How He Works
Every engagement conducted directly. Months before anybody sits together. Nothing repeated to anybody.
Every engagement is conducted by Praveen Saanker directly. Advisory, coaching, Jyotisha, Vastu Shastra and Numerology alike.
The first call is not passed on
There are no associates and no bench. Nobody takes an intake call, no questionnaire is sent, and nothing is handed to a colleague after the interesting part. The person who answers the first time is the person in the room at the end, and the person still reachable a year later.
The problem is rarely the one named
Four to six months of private conversations before anybody sits together. Each person is seen several times, and some of those conversations run for hours. Not only the ones with shares. The wife, the mother, the in-married. They move a decision without ever being in the meeting, so they get the same hours as the shareholders. Those months are not preparation for a document. They are for finding out whether the thing the family is arguing about is the thing actually in the way. Often it is not.
What one person says stays with one person
Each person is seen alone, and what one of them says is not carried to another. That includes between a husband and a wife, and between two brothers. It is not summarised, not characterised, and not hinted at in a meeting. Not at the time, and not afterwards. There is a price for holding that line and he pays it rather than the family does. What it costs a document is set out at Governance.
He does not treat anybody
The work is advisory, coaching and mentoring. It is not therapy and not counselling. That is a limit on what he will do, not a preference about words. Sometimes a person needs a therapist rather than a coach. When that is the case he says so once, privately, to that person, and what they do about it is theirs to decide. He does not raise it again and he does not tell the family. The engagement carries on while that person decides, because holding the family's work back would turn it into pressure on one of them.
The family is the client
He is retained by the family as a whole. Not by the person who made the introduction, and not by whoever is paying the bill. Not by the person whose position is holding everything up, either. That person gets the same hours and the same confidence as everybody else, and no more say in the outcome.
He will not say who should lead
He runs the process and takes no position on the result. He will not say which son should run the company, or how the shares should be divided. He forms a private view and keeps it. A family handed an answer by an outsider has not agreed on anything, and reopens it within the year. What the work produces is smaller than agreement, and it is what these families come for. In one meeting, the fact all of them already knew is said out loud, by him. It is the fact none of them could afford to be the one to say, and now none of them has to.
Wealth is held rather than owned
The frame behind the counsel is Upanishadic, and two ideas from it carry most of the weight. The first is stewardship. A man is answerable for what he does with what he holds, and it passes on whether or not he has decided how. The second is dharma. Obligation is what other people place on a man. Dharma is what his position asks of him when nobody is watching, and the two pull apart more often than families expect.
Karma is consequence, not fate
It is not punishment and it is not destiny. It is what follows from what was done, and from how it was done. What a father built reaches his son as an asset and as a weight in the same hand. The son did not choose the pairing and cannot separate the two. None of this is quoted at anybody. It decides which question gets asked, and when.
He leaves, and it holds without him
Four meetings, sometimes six. Then once a year. Then a telephone call. If a family still needs him in the room for the forum to work, the forum is not finished. What that handover looks like inside a family is set out at Succession.
Where to go from here
The Work. Nine situations, and what is done about each.
The Practice. What the practice is, and what it does not do.