The Business Stories We Need to Hear More Often

Tell someone a good business success story and something interesting happens –> They start questioning their job?

You read enough of these stories and your job can suddenly start looking very different.

• The salary that seemed good last week starts feeling limiting.
• The boss who seemed reasonable starts feeling unbearable.
• The eight-hour workday starts looking like a cage.

• They spent their savings.
• The first year didn’t work.
• The second year required more money.
• The big customer never came.
• The co-founder left.
• They eventually shut the business down and went back to a job.

And suddenly, that same job feels pretty good.

• The salary feels comforting.
• The fixed date on which money arrives in your bank account feels like a luxury.
• The leave policy starts looking surprisingly generous.

It is strange how quickly our perception changes depending on which business story we happen to read.

Maybe that is why we need to hear more of the stories that don’t end with a celebration.

We hear the winners

Most business stories have a natural selection problem.

–> The people who succeed have a reason to tell their stories.

–> The people who fail often don’t.

A successful founder has a company, a valuation, a team, a milestone, a photograph and eventually a podcast invitation.

Then there is the salary problem

This is where I think people considering entrepreneurship sometimes make a particularly strange calculation.

Suppose you earn ₹25 lakh a year today.

You decide you want to start a business.

Maybe.

But notice what just happened.

You quietly converted an existing income into an expected income.

Your ₹25 lakh salary is real <–> Someone is already paying you that money

Your business income is an idea.

• It might become ₹25 lakh.
• It might become ₹50 lakh.
• It might become ₹5 lakh.
• It might become nothing for a while.
• It might even lose money.

The number isn’t really the point. You could be earning ₹5 lakh, ₹15 lakh or ₹50 lakh.

But ₹25 lakh of business revenue is not ₹25 lakh in your pocket.

• There are employees.
• Rent.
• Technology.
• Marketing.
• Taxes.
• Working capital.
• Inventory.
• Bad debts.
• Professional fees.

Reinvestment. And a hundred small expenses that don’t appear in the glamorous version of entrepreneurship.

–> Much less exciting question but a much more useful one.

We also underestimate what a salary buys us

A salary doesn’t just buy things. It buys a certain amount of predictability.

• You know roughly when the money will arrive.
• You know what your monthly obligations are.
• You can plan a holiday.
• You can take a loan.
• You can decide to buy something six months from now.
• You can make plans without first asking whether next month’s customers will pay on time.

I say this with some personal bias because I have experienced both sides. I know what it feels like to have a relatively comfortable job, a predictable salary and the quiet confidence that next month will probably look a lot like this month.

I also know what happens when that certainty disappears. It changes the way you think about money.

More importantly, it changes the way you think about risk.

–> You begin to realise that entrepreneurship isn’t simply about exchanging a boss for freedom.

–> You are exchanging one kind of problem for a different set of problems.

And sometimes you are exchanging certainty for possibility.

Social media makes this harder

We have become very good at packaging the upside of entrepreneurship.

• The photographs are beautiful.
• The office is beautiful.
• The founder story is beautiful.
• The revenue number is beautiful.
• The announcement that someone has quit their job to “build something of their own” is beautiful.

What we don’t see as often is the Tuesday afternoon when there isn’t enough cash to comfortably pay everyone.

• Or the customer who says payment will come next week.
• Or the product that took six months to build and nobody wants.
• Or the founder who hasn’t taken a proper holiday because the business still depends on them.

Those things don’t make particularly good Instagram posts. But they are part of the business too.

–> The danger isn’t that social media lies.

–> The danger is that it shows us a highly edited part of the truth.

This is why failure stories matter

A good failure story doesn’t tell you not to start.

• It tells you what the founder didn’t see coming.
• It makes you think about cash flow before revenue.
• About customers before enthusiasm.
• About margins before scale.
• About working capital before growth.
• About whether the business works without the founder doing everything.

And perhaps most importantly, it makes you think about the life around the business.

Because a business doesn’t exist in isolation.

• There is a person behind it.
• There may be a family behind that person.
• There are commitments, expectations, loans, plans and responsibilities.
• That is the part we often leave out when we talk about entrepreneurship.

We talk about the business decision as if only the business is at risk. It isn’t.

Maybe we need a different way to tell these stories

We don’t need fewer success stories –> We need more complete ones.

Tell me how the business became successful –> But also tell me what almost killed it.

Tell me the revenue –> But tell me the margins.

Tell me about the funding –> But tell me what the founder had to sacrifice.

Tell me when they quit their job –> But tell me what happened to their income in the first two years.

Tell me about the freedom –> But tell me when they last had a completely disconnected weekend.

Tell me how much the business is worth –> But tell me how much money the founder can actually take home.