Mindset. The pacemaker of entrepreneurship

Arindam Biswas

8 min readMar 7, 2023

The faster you run the harder you fall.

I am sure, many of you would be familiar with the following:

Do this to grow your business by 4x, 5x, 10x, etc.

Let me burst your hope. They don’t work. Even if they did it would be at the expense of total loss of personal life.

Anyway, let’s say that they do work.

Even then, think about the following questions:

For how long can you sustain the 4x, 5x, and 10x growth?
What conditions are required for the business to grow at that accelerated rate?

There is a reason for me to ask you to ask those questions.

I have experienced the downfall of not doing so.

A couple of years back, I was heading the marketing and brand-building effort for a retail apparel brand. On the business front, the retail expansion was very rapid. We opened many new stores. Within 3 years of operation, the business had to operate on a certain million square feet of retail space. That would generate the required revenue to prove the strength of the business model. More importantly, it would attract investors.

But, within a year and a half of operation, the revenue wasn’t growing at the expected pace. Analysis revealed something alarming. Of all the new stores opened, close to 45% of them were performing very poorly due to the location.

In retail, location is key. Central to Starbucks’ success is location.

Result? The team was burnt out. Investors weren’t confident enough to invest. Our ‘X’ growth was useless.

The second incident was when I was building a limb disability healthcare social enterprise. We were a small team using technology to make quality disability services accessible to all. To scale up operations, we needed investment. Since we were a social enterprise, we approached ‘Impact investors’. They invest in organizations with dual causes. Revenue as well as social impact. We had approached several of them. Most liked our concept and the business model. But they wanted us to grow at a pace that we knew was not possible. Also, to sustain that growth we had to show more capacity, which we didn’t have. Hence, we failed to raise funds.

These experiences taught me the following:

Investors do care for your business. Not you.

Because they are under pressure too. They are investing their or someone else’s hard-earned money. Hence, it is natural for them to want you to grow at a pace of their choice. They need to recoup their investment in time and make some profit if possible.

I call it pseudo-care.

But there is nothing wrong with that. That’s the nature of it.

The main thing is, you have to realize that and create a realistic picture out of it. Then you can avoid disappointment.

We read too many case studies of unicorns. Case studies of crazy valuation.

But we don’t track how many went bankrupt. How many had their valuation inflated? How many faked a golden picture?

But these stories make us want to build a business too. And fast. No time. Time is money.

As a result, we hurry.

In that process, most do not take care to start well.

Starting well is about the following.

First, take a moment to understand yourself as an entrepreneur better:

This is the key to the whole entrepreneurial journey.

Why do you want to build a business? What’s the distance you are willing to go? How much of your fears, hopes, and dreams are you willing to invest in it? How ready are you to handle failure? How committed can you be to your business?

These are some of the leading questions you must find answers to. It may not be possible to get the right answer. But it still gets you thinking about such key things.

Being in a hurry makes us forget to ask these questions.

I built a social enterprise because I wanted the freedom to design a business my way. Explore the possibilities of designing a new business model. Set new business processes. I took a 30% pay cut in salary. Quit my steady job and joined a 2 member team.

My financial backup wasn’t strong enough for me to make that jump. But I wanted to learn. So as I was building the business I was vigilant about the cash flow to the company. Our salaries depended on it.

With time I started to like my work and I was delivering results. Even during the pandemic, I worked to keep the cash flow on. That made us achieve our annual target during the pandemic.

I was committed to building the business.

Knowing your mindset will set the pace at which you will work. That in turn will define how much you can get done and how you will get it done.

I call mindset the pacemaker of entrepreneurship.

Take the time to gain confidence:

This must be a deliberate effort.

I am a college decathlon champion.

By that I mean, having the highest aggregated points in the first division. My championship came after 3 years of struggle. The first year, though I was competing with the top athletes of my college, I could only gain 9th position. I was overwhelmed as I was competing in a big league.

You are going to be overwhelmed too. There are lots of big players out there. They have done their fair share of grind to hold their position in the market. So how are you going to carve out your niche? or take a share of the pie?

Coming 9th didn’t puncture my ego. Instead, it built my confidence and hunger to win. I requested my coach for special training sessions. And I worked systematically for the next two years. So my progress was 9th,6th, 3rd, and 1st.

It’s very important to build confidence.

I went out and secured 3 long-term device supply deals. That built my confidence. We were an unknown entity. No one knew about us. Hence, I had no legacy to back up the deals. Still, I cracked it.

It is important to identify how you will get that first level of confidence and make it happen. That will kick start the compounding effect of confidence building.

Take time to prepare the support system for the business.

Don’t concentrate on the flower. Instead, pay attention to the soil.

The day you start a business you will be found. The market will judge you by your revenue generation capacity. Hence, you will chase sales and revenue. Either you have a team or not.

Doing that will get easier if you take the time to do the following.

I am stressing about these because we tend to deprioritize them. Because these are non-revenue-generating activities. But ignoring these will set a vicious cycle.

Research: most are aware of it but few deep dive into it. That’s because it’s time and effort intensive when done by oneself or the founding team. The alternative to it is to outsource it to a research agency. That will cost an arm and leg. Freelance researchers will do an unsatisfactory job. You are also almost bootstrapping. Plus you may not get authentic data.

Again, your mindset will determine how you will approach the situation.

I had committed to building the business my way. So I applied that to research too.

First, I wrote a guiding question to design and execute the research. I asked, what would be an efficient approach to digging out unique insights about the disability category?

Unique insights help a business gain a competitive edge. Hence, it is very important.

My research revealed the following:

Limb disabilities can be of two types. Individuals with a dysfunctional limb. Polio.

And, individuals who lost a limb. An amputee.

The common insight was ‘The disabled want their dignity restored. Not their limb alone.’

So we were in the business of restoring human dignity. Not in selling assistive devices.

Notice how the insight can now guide every aspect of the business.

Let’s say you choose to sell a more cost-effective quality device as your competitive edge. In that case, you will focus on hiring a team of excellent mechanical engineers and product designers.

But if you choose to restore dignity as the competitive edge then your approach would be a lot different.

We hired a psychologist to address mental health issues related to disability. No service provider in the industry offered that.

We designed the devices with a natural look and feel to avoid public attention. No one was offering that.

We provided a ‘care package’ to make quality device ownership easier.

The list is long.

But you get the point. Spend time doing research and digging out unique insights.

Inventory: Any type of venture requires cash flow to keep its operation going. Cash is required to pay salary, rent as well as buy material for manufacturing products.

Buying material leads to blocking cash until you make a sale. On the other hand, you must have adequate material in stock to meet the volume of sales demand.

A bit of ping-pong.

If you want to play it well then understand the total available market. Then develop a sense of how much of that market you can serve with the current resources. Then accordingly plan inventory.

If you do not have adequate cash reserves, then curtail the projected volume of sales. Or borrow cash to buy inventory.

Either way, you get the point.

If you can be smart about inventory planning, then you will manage cash flow better.

Infrastructure: you can start a business from anywhere. A garage, house, online, street, or backyard.

The point is to have a designated office space.

You will also need software for accounting, inventory management, and communication.

A storage facility for your inventory.

And a team.

We had built our clinic and office in a space of 750 square feet and utilized every corner of it to the hilt.

40% of that space for patient treatment.

30% for manufacturing devices.

20% for assembling the devices

10% for the management team to sit and work.

With that design, we could service about 10 patients a day. House a team of 2 orthopedics, 1 mechanical engineer, and 2 manufacturers. The business development team wasn’t in the office most of the time.

Also, the rent was manageable.

With investment, we had planned to upgrade to a 2000 SQ FT space.

The point is, you must have the basic infrastructure in place to offer your service.