- Current role
- Managing Partner
- Company
- Kestrel Advisory
- Experience
- 25 years
- Industry
- Professional Services
- Based
- Mumbai
About
Nikhil Rao became managing partner of Kestrel Advisory in 2025, elected by the partnership for a four-year term. The firm has about 700 consultants and works predominantly with Indian industrial and financial services clients.
His platform to the partnership was narrow and unpopular in parts: reduce the firm’s reliance on a small number of large retainer clients, which he argued had made Kestrel comfortable and unable to say no. Two of the firm’s ten largest accounts have since been allowed to lapse.
Rao spent fifteen years in the firm’s industrials practice and has continued to serve two clients personally, which he says is the only reliable way for a managing partner to know what the work is actually like.
Leadership perspective
- Why let large accounts go?
- Because a firm that cannot afford to lose a client cannot advise it. We had two relationships where the honest recommendation would have shrunk the engagement, and we kept not making it.
- Should a managing partner still serve clients?
- Two, no more. Otherwise you are running a professional services firm on the basis of what partners tell you in a meeting about how the work is going, which is not information.