Meet our team

Three people. Every mandate. No handovers.

Most executive search companies sell you a partner and staff you with an associate. At ASTC, the founders run the search briefing, mapping, approach, assessment and offer. Here is exactly who you get.

Founder & Director · Mumbai

Dinesh Arya

A CV tells you where someone has been. It never tells you whether they can run the place.

Dinesh Arya Co-Founded ASTC in 2013 after a career spent inside the industries the firm now recruits for. An engineering graduate of IIT Bombay, he spent over five decades in manufacturing and executive search — running operations and businesses long before he advised anyone on who should run theirs.

That operating background is why clients route sales, marketing, manufacturing and general management mandates to him. He assesses a candidate the way a general manager would: can this person hold a plant together in a bad quarter, carry a distributor network, or take a P&L from ₹200 crore to ₹600 crore without breaking the team that got it there?

His key competence lies in Sales & Marketing, Manufacturing and General Management, and his last assignment was with Boyden Global Executive Search.

He has been a visiting faculty for MBA programs in Pune and Mumbai on subjects like Industrial Marketing and Strategic Management. He has lived and worked in Mumbai, Pune, Japan and USA, in his career. He has a knack of selecting the right talent in various line and staff functions from R&D, Sales, Finance to CXO levels. He believes that the right "life orientation" combined with functional expertise, grit and value-centric approach can convert into great performance.

IIT BombayEngineering graduate

50+ yearsIndustry & search experience

2013Co-Founded ASTC

Manufacturing & operations
General management
Sales & marketing leadership
Chemicals
Auto

Founder & Director · Mumbai

Dushyant Arya

The best candidate for your role has never opened a job portal. Reaching them is the entire job.

Dushyant Arya Co-Founded ASTC 2013. He brings 22 years across search experience, talent acquisition, automotive sales and business development. He owns search strategy, market mapping and the confidential approach the part of the work that decides whether a shortlist contains four real options or four available ones.

His speciality is passive talent: senior leaders who are performing well, are not in the market, and do not return recruiter calls. Reaching them takes a credible first conversation about their business rather than a role pitch, and a track record they can check before they take the meeting.

He leads most of the firm's C-level searches across sectors pan India, including confidential replacements. He works directly with promoters, boards and investors on leadership transitions.

22 yearsIndustry & search experience

MBA & Ex GEQualification & Experience

2013Co-Founded ASTC

C-suite search
Confidential mandates
Market mapping
Consumer & FMCG
Real estate
Chemicals
General Management
Supply Chain

Partner — EMEA · London

Carl Bretherton

Cross-border searches fail on culture far more often than they fail on capability.

Carl Bretherton leads ASTC's EMEA practice from London. A first-class honours graduate, he has spent 30 years in executive search and recruitment, including time with a FTSE 250 business and one of the world's five largest global search firms.

He handles mandates across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the cross-border work that matters most to ASTC's Indian clients: European groups building leadership teams in India, and Indian groups appointing their first leaders abroad.

The large-firm background matters for method — structured competency assessment, disciplined research, rigorous referencing — and the boutique setting matters for delivery, because the partner who takes the brief stays on the search.

30 yearsSearch experience

LondonEMEA base

FTSE 250Prior in-house experience

EMEA mandates
Cross-border search
Board appointments
Industrial
Consumer

How we're set up

Small on purpose.

We cap the number of live mandates so that both founders can stay personally involved in each one. It means we occasionally turn work down, and it means the research behind your shortlist is done by people who have run businesses not by a research desk working from a job description.

Talk to Dushyant See the method

Client references

ASTC took the time to truly understand our organization, culture and business, and helped define a profile that was right not just for our current stage, but for the several-fold growth we are targeting.

Jayen Modi — MD Advisor (former MD), Baerlocher

ASTC helped set up the Pidilite category team between 2015 and 2020 five category heads. They have delivered every time I have put them to the test.

Vivek Sharma former CMO, Pidilite

ASTC was instrumental in building senior sales leadership for the 200-acre Charoli World City, Pune, from scratch.

Arvind Jain — Managing Director, Pride Group

Start here

Tell us the role. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm for it.

A first conversation takes about 30 minutes and costs nothing. You'll leave with a view of the market for that role the talent pools, a realistic compensation band, and how long the search should take whether or not you appoint us.

Start a search Call +91 96195 15919

01
You send the role

The title, the reporting line and why the seat is open. Two paragraphs is enough to start.
02
We come back within a day

With a first read on the market: who exists, what they cost, how long it should take.
03
You decide

No proposal deck, no pursuit calls. If we're not the right firm for this one, we'll say so.