A metallurgy degree from Manchester and an MBA from Birmingham were meant to secure Bish Agrawal a highly paid seat in an established corporate boardroom. Instead, he gambled on an industry that did not yet exist in India.
In an economy held hostage by the Licence-Permit Raj, Indian business houses relied almost entirely on family networks and trusted acquaintances to hire senior leaders. The very idea of a stranger cold-calling a CEO with a job opportunity bordered on scandalous. Yet Agrawal walked away from corporate comfort to build a business dedicated to doing exactly that. He called it professional recruitment, even though corporate India did not yet have a name for the profession.
Five decades later, the industry he pioneered is worth billions, spanning thousands of recruitment, executive search and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firms.
Against odds
Agrawal was born around 1940 into a modest trading family in a small village near Darbhanga in Bihar. One of 14 siblings, he grew up far removed from the English-medium, elite-school world that produced many of the executives he would later place in India's corner offices.
He learnt English only in his late teens and often describes himself as 'Destiny's Child.' It is a rare moment of self-deprecation for a man who spent his career assessing other people's capabilities. Rather than claiming exceptional brilliance, he credits his success to "tons of self-belief, hard work and more than a stroke of luck."
Perhaps fittingly for someone who looked beyond pedigree throughout his career, almost nobody in the industry calls him Mr Agrawal—or even Bish. He is Doc, the sort of nickname reserved for a trusted family friend rather than a founder-chairman. The informality appears earned rather than cultivated. Over the years, he became a confidant to both clients and candidates, often sought out for life advice, matchmaking or career counselling for their children.
Family legacy
Early in life, he married Sumi, whom he met on a bus while they were students in England. Their three children arrived alongside the business, not after it, and the family has often acknowledged that work was never separated from home life—it became the common language around the dinner table.
His son Shiv eventually took over ABC Consultants and has led the firm for nearly two decades. His daughters, Sonal and Toral, did not merely join the family business; they built their own within it by founding Accord, a retained executive search practice, in the mid-1990s. Sonal later went on to chair AltoPartners, the global executive search partnership that Accord co-founded, becoming both the first woman and the first Asian to hold the position.
Whatever leadership meant around the Agrawal dinner table, it clearly wasn’t deference to the founder's bidding.
Building industry
That is perhaps because Agrawal's interests have always extended well beyond recruitment.
He is an avid collector of contemporary art, displaying the same instinct in galleries that he did in interview rooms—an eye trained to recognise value long before the market does. Former colleagues often recount another habit: judging a person's character over lunch by observing how they treated the waiter. In many ways, it reflected the same skill exercised in a different setting. It also explains why, in an industry obsessed with credentials and pedigree, Agrawal reportedly trusted his own reading of people more than what appeared on a résumé.
None of this, however, would matter without his formidable professional record.
Associated Business Consultants (ABC), the firm he founded in Kolkata in 1969, initially helped Indian business groups such as the Birlas, Tatas, Singhanias and Burmans, alongside multinationals including ICI and Metal Box, "Indianise" their leadership. At a time when many believed Indian executives lacked the ability to lead global organisations, these appointments represented a powerful endorsement of domestic talent.
When economic liberalization arrived in 1991 and multinational companies rushed into India seeking country heads, ABC already possessed the expertise and relationships to meet that demand. Agrawal and his eldest daughter responded by launching Accord to focus exclusively on C-suite hiring.
But his real achievement hasn't been building an unassailable firm; it is training away his own indispensability.
ABC alumni went on to establish several rival executive search firms that now compete with it, effectively seeding an entire industry. A less secure founder may have viewed that as betrayal. Doc regarded it as success.
In 2020, he became the first Asian recipient of the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants' (AESC) Global Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising his role as the founding architect of India's executive search industry.
Now in his late 80s, Bish Agrawal can look back knowing he achieved something few entrepreneurs ever do. Others may have built larger companies, but few can claim to have created an entire industry.
For more such stories, read The Enterprising Indian: Stories From India Inc.