When the balance sheet stops working, the decisions get very expensive.

Winners share it all

I built Sainov to create value for every stakeholder, not only for me. I still believe it, and I think it is part of why every one of my secured financial creditors eventually signed. Reputation compounds slowly, and it is the only asset that survives an insolvency.

Never carry monkeys on your shoulders

A co-founder who comes in free of cost thinks differently, because nothing of his is at stake. Skin in the game is not a clause in the shareholders agreement — it decides how a man behaves at two in the morning when the business is in trouble. Find people who have something to lose, and a real appetite for risk.

Test exposure before competence

The first thing I now establish about any counterparty is not how good they are. It is what they stand to lose if this goes wrong. I learned that the expensive way: I used to extend trust at the speed of instinct, and mistook it for generosity when it was closer to impatience.

Fix the capital structure before you need to

I built on debt, because debt was available and equity meant giving something up. I should have brought in a like-minded co-founder or investor at the beginning. By the time you need equity, you cannot get it on terms you would accept. Capital structure is not a finance question — it decides how much room you have when something goes wrong.

Do not let a good business fund a bad one

I acquired a distillery on a slump-sale basis, and that changed everything that followed. When a monopolistic state excise policy squeezed that asset, my healthy businesses carried it. Cross-subsidy inside a group is invisible until it is fatal. Ring-fence, or be honest with yourself about what you are actually funding.

Working harder than your team makes your team relax

I was chief executive, chief financial officer and chief operating officer at once. I had good people, but when the founder does everything, everyone else steps back. The job is not to carry the business — it is to build the system that carries it, and then hold people to it.

Somebody has to own the outside

In a regulated business, policy is not background. It is a counterparty. You need one person whose entire job is the external environment, so that you can hold the core. I did not have that, and the external environment is what made the business suffer.

Systems are not overhead

Ten years ago I did not have the systems, the controls, or the tools that exist now. I would run that business very differently today — more organised, more instrumented, far less dependent on what was in my head. Founders who plan to install this later are borrowing against their own future judgement.

Conviction is a strategy, not a feeling

From February 2020, through the CIRP, through liquidation, through every adverse order, I did not lose hope. That was not optimism. It was a reading: as long as the strategy is right and the belief is real, there is a move available. There almost always is. Most people stop looking one move early.

Speed is not the problem. Unfunded speed is.

Founders are told to slow down. I would not say that — I moved as fast as anyone. When a monopolistic market opened, I went from ₹65 crores to ₹685 crores in a single year, and taking that opportunity was the right decision.

What I did not have underneath it was capital that could carry the pace. Growth funded by debt looks identical to growth funded by equity, right up to the quarter it does not. Businesses rarely die of ambition. They die because demand was misjudged, or because the cash ran out one month before the money arrived.

So do not go slower. Go with the structure that survives being wrong. Build a team that lives the same vision, stay open to advice and to criticism, and keep the courage to change the model when the evidence says you should.