is a heavy bet. A fractional engagement removes that bet. You get the discipline a few days a week, at a fraction of the cost, with the work structured to install systems and then transfer them. For a company in the 50-to-500 band, it is usually the more rational first move than a premature full-time hire.

Operating excellence is India’s advantage to protect

India already runs a remarkable amount of the world’s operations — delivery centres, shared services, agency and media production, back-office for global enterprises. In that world, consistency at scale is the product, and an honest, governed quality system is a commercial asset rather than an overhead. Much of my career has been spent building exactly this: a standard precise enough to score against, measurement that holds across hundreds of clients, and the governance cadence that keeps the score where you moved it to. It is the work that lifted a quality score from 95% to 99% across more than 2,000 campaigns and 450 clients.

GCCs and the operations-leadership gap

Global capability centres in India have moved well beyond cost arbitrage — they now own critical processes end to end. That maturity raises the bar on operations: SLAs across many internal clients, quality that must be provable to a global parent, and governance that gives headquarters an honest, comparable read. These are precisely the systems a Business Excellence practitioner installs. A fractional COO or BE partner can give a GCC executive-grade operating discipline without adding a permanent senior line to the centre’s cost base.

Working across cities and time zones

I am based in Gurgaon, in Delhi NCR, and work on-site in NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru or wherever your operation actually sits — particularly for the diagnostic and the early operating reviews, where being in the room earns its keep. The rest runs remote-first. Having carried quality and delivery across global clients and time zones, a team that is part in India and part elsewhere is familiar ground rather than a complication. The operating cadence is what holds a distributed organisation together, and installing it is the same discipline wherever the people sit.

The cost case, in plain terms

A full-time chief operating officer of real calibre is one of the larger fixed commitments a company makes — salary, equity and overhead, indefinitely. For a business in the 50-to-500 band that bet is often premature: the role is not yet large and constant enough to justify the package, and a mis-hire at that level is among the most expensive mistakes a scaling company can make. A fractional engagement converts that fixed bet into a variable one. You pay for the cadence you need, scale it up or down as the work demands, and keep the option of hiring full-time later — into a role that is, by then, properly defined.

Starting with a diagnostic

Most engagements open with a fixed-fee diagnostic rather than a long contract. Over a short window I sit inside the business, read the numbers, and trace how work actually moves from sale to delivery to cash; you receive a written read on where the operating model is straining and what to do about it. It is deliberately low-commitment — a senior, independent assessment with a clear recommendation, and the room to decide whether a longer engagement is worth it before committing to one. For many Indian companies it is the most useful first step on its own.

What you keep when the engagement ends

Because the work is built to transfer, the artefacts outlast the months: a documented operating model, the cadence and who runs it, an ownership map for every critical process, a leadership scorecard with each metric defined, and the playbooks for the processes that carry the most risk. The test is simple — could your own team, or an incoming full-time COO, pick this up and run it without me? Building toward a clean handover from the start is what separates a durable gain from a dependency, and it is how I work whether the company is in Gurgaon, Bengaluru or run across several countries from India.

Questions

Fractional COO in India — common questions.

Yes. I am based in Gurgaon but work with companies across India — Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and elsewhere — and with global teams run from India. Engagements are remote-first, with on-site time where it matters most, such as the diagnostic and the early operating reviews. The cadence matters more than the postcode.

Engagements are priced as a fixed-fee diagnostic to start, then a monthly retainer scaled to cadence and scope — never billed by the hour. The retainer is a fraction of a full-time operating executive’s package because the time is fractional, not the seniority of the work. The diagnostic is deliberately low-commitment so you can judge the fit before committing further.

Yes — it is one of the areas where the work is deepest. GCCs and delivery centres face the hardest version of quality: consistency and governance across many internal clients, provable to a global parent. Building the standard, the measurement and the governance cadence for exactly that environment is the core of my Business Excellence experience.

Yes. Having led quality and delivery across global clients and time zones, a team split between India and other regions is familiar ground. Much of what I install — clear ownership, a trusted scorecard, a working operating cadence — matters more in a distributed organisation, because distance punishes ambiguity.

It is growing quickly, alongside fractional CFOs and other fractional executives, as more founder-led companies and capability centres reach the size where they need executive operating discipline before they can justify a full-time hire. The model is well established globally; in India it is being adopted fast, for exactly the reasons the market needs it.

The best fit is usually a company that has already found traction and is now straining under its own growth — often between roughly 50 and 500 people — rather than a very early-stage startup still searching for product-market fit. If you are earlier than that, I will say so honestly and point you to what would help more.

They can, and many working weeks are. I do recommend some on-site time — especially for the diagnostic and the first operating reviews — because being in the room early accelerates everything that follows. After that, a remote-first cadence works well, which is also what makes it practical to support teams beyond my own city.

The work is deepest in operations-heavy sectors: scaling founder-led companies, global capability centres and shared-services operations, and advertising, media and content operations running at volume. These are the environments where quality, governance and throughput at scale decide the outcome — and they are where nineteen years of my experience is concentrated.

The simplest first step is a short conversation about where your operating model is under strain. From there, a fixed-fee diagnostic is usually the right entry point — a low-commitment way to get an independent read and a clear recommendation before deciding on anything longer. You can reach me through the contact page, by email, or on LinkedIn.