From Bottleneck To Bigger Vision: How Mihir Sanganee Scaled By Stepping Back
For many entrepreneurs, growth creates a familiar problem: the business gets bigger, but so does their personal involvement in every decision.
That was the position Mihir Sanganee, Co-Founder of Designsmith in the UAE, found himself in before joining Strategic Coach.
“I was trying to do too many things,” Mihir says. “Operations, strategy, marketing, growth, expansion—I was putting my foot into areas that weren’t really my space.”
The result was frustration, burnout, and a growing sense that his energy was being spent in the wrong places. Although there were capable people around him, Mihir found himself micromanaging projects and stepping into details that didn’t need his involvement.
“I’m not an operations person,” he says. “I’m a big thinker—and then I should be asked to leave.”
That realization became a turning point.
Through Strategic Coach, Mihir began to see where he was the bottleneck. Instead of trying to control every output, he started focusing on the bigger picture: the company’s direction, growth strategy, and the tools his team needed to succeed.
He also gained the space to think. Travelling to London for workshops gave him time away from the day-to-day demands of the business—time to reflect, reset, and return with a clearer sense of what mattered most.
“The conversations in the room, the time to think, and the strategies you build on—that changes the way you deliver,” he says.
One of the biggest shifts was learning to double down on his strengths while allowing others to do the same. Mihir stepped more fully into growth and scaling, while his brother focused on operations—an area where he naturally excelled.
That separation of roles created momentum.
By the time Mihir entered his second year in Strategic Coach, Designsmith had grown by almost 5x. The team evolved too. As the expectations of the business changed, some people grew with the company and others moved on. The standards were higher, the vision was larger, and the direction was clearer.
Mihir also launched a new business—his fifth—and began approaching it with a very different mindset.
But the results weren’t only commercial.
“I can actually take time off from the business now,” he says. “Time at home is sacred and comes first.”
Mihir began using Wednesdays differently, creating space for conversations, reflection, relationships, and personal grounding. These weren’t traditional Free Days in the strictest sense, but they gave him breathing room and helped him reconnect with the parts of life that had started to suffer under the weight of constant business demands.
His relationship with his wife strengthened. Time with family became more protected. And the pressure to be everywhere in the business began to fall away.
For Mihir, the tools from Strategic Coach didn’t just live in worksheets or workshop notes. They began shaping the way he communicated, led, and made decisions.
“The way I structure conversations changed. The way I write messages to the team changed. The way I clarify things changed,” he says.
His biggest lesson? Strategic Coach is not simply about business growth. It’s about scaling your life and your business together.
“It’s for people who want to scale both,” Mihir says. “It’s not a one-to-one coaching platform where someone holds you accountable. That accountability has to come from within.”
It is also not, in his view, for entrepreneurs who believe they already have all the answers.
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, this isn’t the room for you,” he says. “And it’s not a room for naysayers.”
For ambitious entrepreneurs in the Middle East, Mihir’s story offers a powerful reminder: growth does not always come from doing more. Sometimes, it comes from stepping back, thinking bigger, and allowing the right people to take ownership of the right things.
Mihir will be sharing more of his story as a panelist on Scary Times Success, a live Strategic Coach webinar created for entrepreneurs in the Middle East.
