Minal Srinivasan spent 17 years building businesses for everyone else. Then she turned that same ferocity toward something that was entirely, unapologetically her own.

By AboutHer

There is a particular kind of woman who makes you sit up straighter the moment she starts talking. Not because she is loud, or grand, or performing for the room. But because every word she says has clearly been lived before it was spoken. Minal Srinivasan is that kind of woman.

She is the Managing Director of Kesari Infrabuild Pvt. Ltd., an environmental consultancy and sustainable infrastructure firm. She is also a certified executive coach, a doctoral candidate at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, an abstract artist, a voracious reader, and a woman who has practiced yoga every day for over 25 years. On paper, she sounds like several people. In conversation, she is entirely, unmistakably one.

When she sat down with AboutHer, the first thing she said that stopped us in our tracks was not about sustainability or leadership or the infrastructure sector. It was this.

“If you’re scared of the pain of failure, then wait till you experience the pain of regret.”

It is the kind of line that lands differently depending on where you are in your life. For some women, it will feel like a warning. For others, it will feel like permission.

The Many Lanes

Most women are told to find their lane and stay in it. Minal has had at least four: education, talent management, executive coaching, and now environmental infrastructure. She built businesses across more than 20 geographies in her first role alone, working across India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and several others before deciding she needed to understand the Indian market up close. She then moved into talent management at a boutique firm, then to the Indian School of Business where she worked in executive education, before eventually joining her husband’s environmental infrastructure business, Kesari Infrabuild.

When asked whether she ever saw all this movement as restlessness, she paused. Then she smiled.

“I think the shift in my professions is probably just an extrapolation of who I am as a human being. The curiosity in me propels me to explore different dimensions. And maybe five years from now I’ll be doing something else entirely. I’m all game for that.”

What she is describing is not restlessness. It is compounding. Each chapter added something the next one needed. The international business gave her adaptability and the understanding that what is a floor for one person is a ceiling for another. The talent management work gave her the principles of organisational development. ISB gave her strategic thinking. And all of it, every year, every geography, every room she had to prove herself in, became the arsenal she brought to KIPL.

The Only Woman in the Room

The environmental infrastructure sector is not an easy place to walk into as a woman. Minal does not pretend otherwise. She recalls clients who would direct questions to her husband even when the project was hers to deliver. She remembers arriving at a site for a 10-acre Miyawaki forest project and learning later that people had asked, in disbelief, whether she was really the one responsible.

She took it with what she calls not a pinch of salt but a backful of it.

“Women don’t get things on a platter. We just don’t. So I said, if going the extra mile is what it takes, then fine. That extra mile is just going to make me better.”

And it did. She pursued an advanced MBA in infrastructure from ISB specifically to build domain authority in a field where she was starting from scratch. She focused relentlessly on outcomes and results. Today, she says, her voice is taken as a voice of the industry. Thought leadership, in her world, was not given. It was earned.

But she is quick to point out that the problem begins much earlier than the glass ceiling most people talk about.

“Breaking the glass ceiling is the next step. I think women need to get out of the sticky ground first.”

The sticky ground is impostor syndrome. It is the self-doubt that keeps women from even attempting the climb. It is the internal narrative that says you are not quite ready, not quite enough, not quite deserving. Minal believes that before anything else, that is what has to go.

Resilience Is Not a Survival Kit

One of the most striking things Minal said in the entire conversation was about the quality women most consistently underestimate in themselves. Not ambition. Not intelligence. Not even courage. It was this.

“The transformative power of resilience and emotional depth that women have. People take that as a survival kit. I want to tell every woman: that is not your survival kit. That is your leadership superpower.”

She is not speaking in abstractions. She has watched it in the women she has coached, and she has lived it herself. The ability to hold complexity, to stay empathetic under pressure, to build trust through relatability, these are not soft skills in Minal’s vocabulary. They are strategic assets, and the women who learn to deploy them as such are the ones who build organisations that last.

Also Read: Her Money, Her Rules

The Artist in the Boardroom

Minal is also an abstract artist. She designs her own office spaces. She writes academic papers and blogs. She keeps returning to Leonardo da Vinci as her north star, a man who moved freely between the rational and the creative and saw no contradiction between the two.

Has she ever felt pressure to hide the creative parts of herself in professional spaces?

Her answer was an emphatic no.

“Nothing works in isolation. This world is all about interconnectedness. The creative fuel I get from my art, I apply directly to my work. Building a business is itself a form of creation.”

It is a philosophy that has shaped how she runs her company, how she designs physical workspaces for her team, how she thinks about people development. For Minal, the artist and the entrepreneur are not two different women. They are the same one, expressing herself on different canvases.

Her Terms

Joining a family business as a woman carries its own particular set of invisible complications. There are assumptions about your role, your authority, the weight your voice carries. Minal walked into Kesari Infrabuild with 17 years of corporate experience and an MBA from ISB, and still encountered moments where someone found reasons to look past her.

What she did with those moments is instructive. She did not fight them directly. She reimagined the business entirely.

From the day she joined, she saw a gap in the market that no one else had addressed: there was no single environmental infrastructure service provider in India. Consultancy firms were doing consultancy. Water treatment companies were doing water treatment. No one was doing all of it, end to end. She set about building that.

In five years, KIPL has more than doubled its bottom line, established new revenue streams, and diversified its client base. The authority she now holds inside the business was not inherited. It was constructed, project by project, result by result.

The Deliberation Before the Leap

When Sang asked what was really happening inside Minal during the long deliberation before she took the leap into entrepreneurship, her answer was not what anyone expected. It was not about the sector, or the opportunity, or even the fear.

It was about her son.

He was small at the time, and she knew she did not want a full-time job that would take her away from him. The question she was really wrestling with was not whether to become an entrepreneur, but what kind of life she wanted to build, and whether she could build one that held all the things she valued at once. In the end, three things tipped the decision: the opportunity was enormous, she could see it clearly. She felt equipped to pursue it. And every time in her life that she had stepped outside her comfort zone, it had been the right call.

“Resilience is forged in fire, not in comfort. I’ve always known that. So I said, if I have to build something real, discomfort is where I have to begin.”

KEY TAKEWAYS

From Minal’s journey, for every woman sitting at her own crossroads.

01. Your many chapters are not a liability. They are a compounding asset. Every skill you gathered in one life will serve you in the next one.

02. Resilience and emotional depth are not things that help you survive. They are things that help you lead. Name them as such.

03. The sticky ground is the first thing to address, not the glass ceiling. Belief in yourself is not a luxury. It is the entry point.

04. Authority in a new domain is built through knowledge and results. There are no shortcuts, but the path is straightforward.

05. Your creative self and your professional self are not competing for space. They are feeding each other. Let them.

06. The pain of failure fades. The pain of regret does not. When in doubt, try.

Listen to the full conversation with Minal Srinivasan on the AboutHer podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms.