Doing the things that you don't like to do
Updated: Oct 6
“All I ever wanted was the freedom to make my own mistakes.”[1]
Toxic dumbness.
Years back when IJK was established to enter the advisory business, there was a whole bunch of M&A and capital raising deals thrusted on to our plate by an older person who offered to mentor us on our startup journey. He had been our deal originator, only because he had claimed to be a big-time investor and presumably had access to many people in high-up places. For now, let's just call him the mentor.
Despite being in the advisory business for nearly ten years, I was relatively new to finding deals. I had been chiefly involved in execution for the most part of my career. I was good at it, but origination was something of a different skillset.
The mentor had introduced numerous companies that would serve as IJK's potential clients. It was a buffet of large and small firms either trying to get into new markets, in search of capital or who were simply just trying to look for customers. It was a non-exhaustive list. Every one we met was a prospect and we spent a considerable amount of effort evaluating each deal.
We had a loosely systematic way of filtering and deciding whether or not to proceed. For certain opportunities, we were told that some 'favours' had to be done such as buying meals, hosting prospects at conferences, or even meeting their stakeholders, brokers or associates who were going to be a party to the transaction. In some cases, the favour also included sitting in a classroom for three consecutive days serving as a teaching assistant. The mentor assured us that this was all part of the process.
Whenever we held back on moving ahead to commit additional resources for a particular deal that we felt to be too uneconomically profitable, the mentor would say:
"When starting up, sometimes you just have to do the things that you don't like to do."
But our deal pipeline had been so full—full of long shots and losers.
Objectively, many projects had a low probability of closing, largely because they involved clients that likely couldn't pay, or the timeframe was simply too long and cumbersome. But a lot of times it had been very subjective. After all, what do we know about origination and politically-driven handshakes having mostly been involved on the execution side?
In the spirit of teamwork, cooperation and good faith, we continued to listen. But in reality we were starting to bleed cash, and we never had any real decision-making authority to kill the deal or disagree with the mentor to proceed with what we felt in our gut made more commercial sense.
It was only over a year later that I had begun to realize the ironic and toxic dumbness of it all:
The idea of starting an advisory business had been ours, we were prepared to bear our own costs, but somehow ended up suffocating under a blind workload and executing a totally different agenda that belonged to someone else, just to heed conventional wisdom.
We were told that the rites of passage of starting up was part of the process, that was—to do the things that we didn't like to do.
No longer the owner of my own business.
I could not pinpoint exactly when it started to dawn on me, but one day amidst the frenzy of calls and meetings, I woke up subconsciously dragging my feet out of the house, and feeling the familiar morning anxiety of arriving at the IJK office before 9:30am.
I had also been checking my emails and text messages in the same way I used to check my Blackberry on a typical Friday evening, hoping not to get a nasty email from the ‘boss’ to turn around a slide deck by Monday or hop into a weekend update call.
And in any job, the moment you start counting down to Fridays or dread Monday mornings, you are basically f**ked.
One day I decided to re-examine the leads I had on hand:
Aside from a few small opportunities, I had no full context to most of the other projects, no direct access to the source at a higher level, no tangible resources to mobilise. Perhaps more importantly, I had no autonomy in dictating any of the commercial terms or the execution process.
At every discussion, I found myself mostly on the receiving end, listening to fluffy ideas and being fed with lofty dreams, all the while being told to follow up on execution in the background. I was stuffed to the neck with work that wasn't mine and simply churning slides and spreadsheeting numbers.
The truth turned out to be that a lot of our deals didn't have any commercial mandates tied to it.
The mentor had opportunistically exploited the entrepreneurial ambitions of two young folks to help run execution while he played the role of senior figurehead and rainmaker. He didn’t had a clue on how things on the ground worked and demanded we did things to uphold his business relationships. A lot of those errands ended up being done out of goodwill, in the blind hope that would one day convert into a billion dollar payout.
Worst still, we later discovered that he had been a charlatan selling an allegedly falsified track record in private equity and fundraising to the people that we had met over the years.
We were being played.
And as the proverbial Chinese saying goes, I was being led by the nose.
In that whole process, I think no one really considered what I wanted for myself. The whole experience felt like doing corporate finance work all over again except that my bank account was drying up faster than I could replenish it.
When as the dust finally settled, everything started to clear up:
My intention of starting a business had been to unshackle myself from a corporate job, but I ended up in a situation whereby I was working on someone else’s projects and providing the ‘weekly reports’ on a regular basis.
Suddenly I was an employee all over again.
This reality hit me really hard when I ran this through my head and played it out right till the very end—
I was no longer the owner of my business, whatever the form it had evolved into.
The reality was that: I had no say, no control, no money, no visibility. I had all of the downside and none of the upside. That whole process taught me something important:
In any moment of vulnerability, if you are not careful in protecting your dreams, someone else will show up and make you build their dreams for them.
Vulnerability can create a blind spot which can lead to becoming overly trusting and cloud decision making—much like a drowning man clutching a straw.
Of course not everyone is a charlatan, but you can be sure that there is definitely a personal agenda involved. Everyone is just trying to validate their own narrative based on what works for them. Sometimes the interests of all parties are aligned, but most of the time it isn't. Humans are complex organisms. What works for one person may not necessarily work for another.
And if you are not careful, you can easily fall into someone else’s dark agenda.
What matters.
In any start up with more than one shareholder, it is almost inevitable that decision-making and relationship dynamics get entwined.
Everyone brings a set of different resources to the table--some bring sweat, some bring relationships, some open doors, others bring influence. But regardless of what you bring to the table there are always some fundamental rules to abide by.
Integrity and transparency above and before economics, always.
Respect the capital i.e. everyone has the right to their opinion, but only those with skin in the game get to decide.
In any deadlock or impasse, refer to point number 2.
Whenever you feel that you are getting the short end of the stick, refer to point number 2.
If you find yourself doing the things that you don't like to do, refer to point number 2
Everything fundamentally defaults to point number two–money talks.
You can be well credentialed by bringing grey hairs and sweat accumulated from years of experience, or show off selfie photos with the big shots. But none of that really matters unless you put money on the table.
That is all there is.
A few friends who knew our story often likened it to a Netflix drama serial--exciting and gripping to hear. Beyond the stories, my co-founder at IJK and I share even more dramatic episodes and sleepless nights that we had gone through. But there is a fine difference between being the actor in a reality TV series gone wrong, and watching the show from the safety and comfort of the living room couch. I think people don’t really understand this.
Given the fallout from the aftermath of things back then, I should have been panicking and thinking about what lies next. But even in those dark moments, there had been a quaint inner peace coming from taking responsibility of all the good and bad decisions. I was dry, but I felt liberated.
Perhaps all I really wanted out from starting a business was the freedom to do what I wanted, including the freedom to make my own mistakes.
[1] Adapted from the HBO series "Game of Thrones". Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildlings, the free folk.
