Sandhya Mathur, Founder

Gurgaon based Inward Focus was born out of a deep desire to help others succeed. The idea was inspired by a counter-intuitive response to people externalizing the challenges they face in their lives and their careers. “It felt incongruous, in fact, outright paradoxical, that every win came from within, and every loss was caused by external factors. To me, this simple idea had to be the biggest opportunity in developing people. My background in education, and the teacher within fuelled me to zero down to some thing that would let me address whatever part I could,” says Sandhya Mathur–Founder. This marked the beginning of Inward Focus. Inward Focus as a company believes the best way for organizations and people to deal with these challenges is to develop from within. It helps the clients out of their whirl wind, define what’s really important to them and partner with them to achieve their full potential.

While the relationship between training and results, low demand and willingness of corporates to invest, lack of innovation and localization pose some of the major challenges in the industry Inward Focus religiously follows some principles to stay ahead of

the game. The team at Inward Focus develops its own content rather than importing it as this helps them address some of the issues pertaining to localization and innovation. Throwing light on this, Sandhya says, “Our focus is on creating value for our customers–helping them think about their businesses in ways they haven’t thought about themselves. We try to stay away from generic areas and our focus on individual, teams or organizations is centred on customer’s business problems. We use classroom interventions largely as a means to get everyone on the same level; the real learning starts there after, when it is applied.”

"In the next two years, we intend to strengthen our solutions by placing greater emphasis on behavioural research"

The Journey
Inward Focus commenced its operations with the primary inspiration of creating self-awareness and self-improvement among its customers. The team initially limited themselves working with individuals exclusively in the coaching area with certifications, credentialing and individual coaching work and later expanded to include EQ assessments and executive presence. Moving a head, they added components involving group work. The next endeavour was the creation of a framework on execution where the entire team worked as a group to change behaviour that impacts getting the job done. In the later stages, the team became involved in areas that would create better stick ability to what it delivers.

“Through 2019-20, we are building out a broad set of solutions in organization development and assessments. We are also building

on key concern areas such as diversity in the workplace, employee engagement and retention, visualization and story telling and executive presence. In assessments, we want to help clients make better decisions regarding the current strength of their management teams, and those they want to hire,” she informs.

“Through 2019-20, we are building out a broad set of solutions in organization development and assessments. We are also building on key concern areas such as diversity in the workplace, employee engagement and retention, visualization and story telling and executive presence. In assessments, we want to help clients make better decisions regarding the current strength of their management teams, and those they want to hire,” she informs.

The company started operations in NCR and now has customers across India, ASEAN, Middle East, Europe & North America. “We have a presence in Mumbai and in 2019-20, we intend to extend it into the southern states,” she mentions.

In the years to come, team Inward Focus envisions building and operating a successful business. Consequently, they will be leaning towards new customer acquisition and building solutions for people and businesses that focus on improving them from within. “We will be spending 2019-20 in building out the assessments business, consolidating management effectiveness products and business, structuring our sales excellence practice and bringing on more talent,” Sandhya concludes.