My name is Karan Arora. I'm 33. I have spent thirteen years in Indian supply chains — including one Diploma from IIM Lucknow and quiet thousands of hours staring at warehouse layouts and vendor spreadsheets. I am also the author of one book about a marriage that did not work the way it was supposed to. The combination, surprisingly, is exactly the right preparation for what I do now.
I started as an engineer. B.Tech first — because of course, like most middle-class Indian boys of my generation, that was the default. I learned that engineering taught me to break problems down. That turned out to be a useful skill no matter what I ended up doing.
After that came the PGDBA, then the IIM Lucknow Supply Chain Diploma — because by then I had figured out that what I actually enjoyed was the operations side of business. Supply chain is the discipline that most rewards careful thinking. It is also the discipline that most exposes lazy thinking. There is no charm offensive you can run on inventory. The numbers either work or they don't.
Across thirteen years inside Indian companies — manufacturers, traders, distributors — I have done procurement, planning, warehouse design, logistics negotiations, and import-export desks. The thing I learned that I most want to share with founders is this: operations is the cheapest place to add margin in your business, and most founders do not spend enough time there.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I was in a marriage that did not fit. The reasons are detailed in the book — Our Ill-Legal Marriage — but the short version is that I spent several years inside a relationship that the law, the family, and my own conditioning had set me up for, and that nobody around me could quite admit was not working.
I wrote the book in part as a coping mechanism, in part because I wanted to be the writer that 25-year-old me had needed to read. When it came out, hundreds of strangers wrote to me. The pattern in their messages was always the same: I thought I was the only one. I thought my situation was unique. I thought there was something wrong with me for feeling this way.
I started talking to them. Long conversations, often unplanned, sometimes on WhatsApp at 1am, sometimes over a careful coffee. Over time I realised I was doing something my therapist friends called counselling, even though I had not set out to.
What I learned from those conversations is the second pillar of Global Guidance Co.: that being told the truth, gently, by someone who is not personally affected by your situation, is worth paying for. It is also worth charging for, because otherwise the work cannot be sustainable.
For most of my adult life I held a full-time job in supply chain and did the counselling work on weekends, for free, for whoever asked. That is still my reality today. Global Guidance Co. is the structure I have built so that I can keep doing both kinds of work — the business advisory I'm trained for and the personal counselling I'm experienced for — without one starving the other.
The name "Global Guidance" is not a marketing claim about scale. It is a description of what the work is: guidance, offered seriously, to anyone in India or beyond who needs it. Sometimes the guidance is about an Incoterm. Sometimes it is about a marriage. The discipline of how you give it is the same.
The first call is free, takes 15 minutes, and you owe me nothing afterwards.
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