Speaking Small

I’ve come to realise that most of us grow up mastering the art of speaking small. Not because we lack ambition, but because somewhere in childhood we learned a quiet rule: don’t say anything that might make you look foolish later. So we talk in safe units… half-dreams, modest targets, things we’re already confident of achieving. It feels practical, but over time that habit quietly becomes a ceiling. We end up describing our lives, not shaping them.

Entrepreneurship shook that out of me. It was the first world I entered where people didn’t just dream bigger — they spoke bigger. They talked about goals as if they were already sitting on the table. Not as a performance, not as bravado, but as a way of telling their mind, their team, and the world: this is where we are heading, come catch up.

Think of Kennedy announcing the moonshot. He didn’t say, “We hope… we wish… we’ll try.” He spoke with a strange kind of finality, as if the universe had already signed the contract. And that tone — that certainty — pulled an entire nation into a higher orbit. Leaders, no matter the field, carry this same quality. They don’t wait to feel confident before they speak; the speaking itself creates the confidence.

Over time I realised something uncomfortable: the moment you declare a goal out loud, you place yourself in a vulnerable position. And maybe that’s the point. Because once you say it — truly say it — your mind starts rearranging itself. Ideas appear that never showed up before. The path you couldn’t see suddenly starts revealing itself, one small light at a time. You didn’t get the confidence first; you got the words first. And the confidence followed.

I’ve watched this transformation happen in real people around me. The day someone says, “I’m doing doubling my revenue this month,” the room shifts. There’s surprise, maybe even disbelief — but something else too. A new expectation forms, both in them and around them. Others start assuming it’s possible. The person saying it stands a little taller, even if they’re terrified inside. It’s not arrogance; it’s courage wearing a thin coat.

And then, of course, there are the reminders that sometimes children hold the wisdom we keep misplacing. A 14-year-old I know recently made a vision board filled with goals written in the past tense — Got the internship. Scored the A’s. Held my first art exhibition. Not “I hope to,” not “maybe someday.” It was all stated as though life had already handed it to her. There was no hesitation in her language, no fear of being wrong. Just a clean, bold claim on her future.

It struck me: adults hesitate because we’ve lived long enough to collect disappointments. Children haven’t yet learned to be afraid of their own voice. And maybe that’s what we’re really recovering when we learn to speak our goals again — a return to that uncomplicated courage.

So if you ever find yourself stuck, unclear, or quietly shrinking your dreams, ask just one thing: What am I afraid to say out loud? Because more often than not, the missing link isn’t strategy. It’s speech. The future doesn’t always begin with a plan. Sometimes it begins with a sentence — spoken boldly, before you’re ready, before you know how — and everything else learns to follow.

The AI Coach

People often say, “I’m not sure I can do this… it feels like too much work.”

But work has never been the real fear. People handle hard things all the time — family, jobs, illness, uncertainty. What unsettles them isn’t the effort. It’s the isolation that effort usually comes with.

And this is where app-based or AI-driven solutions quietly fall short. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack human presence — the one ingredient effort depends on.

Apps can remind you to walk. A coach asks why you didn’t — and helps you fix the reason.

Apps can give you a meal plan. A coach checks your fridge, your schedule, your stress levels — and adjusts the plan to your life.

Apps can send automated notifications. A coach sends a message because they remembered you had a tough day coming up.

This is the difference most people underestimate.

The difference isn’t in the data.

The difference is in the relationship.

If information alone created transformation, everyone would be healthy by now. Google has enough advice to fix every problem, yet people still feel stuck — not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of companionship. An app can tell you what to do. But it can’t sense the fear behind your questions, the shame behind your slip-ups, or the loneliness behind your “I’ll start again tomorrow.”

And that’s the real question hidden inside “I’m not sure I can do this.”

It’s not a question about effort.

It’s a question about support.

Because with an app, you carry your doubts alone.

With a coach, your doubts become part of the process — something to work through, not hide from.

In the end, transformation isn’t technical. It isn’t a list of steps or macros. It’s emotional. It’s human. It’s two people walking together so the burden never becomes unbearable.

Apps guide the body. Coaches guide the human inside the body.

And that’s why coach-led change endures — it dissolves the one fear no algorithm has learned to solve:

The fear of walking alone

Recognizing Value

There’s something subtle that happens in service professions — especially in coaching. We become so familiar with the work we do that we stop seeing how much of ourselves is embedded in it. Not in the obvious places, like the plan or the protocol, but in the quiet, everyday gestures that no one else notices.

A client sends a photo of a half-eaten meal, and you instinctively know what went wrong. Someone messages at 10 p.m. saying they’re craving sugar, and you talk them through the moment instead of ignoring it till morning. You remember their routine, their challenges, the things they shared casually but that mattered to them. You hold all of this — their doubts, their momentum, their fragile motivation — as if it were your own responsibility.

And strangely, we forget that this level of attention is rare.

The world has already placed a high value on focused expertise. Doctors bill for a few minutes of consultation. Dermatologists charge heavily for follow-ups. Trainers set fixed rates for sessions whether the client shows up or not. Nobody questions it, because the value has been normalised. You pay for the container, not the guarantee.

But coaching operates differently. It’s not a container — it’s companionship. And companionship is harder to price, because it comes from a very human place. We don’t measure our care in minutes or appointments. We measure it in desire — the desire to see someone succeed, to see them change their own story.

This is why so many coaches hesitate when they quote their fee. Not because the price is unreasonable, but because they’re unaware of the invisible work they’re offering. They compare their number to the plan on paper, not to the life they help someone reclaim. They forget that clients aren’t paying for information; they’re paying for the presence that keeps them accountable, the guidance that stops them from repeating old mistakes, the steady voice that helps them stay with the process when the process gets uncomfortable.

And when you look at it that way, the question shifts. It’s no longer, “How do I justify my price?” It becomes, “Why did I assume my work needed justification at all?”

Because value doesn’t come from the length of a session or the sophistication of a chart. It comes from the heart and discipline you pour into someone’s transformation — the kind of effort that can’t be outsourced, automated, or easily replaced.

When you recognise that, pricing stops feeling like a defence.

It feels like telling the truth

Profit = Self Image

We’ve all had that moment where someone hears a price and instantly freezes. It doesn’t matter whether you say 90000, 60000 or 45000 — the reaction is the same. The eyebrows lift, the breath tightens, and the familiar line appears: “I’ll think about it… maybe after two months.”

And for a long time, we assume the number is the problem. We think if we had said a smaller amount, the person would have felt different. But if you watch closely, the size of the number rarely changes the size of the reaction. Because the truth is uncomfortable but liberating: a price feels like a bomb only when it arrives without context.

I’ve seen this play out with PCOD cases, IVF journeys, even something as simple as stubborn acne. A couple tries for years, visits doctor after doctor, and finally reaches the word nobody wants to hear — IVF. One cycle costs around 2.5 lakhs, and there’s no guarantee the first cycle works. Or the second. Or the third. The emotional toll alone is heavy, but the financial cost? Lakh after lakh, often with nothing to show for it except more fear and more fatigue.

Now imagine someone already carrying that weight. Already spending that much. Already hurting that much. For them, is ninety thousand really a bomb? Or was it a bomb only because we dropped it without showing them the landscape they’re actually standing in?

We forget that people are already paying a price. For the girl with hormonal acne, it’s fifteen or twenty thousand scattered across dermatologists, tests, creams, treatments she had to throw away because her skin reacted badly. For the woman with PCOD, it’s years of medication, missed cycles, emotional breakdowns, and the slow erosion of hope. When you look at that honestly, the program fee — whatever it is — isn’t the real expense. The real expense is the life they’re living right now.

That’s why context matters. Not as a sales trick, but as a kind of compassion. When we ask what they’ve tried, what they’ve spent, what they’re afraid of, we’re not interrogating them — we’re helping them see the full picture. Most people don’t make decisions based on information; they make decisions based on clarity. And clarity only comes when someone slows the moment down enough to say, “Let’s look at what’s actually happening.”

There’s a deeper layer too. When we rush to the price, we’re often revealing our own self-image. One coach quotes ninety, another quotes sixty, a third quotes forty-five — not because the value changed, but because their confidence did. Meanwhile the client, regardless of the number, still feels the same confusion because they still don’t understand the context.

Context is oxygen. In conversations, in relationships, in health, in selling anything that can genuinely help someone. When the story is clear, the price becomes grounding instead of frightening.

And maybe the quiet lesson beneath all of this is simple:

People aren’t scared of the cost.

They’re scared of paying for the wrong thing… again.

Listening for References

One of the quiet shifts that happens when you stop thinking like a service provider and start thinking like an entrepreneur is this: you stop looking for clients, and you start noticing connectors. The world suddenly looks different. Every person you meet carries a small universe of relationships you’ve never accessed. And most people don’t even realize the value of the worlds they already move in.

A real estate agent, for example, isn’t just someone helping families find homes. He meets dozens of people every week — people in transition, people under pressure, people talking about their lives more openly than they planned. A makeup artist meets people before big moments. A school administrator meets parents navigating stress. Even your neighbourhood shopkeeper hears more stories in a day than most people hear in a month.

But we often dismiss these people. We assume they’re not “our audience.” We forget that business doesn’t grow in straight lines; it grows through networks — through the person who knows a person who knows another person who needs exactly what you offer.

The art is simple: sit with people, listen to their stories, appreciate what they do, understand their world a little. Not to sell — but to build a bridge. When you show genuine curiosity, people naturally want to reciprocate. And when they trust you, they remember you. Not for your pitch, but for your presence.

Partnerships aren’t built in boardrooms. They’re built in casual conversations, everyday encounters, and the courage to say, “If you know someone who needs help in this area, send them my way. Maybe we can grow together.”

Every person you meet is a doorway. Most people walk past the door. Entrepreneurs learn to knock.

All ears...

It’s funny how we grow up believing that the smartest person in the room is the one who speaks the most. The one with the strongest opinions, the quickest answers, the loudest certainty. But anyone who has spent real time observing people eventually discovers the opposite: the real power is in listening.

There’s a reason God gave us one mouth and two ears. Maybe it was a hint. Maybe He was telling us that understanding should always come before speaking. But most of us spend our lives doing the reverse — talking twice as much, listening half as much, and wondering why our conversations feel shallow and our connections feel fragile.

Entrepreneurs, especially the ones who build trust easily, learn a different rhythm. They ask one open-ended question — “How’s life going?” — and then they do something most people can’t: they stay quiet. And in that quiet, people start to unfold. They talk about stress, fears, hopes, the small private battles they’ve been carrying alone. They reveal insights you could never have discovered by talking. They hand you the roadmap to understanding them… without you having to push.

And here’s the paradox: the more they talk, the more they think you are wise. Not because you dazzled them with knowledge, but because you made space for their truth. Listening gives them the rare experience of feeling seen — and people remember the ones who make them feel that way.

In a world full of noise, silence becomes your advantage. The person who listens isn’t quieter; they’re sharper, more aware, more trusted. Sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is simply let someone else speak

“The person who listens holds the real power — not because they know more, but because they understand more.”

Empty Calories, Empty Monies...

I’ve been thinking about this strange thing we do with money. We treat it like fuel, assuming that as long as it keeps us moving, everything must be fine. But just like food, money also comes in two varieties — empty calories and nutritious calories.

Empty calorie money is simple: you do the work, the money comes in, and technically nothing is wrong. You can run, you can function, you can tick off every box of a “productive” life. But somewhere inside, something feels hollow. There’s no meaning, no direction, no sense of being part of something larger than yourself. It’s like eating a big sugary meal — you feel full for a moment, then strangely empty again. You start wondering, “Is this it? Is this what I’m going to do for the next 20 years?”

Nutritious money feels different. It’s not just income; it’s impact. It’s the kind that comes when someone looks you in the eye and says, “My life changed because of you.” When a client sends you a photo, or a message at midnight, or a quiet thank-you that shakes something awake inside you. You sleep deeper on those nights. Not because you earned more, but because you mattered more.

And once you taste that kind of money, it’s hard to go back. It’s hard to chase work that drains you when you’ve experienced work that fills you. Hard to settle for transactions when you’ve felt transformation.

Maybe the real question isn’t “How much did I earn today?” but “What did my earning do to me today?” Did it nourish me? Or did it only keep me running?

Because, in the long run, we don’t just live on money. We live on what it does to our spirit

Being an Entrepreneur

Sometimes I meet wellness coaches who introduce themselves with a quiet apology in their voice. “I’m just getting started,” they say. Or, “I’m still learning the protocols.” And I smile, because I know what they don’t yet see: this work was never about becoming a wellness coach. It was always about becoming an entrepreneur who happens to operate in the domain of wellness.

That shift sounds small on paper, but it changes everything. A wellness coach looks at a client and sees problems to fix — weight, sleep, skin, energy. An entrepreneur sees something different: an outcome to be created. A path to design. A set of skills to refine. Where others say, “This is what I know,” an entrepreneur quietly asks, “What do I need to learn?” There’s a hunger in that question… a kind of restlessness that pushes you to upgrade yourself long before anyone asks you to.

But here’s the part we often miss: entrepreneurship is not built on knowledge alone. It’s built on identity. And identity grows through the less glamorous skills — how you speak to people, how you make them feel, how deeply you listen before offering a single piece of advice. These are the muscles most coaches forget to build. They chase every new nutrition book, every new protocol, every new supplement strategy, hoping it will magically make them successful. It won’t. Not on its own.

Because clients don’t follow information. They follow energy. They follow presence. They follow the person who makes them feel understood, not assessed. The one who asks, “How’s life going?” and actually waits for the answer. Leadership, in many ways, is the emotional atmosphere you create around you — the feeling people carry after a conversation with you.

And that’s why mindset and people skills are not optional extras; they’re the quiet foundation of a thriving coaching practice. The books on leadership, influence, and human connection — those are not for corporate managers. They are for anyone who wants to guide another human being through change. Without that growth, you stay stuck in the identity you started with: employee, student, housewife, technician. You may know the perfect detox, but you won’t know how to lead a person through their own resistance.

The real shift happens the day you stop saying, “I am a wellness coach,” and start feeling, “I run a business that transforms lives.” One is a role. The other is a responsibility. One limits you to information. The other demands that you grow — in confidence, in character, in your capacity to hold people’s stories without rushing to fix them.

And maybe that’s the secret nobody tells you at the beginning: entrepreneurship in wellness isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about becoming the kind of person people trust enough to ask their questions. When that identity clicks, everything else starts to move. The protocols matter, of course. But the person delivering them matters more.

Here are some mandatory books for everyone to go through: How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, How to have power and confidence in dealing with people by Les Giblin, 25 ways to win with people by John Maxwell

Passion is not enough

When we start something new, the reason usually sounds noble — “I’m doing this because I’m passionate about it.” It feels pure, exciting, and full of energy. But that’s also the trap. Because passion, by itself, doesn’t build success. You can be passionate about medicine and still fail as a doctor. You can love flying and never become a great pilot. You can adore teaching and still not run a thriving school. Passion makes you good at the work, but not necessarily good at the system that carries the work.

A job feeds on passion. But a business feeds on consistency, patience, and repetition. When we say, “I love doing this,” we also unknowingly say, “I’ll stop when I no longer love it.” That’s the double-edged sword of passion — it’s emotional, not structural.

Building a business is about doing the same thing so many times that you can teach others to do it. It’s about designing routines, not chasing rushes. It’s about filling forms, answering objections, making follow-up calls, managing people, being misunderstood — and still showing up the next day. The boring parts are the foundation. The beautiful parts just sit on top.

That’s why ventures built only on passion collapse. The moment excitement fades, effort does too. The ones that last are built on a larger understanding: Does this solve a real problem? Does it serve a real need? Are people willing to pay for it? The skill of entrepreneurship is not doing what you love — it’s learning to love what needs to be done.

That means getting good at sales, planning, marketing, people, organisation — and building a thick skin for opinions you never asked for. It means staying steady when others don’t understand what you do. Because that’s where strength is built. Over time, the thing you were passionate about still remains — but it matures. It’s no longer about excitement. It’s about devotion.

Passion is a spark. Discipline is the fire that keeps the house warm. So, don’t build a business around what excites you today. Build it around what will still matter to you when the excitement fades.

The Man(ual)...

Every machine comes with a manual. Even the simplest ones — a toaster, a washing machine — arrive with a small folded booklet that says, “Here’s how it works. Here’s what not to do.”

But when you become a man — when you marry, when you lead a family, when you try to make sense of your own purpose — no such booklet appears. No list of instructions. No index of what to do when fear, doubt, or fatigue creep in. You’re expected to somehow just know.

That thought came alive again for me in one of our Band of Brothers gatherings. As men stood up and shared, I realized we were all saying the same thing in different ways — we’re trying to figure it out as we go. Each of us learning how to lead ourselves first, then our families, and perhaps, one day, others.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe life was never meant to be mastered from a set of steps, but discovered through shared experience. We don’t need someone to hand us the answers — we need spaces where we can ask the real questions aloud.

Perhaps the “manual for men” was never missing. Maybe it was never meant to exist in the first place. Maybe it’s meant to be written in conversation, in brotherhood, in the quiet notes we take from each other’s stories.

Every time we share openly, we add a page to it. Every time we admit we don’t know and still take the next step, we add another.

And one day, when a younger man looks at you and says, “How did you figure all this out?”, you’ll smile — because you’ll know the secret. You didn’t. You just kept showing up, learning, and living your way through it.

That, it turns out, might be the only manual there ever was.

Levels of transaction

There are many levels of a business transaction. The first and lowest level is when you deliver a product or a service for a payment done. Settled, done and dusted. An equal transaction. You got what you paid for.

The second level of transaction is when you deliver what they paid for and then more. There is extra mile and delight. They were made to feel special.

But the highest level of transaction is when you deliver what they paid for…and then you went the extra mile and created delight…but then you did something which made a deposit in their life which they cannot pay for…something that cannot be returned.

And since it can’t be paid or returned, it builds a bond that lasts. Anything that can’t be paid will go into building the bond…

Acceptance (verb)

The first time I read this concept was in the book “The Servant” by James Hunter. Love as a noun is very limited in its purpose in our lives. Because either it exists for someone or something or it doesn’t. And it seems that we can’t do anything about it. How about using it as a verb instead? Love could be something that we “do” or choose to do instead of something that happens “to” us. And that changes everything in our lives and in the lives of people who come in contact with us. Because now we have a choice and it’s no longer a compulsion.

I feel it’s the same thing about “acceptance”. What if we start using it like a verb? Would we be able to give the biggest gift to anyone and everyone in our lives. Because we expect this gift from everyone around us. We want them to accept us as we are - in all our strengths and limitations, weaknesses and shortcomings. But we expect that they change according to how we want them to be. What would happen inside us if we could start accepting everyone as they are…everything around us as it is? Maybe that’s when we will be able to truly change it…something to really think about…

Middle Age Crisis

It’s only something we know as a concept for the first quarter of our lives. Something that happens to the other “middle aged people”. But then as you hit 40 and 45 and beyond, you start getting this feeling of insecurity and know that you are living it. So now, what about it? Should you be proud of the fact that you lived through what everyone lived through? No. Definitely not. Mature people are able to brace for every stimulus and are able to give a response that comes from awareness and thoughtfulness instead of sheer instinctive behaviour. The question you need to ask yourself is this - did you feel life was perfect at any point in time? When you were 6 you wanted to be 13. When you were 13 you wanted to be 18. When you were 18 you wanted to be 25. And even at 25, you wanted to live the life of 45 because you felt you deserved more. Finally, at 45, you want to be 25. And then at 65, you will want to be 45. And 65 when you are 95. The secret is in enjoying the present moment. Because each day is bringing something so unique and so beautiful that it will never come again.

Dinosaur Gupta

I don’t think dinosaurs sensed that they were about to vanish as a race. If the thought had crossed their mind, they would have done something about it. I think they kept thinking it’s becoming more and more uncomfortable and something doesn’t seem right, never to guess that the doomsday was coming. A rare one here and there might have felt it deep in his gut that something was definitely not right but then the others who were overconfident of their size, their power, their dominance might have shrugged him off. The weather kept changing and before they knew it crossed the limit which was their death knell. And they fried inside out. The same is true for us humans as well. We get used to our successes. Our ego. Our momentum from the past. We ignore the warning signs. We ignore the nagging feeling that it’s not going the way it should. Because we don’t “want” it to change. And before we know, we’re history.

PS - so is there a way to avoid it? Yes! Don’t be afraid of changing. Period.

The Entrepreneurship Scale

This is my invention. I believe that most people fall somewhere on an entrepreneurship scale of 0-10. At zero are people who are in the E quadrant (have a job) and are so thankful and so happy about it that they can’t thank their stars enough. They are so elated about it, they want to just enjoy the feeling and the money. They think they have arrived. 

At 10 are people who are “pure entrepreneurs” - the ones who have built enterprises and empires like Dhirubhai Ambanis and JRD Tatas and Jeff Bezos’s of the world and the countless others whose names we have not yet heard but they had the guts to believe in “all or none” - they are willing to go out on a limb and risk it all and don’t have fear of landing on the road if it doesn’t work. They have the guts to borrow money, wager on a new idea which might or might not work, quit their jobs and follow their heart. 

Both these people are very happy in their life - the zeros and the tens. They both are following their hearts and passionate about what they are doing. The problem is with the 4s and the 5s and 6s which is essentially people like me. Who are frustrated to no end with working for someone and not having a vision that they can pursue. Who cannot see themselves doing that for the rest of their lives, running the rat race, 9-9 for 40 years. At the same time who don’t have the guts to leave the security of their profession to pursue something different. Who don’t have an original idea that they can own and be passionate about or even stand up for and prove. They live a life of quiet desperation. Reading every article out there and watching every movie on entrepreneurship and every story about someone who is pursuing their dreams and wondering when they will be able to do something like that. When they will be able to break free from the rut of traffic and status reports and boredom and politics. That’s where I was. 

Mentorship : 270 degrees

The thing about mentorship is that it covers your blind spots. We can all see the 270 degrees behind us, but the rest is always a blind spot for us which we want someone to watch out for us. And that is what mentorship does. It’s like walking through a minefield. If you can just walk in the footsteps of someone who has walked before you, there’s a high chance you won’t blow yourself up. Most people have spiritual mentors, financial mentors, mentors at work and so on. But the problem is that most of the time their lives themselves are out of balance. They are so passionate about the one thing they are good at that you run a real risk of duplicating their life along with all of it’s imbalances. 

When choosing a mentor, it’s important to begin with the end in mind. Who is there around you whose package of life is something that you would like to have? Who is there who can think about your “well being” in all areas of life instead of just a one dimensional path? Unfortunately, most people treat life as separate boxes and try to make sure they don’t mix together. The work package is separate, the relationship package separate, the spiritual life package separate, the health package separate. They work on 1 or 2 of them but ignore the rest which doesn’t work since they affect each other greatly. Massive success in one at the cost of other almost always leads to pain and grief in the long run. 

I was very fortunate to find a mentor whose life was in balance on all fronts - wealthy on the money side, conscious of health and habits, solid marriage - basically they had the fruit on the tree, and were living a life I didn’t mind living in. That is an appropriate choice of mentor. Everyone else can only be a coach - they can coach us on certain skills or areas of life. A football coach will be worthy of following on the field but might not be worthy of following off the field. And that differentiation is very important. When we start confusing a coach with a mentor, we might unknowingly start picking up habits and attitudes which might be difficult to change in the long run. 

But what if a mentor is not in physical reach for whatever reasons? Chase them, become worthy of their mentorship and earn it. And if none of it works, keep following them and keep catching the nuggets from wherever they are. It’s a worthwhile chase for a great life. The joys of being mentored by someone and the feeling of security knowing that someone like that is looking out for you itself is worth it. 

Entrepreneurship for the “Common man”

Whenever we decide to mentor someone for entrepreneurship, the first thing we like to do is ask them to go our and research the options in the market first. The problem is most people we work with are trying to move from the E quadrant (employee quadrant) to the B quadrant (Business quadrant). Their worldview is that of the E world but their eyes are set for the B world. The two worlds are poles apart. We can see the shiny successes of the B world because we have a romanticised idea of business and entrepreneurship which comes from movies like “Guru” and “The Social Network” and most recently “Sui Dhaga”. The portrayals are a 100% accurate but the problem is that the story from nothing to everything gets done in less than 3 hours. And it’s difficult to expand each phase shown to 10 and 15 years which is how it actually pans out in real life. Like they say “overnight success usually takes 10 years”. 

The options that the “common man” who is a professional like me is considering are not practically infinite. Common man being defined as the person who does not get a radical, innovative or technically unique idea like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Elon Musk and is not exceptionally gifted with a different worldview and the power to shape the world like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. And that covers most of us out there who will perhaps ever read this article. And if you are one of us, then, before you explore a business option of opening a Restaurant/Cafe or source some product from China and do online sales or open a services based business like in health or beauty or grooming or housekeeping or cleaning or maintenance or open a boutique or buy a ice cream/pizza/bagels franchise or try one of the few legit Network Distribution models like through Amway, ask the following questions:

1. How much is the startup investment that it will take - for example for a food stall it could be anywhere from 3-5lacs or a restaurant could be 15-20lacs or franchise could be 40-50lacs or a services based business could take 2-5lacs or a network distribution model could be 10-15k and so on

2. How much will be the running cost monthly for the business - this the money you need every single month on the 1st of the month to pay for the salaries, rent, utilities, EMIs, royalties, taxes etc. This money is a fixed cost every month irrespective of how much revenue you do or don’t generate that month from your business. If your business doesn’t perform…well..you pay from your pocket for it.

3. What is the break even time for the business idea you are considering - for most businesses that means can you just cover the monthly expenses of your business? Most of the time it doesn’t mean recovering the initial investment. That is considered “cost” of business which might never be recovered most of the time. 

4. How much time commitment will be needed to set it up and then to run it on a day to day basis? Can it be run part time with your full time profession or will you have to move full time into it?

5. Can you identify a mentor in the domain who has successfully walked the path before - such guidance is invaluable because you can save yourself the pain of learning everything by yourself and stand on the shoulders of giants so to say.

6. It’s easy to start something but are you aware of the effort it will take to sustain and run the business in the long run? What are the risks and how do you close it down if you have to?

7. Is the business scalable? Most businesses can hardly make any profit from a single unit because most of the profit goes in creating the systems itself. Profit can only be made if the model can be duplicated and scaled up. Scaling up almost always means multiplied investment and risk but if a business is not scalable it can become really frustrating in the future. 

The Entrepreneurial Dilemma

My job is meeting people day in and day out. And most of these meetings are to discuss and talk about how to make the transition from the employee world into the business world. The software guy is almost always thinking about opening up a software company or an app development company. The artist is thinking about starting an art school or an art gallery or an art based website. The musician is thinking about opening up a music school and a teacher about starting their own coaching centre. These are obvious choices because the only things we are confident about are things we have done for many many years and accumulated experience and expertise in. Here is how the story typically starts for most ambitious professionals. 

A teacher hates being employed at a school or a college and feels being taken advantage of, what with being made to teach beyond the initial agreement and also participate in the marketing/administrative activities of the institution. The obvious option he thinks of is to start taking tuitions and ultimately convert it to a home based coaching class. Obviously the income jumps from anywhere around 30k a month to say around 1 lac a month but now he is busier than ever before. Now he has a job during the day and another job during the evenings and weekends as well - one he has created for himself and cannot run away from because it’s “his own job”. And most of the time this becomes the end of the entrepreneurial bug…so difficult to handle that he cannot think of expanding it further. 

Soon he realises that his teaching is so good that everyone wants it but he has no more space left in his living room and dining room to expand. He also wants to cater to other subjects which he is not an expert in and ends up recruiting a few more teachers to cover the ground. Obviously now he will need to rent a room for doing this. Not an issue because the returns justify the additional investment. The problem is the lean periods where not enough students come in but the salary and rent stays the same. So he starts looking for a marketing person who can advertise his class and create a bigger funnel. The marketing guy does that but he can’t close all the inquiries coming in. So the next step is a team of sales guys who can negotiate and close every deal. All seems to be going good and the trickle has turned to a flood even in lean times. The only problem being the good times when they can’t handle the demand anymore and so they start recruiting more teachers and a bigger facility with 5-6 rooms in it, which is difficult to manage and so enters an admin guy who can handle the bills and the maintenance and the cleaning and fixing. But since this requires some sort of administration as well, the next logical step is to hire an HR and a Finance person to make sure all these employees stay happy and the money doesn’t get messed up as well. 

The brand is becoming a power player and the government departments always want a share of the pie - so here comes a special guy who will handle Govt Affairs. Obviously older players in the market don’t like the new kid coming on the block and spoiling the show and there are legal issues that start arising for which an in-house legal counsel is the only one to be trusted. The number of teachers are increasing fast and the turnover is high too and to maintain the standards there has to be a Training department which keeps the quality of teaching high. 

This is called a “Business”. Unfortunately the only problem is our teacher is actually a teacher and not a business owner. He actually loves to teach students hungry for knowledge but what he is dealing with 95% of the time now is not students but these various department heads of the “business” he has set up, trying to resolve their issues and giving them direction. It’s not long before he lies in the bed one night thinking about his purpose of life and his real passion and where it all started and where it ended up. The stress is not worth it; the work no longer enjoyable; the cause and the path lost somewhere in the din of the day to day management and expansion. 

The story is no different for the rest of the professionals either. The doctor’s hospital, the artist’s school, the engineer’s consultancy, the accountant’s practice, the player’s academy…and unfortunately when I meet these successful people, I hear two stories. I hear a story for the first 30 minutes which beams with pride and joy of success but then another story which opens up after 30 minutes which talks about stress induced lifestyle diseases and a quiet desperation. Where did it all go wrong? In my opinion, the biggest missing link in all these cases is mentorship. The guidance of someone who had walked the same path before them and who could have helped them preempt this dilemma because they would have seen it coming 10 years down the line. 

EI or AI...

Every single day at least one person comes and brings up the subject of AI in our conversations. AI or Artificial Intelligence was science fiction less than a decade ago but today it is something that is standing right on our doorsteps, threatening us with our jobs or luring us with it's vast potential to make our life easier - both in one fell swoop. It is making people jittery about their own futures , threatening to take away their livelihoods. And there seems to be no way around it except one...we start working on increasing our EI - our emotional intelligence.

We are entrepreneurs and want to make use of every new technology that comes up to our advantage. What used to take hundreds of man hours for us today is effortless and hidden somewhere in the background. The challenge for us is not AI, but EI. Because that's something that is not getting automated at all. As a matter of fact, it is becoming more and more difficult each passing day - to be emotionally stable and to be able to respond to situations, stimulations and people, instead of reacting to them. All the time we are going to save from AI doing the job for us, needs to go in us developing our Emotional Intelligence. Because that's the only inner technology that's going to help us to make use of every new outer technology like AI in the future.

Listening with the eyes...

I heard something interesting the other day. Only 17% of our communication is verbal - meaning what we speak or hear others speak in words. Around 35% is tonal - meaning the words are not as important as the tone of voice in which they were said - and the tone is twice as important as what we are saying. But around 58% of our communication is body language - meaning what our body language says is almost four times as obvious as the words we speak. 

Which brings us to the point of how we read people? Most of the time I see people paying 100% attention to what someone is saying without really paying any attention to how it was said. Then, when the words don't measure up, they get perturbed why it happened. They should have understood in the first place that the words are not going to get honoured. Thus, it is very important to learn to listen with our eyes as much as we need to listen through our ears. Sometimes that will speak so loud, you won't need to hear what they say.