DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Entrepreneurs face many challenges. But the biggest one has to be the existential one, whether to be an entrepreneur or not. That is the question. This question, of course, hides many other issues and problems faced by a person who is thinking of taking the plunge. It is clear that many of the most successful entrepreneurs are those who have little to lose in life and take entrepreneurship by diving at the deep end of the water because the hardships in life leave them with little other choice. A careful analysis of risk and returns—if there are alternative sources of returns—always reduces the chance that a person becomes an entrepreneur. It is no wonder that few people from the IIMs actually become entrepreneurs because the degree not only gives you a comfortable job with certain revenues but also makes you over-analyze the risk return proposition.

Sandeep Parekh

I would rank my father as a true entrepreneur, who walked into Delhi with a hundred rupee note; with a mediocre school education from a small town and a will to succeed; to compete in the rather intellectual area of being a lawyer in the Supreme Court. He became a sought after and respected lawyer within just a few years despite his initial shortcomings. He took the deep end, because there was no shallow side for him.

I was placed at the other end of the spectrum. With a good education at an English speaking Delhi school and then a foreign education, except for the first few years having led a comfortable life, fate presented me with an equally, in some ways, more difficult choice. A comfortable predictable life with known income, a well-built corporate structure where you walk in at 9 AM, work hard on your legal skills and lead the ordinary life. Or a life with little predictability. A life where there was a possibility of complete failure, uncertain income and certain expenses. A place where not only must I do legal work, but pay the electricity and phone bills, keep records of correspondence and answer my own calls. But there is something about entrepreneurship which attracts us. In fact, for every successful entrepreneur there would be many who tried and failed, but the rest of us try in any case.

I was faced with the crossroad just a few months back. I had an offer from a large law firm which I nearly accepted. But the process of working on the fine print from the law firm’s end took so long that it gave me pause for thought. Waiting for the final offer to materialise helped me introspect and think about the choices I had. I made six phone calls one fine morning to people I respected, including my father and shared my choice with them. It so happened, that all six voted for the new venture, a professional financial sector law firm of my own. One person whom I called, an entrepreneur himself, said, "The best time to start an enterprise is last year." Clearly, I was going to get more risk averse as time passed. I took the plunge.

There are payoffs, of course. Besides the possibility of success and the chance that there will be enough money to run the house, there is an infinite upside in terms of success. If you start from zero, there is a good chance that you will be more than a zero in a few years' time. The personal and professional high that you get out of creating and nurturing your creation is the real reward more than anything else. For me, it was this and more. I was looking forward to professional growth and personal freedom. I have always had the dream of creating an organisation where people would be really happy to work, where there would be no office politics and where people would give credit and not snatch it from colleagues. I wanted to create a firm which provides the very best of services to its clients, a firm which is a complete meritocracy, where flattery has no place. Here was a chance to create that place. I have also wanted to create an organisation which has a material impact on society.

My exposure to IIM, Ahmedabad as a faculty also helped create the person that I am. IIM-A is a place which sets few targets and which helps you draw your own goals and targets and give yourself appropriate debits and credits. In short, it prepares you for entrepreneurship. Another aspect of IIM-A is that it helps you think in terms of output rather than input. So Finsec, my firm, would be a place which will deliver the best service to the client, but remain wholly agnostic to the fact that the work was done from either the office or from a Barista coffee shop. Finsec will hopefully never have attendance registers and other measures of input, but measurable outputs with modern management techniques used to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit alive even when it is much bigger.

Finally, the many networks that I have developed and the people I have come to know from my professional contacts at law firms, SEBI and IIM-A besides networks like the World Economic Forum of which I am an active part, gave me the confidence to go for creating a new venture. These are some rather unique and valuable networks when put together.

Having said that, the decision to be an entrepreneur must also be rational. To enter a field which is full of competitors or which has few entry barriers, is not a good idea. Entrepreneurship must not defy economics and steps which are taken towards beginning something new must understand the hard facts of a competitive landscape. I certainly did calculate the various factors at play in the legal market before I decided to take the plunge, and I do know that I am still afloat. So that is a good sign I guess.