There is no single formula for entrepreneurial success, but founders who build lasting businesses share recognisable habits. They act rather than over-analyse. They understand customers’ problems deeply, sometimes before customers do. They find creative ways to share risk and capital. They tell compelling stories to people whose support they need. They price for the many where they can, stay distinctive and refuse to compromise their integrity.
This article draws ten lessons from the experiences of Indian founders discussed in small-business training: an infrastructure financier who built equipment finance and shared telecommunications towers, a biotechnology pioneer who made expensive medicines affordable, and a film actor who described the habits that carried him through years of struggle. Each lesson is applied to small businesses, including manufacturers and trades.
Lesson 1: Focus on the work, not only the result
Professionals trained to analyse can sometimes analyse so thoroughly that they never start. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, tend to start once they are convinced they are doing the right thing, and then adjust as they learn.
An Indian founder of an infrastructure finance business quoted a well-known principle from the Bhagavad Gita: you have a right to your actions, but not to their fruits. In business terms, concentrate on doing excellent work rather than becoming paralysed by worry about outcomes you cannot fully control.
This does not mean ignoring risks. It means accepting that perfect information never arrives, taking calculated steps, and letting results follow from consistent effort.
Lesson 2: Anticipate customers’ needs through empathy
Customers often cannot tell you what they need, because they have not imagined a better way. Entrepreneurs anticipate problems and offer solutions that deliver either efficiency or cost benefits.
The same founder’s first customer illustrates this. In 1989, an excavator salesperson mentioned a customer who needed an excavator but could not obtain finance. The customer was a labour contractor loading iron ore from mines onto railway wagons. The work required hundreds of labourers and took weeks to load a single train.
The founder financed the excavator. The contractor completed the same work in about five days instead of weeks, won more contracts and grew rapidly. Construction equipment finance became a major business, and equipment sales in the region grew enormously over the following decades.
The lesson is to understand how customers currently work, what it costs them and how your product or service could transform their productivity. Design thinking, observing customers, understanding their work and prototyping solutions with them, is a structured way to do this.
Lesson 3: Connect idle capacity with unmet demand
The same business noticed that some contractors owned machines but lacked projects, while others had projects but lacked machines. It created an “equipment bank” to connect them, and later an online platform where companies could buy, sell, lease or finance equipment.
This is the logic behind many successful platforms: find assets that sit idle and match them with people who need them. In Australia, equipment hire businesses, online machinery marketplaces and shared manufacturing facilities follow the same principle. A small manufacturer with spare machine capacity might offer subcontract machining to others, turning idle hours into revenue.
Lesson 4: Share capital and risk, even with competitors
When a mobile operator asked the financier to fund a mobile phone tower, he knew that operators in other countries shared towers. He offered to finance the tower and to give the operator a discount if other operators also used it, with bigger discounts as more operators joined.
Operators initially resisted. Being first with a tower in an area attracted customers. But competitors installed their own towers within weeks, so the advantage was short-lived. Sharing, by contrast, cut each operator’s capital expenditure dramatically and allowed faster growth. Shared towers became standard, and the business installed a very large number of towers in a short period.
Small businesses can share capital and risk through:
- Partnerships and joint ventures for specific projects.
- Refinancing models, such as leasing rather than buying equipment.
- Franchising, where franchisees fund their own outlets.
- Distributors, who invest in stock and local marketing.
- Investors, who share risk in exchange for equity.
- Competitors, through shared facilities, joint purchasing or shared logistics.
A caution for Australian businesses: collaborating with competitors must not involve cartel conduct, such as fixing prices, sharing markets, rigging bids or restricting output, which is illegal under the Competition and Consumer Act. Sharing infrastructure, joint purchasing and joint ventures can be legitimate, but get legal advice, and check whether ACCC authorisation or a class exemption applies to collective arrangements.
Lesson 5: Tell your story with conviction
When the finance business was still small, it obtained funding from several foreign governments’ development agencies and from the World Bank. It did so by understanding each funder’s objectives and telling its story with conviction, showing how its plans would serve those objectives.
Every founder needs to tell a story: to customers, employees, lenders, investors and partners. A good story explains the problem, why it matters, how you solve it, what you have achieved and where you are going. It connects your goals with the listener’s goals. The article on storytelling in business explains how to build one.
Lesson 6: Build the organisation on people’s strengths
Organisations are built on people’s strengths, not their weaknesses. Leaders who take time to understand team members, show empathy, keep them engaged and discuss their strengths and weaknesses openly get better work and build healthier cultures. When people are deployed where they are strongest and supported in growing, both performance and wellbeing improve.
Lesson 7: Price for the many, and use research to make it possible
In 1978, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw founded Biocon in India with very little money and no business experience. She had been looking for a job when an Irish businessman invited her to establish a joint venture in India. She has described the obstacles she faced:
- Banks would not lend, because she had no collateral, biotechnology was unfamiliar to them and women business founders were rare.
- Foreign investment was hard to arrange at the time.
- Potential employees were reluctant to join a company led by a woman, fearing for their job security.
She built a research-led business that offered opportunities to scientists, and it grew into one of India’s best-known biotechnology companies, listing on the stock exchange in 2004.
High volume, low price
Many multinational pharmaceutical companies follow a “low volume, high value” model: a limited number of expensive medicines sold mainly to those who can afford them. Biocon pursued a “high volume, low value” model: medicines priced so that very large numbers of people could afford them, at small margins.
Its work on biosimilars, highly similar versions of complex biological medicines whose patents have expired, helped reduce prices of expensive treatments for cancer and diabetes and expand access to them. The company has also made public commitments to supply insulin at very low daily cost in lower-income countries.
Lessons for any business:
- Identify the opportunity, often where existing providers serve only a narrow, affluent market.
- Overcome challenges with persistence rather than waiting for ideal conditions.
- Write a clear mission and vision.
- Price so that the largest feasible number of customers can buy.
- Invest in research and technology to make better products at lower cost.
For a small manufacturer, this might mean redesigning a product to use fewer parts or cheaper processes so it can reach a wider market, rather than competing only at the premium end.
Lesson 8: Work hard, every day
An Indian film actor, describing his early struggling years, explained his routine: wake early, exercise, get ready and meet as many people as possible each day, attending as many auditions as he could. He refused to waste days at home.
His point applies to founders: dreaming about success does not create it. The bigger the goal, the harder and more consistent the effort required. Hard work in the early years of a business lays the foundations for everything that follows. Effort should also be smart, directed at the activities that create the most value, and sustainable, so it does not lead to burnout.
Lesson 9: Be unique
Copying competitors means competing on the same terms, usually price. Customers with many similar options raise more objections and switch more easily.
Instead:
- Identify what is unique about your product or service: why would customers choose you over the alternatives?
- Find your own voice and identity. Add a personal touch that people recognise.
- Build a signature strength, something you are known for.
A copy can at best become one of many. Something genuinely distinctive can stand alone. The article on choosing your value position explores how to define what makes you different.
Lesson 10: Never compromise your integrity
The same actor emphasised honesty above all. As businesses succeed, greed can creep in, along with the temptation to do things that benefit you at someone else’s expense. Such behaviour may bring short-term gains, but it does not last and eventually catches up with you.
He put it simply: if you hold on to values, valuable things will come to you; if you chase only valuables, you lose both. Good roots produce good fruit.
In practice, integrity means:
- Telling customers the truth about products, prices and delivery.
- Treating employees, suppliers and partners fairly.
- Keeping commitments, and owning mistakes when you cannot.
- Refusing to cut corners on safety, quality or legal obligations.
A caution: innovation needs financial discipline
The infrastructure finance group whose early innovations are described above later ran into serious financial difficulties, as many finance businesses have. It is a reminder that creative ideas and strong growth do not protect a business from risks such as excessive borrowing, concentrated exposures or weak governance. The lessons on customer empathy and shared capital remain valuable, but they must be combined with sound financial management.
Putting the lessons together: a founder’s checklist
- Am I taking action, or analysing endlessly?
- Do I understand how my customers work, and how I can make them more efficient or save them money?
- Is there idle capacity, mine or others’, I could connect with unmet demand?
- Could I share capital or risk with partners, distributors, investors or even competitors, legally?
- Can I tell my story clearly and connect it with the goals of the people I need?
- Am I building my team around people’s strengths?
- Could I reach many more customers at a lower price through better design or technology?
- Am I working hard and consistently on the activities that matter most?
- What makes my business unique?
- Am I acting with integrity in every relationship?
A worked example
A small fabrication business in regional Victoria has spare capacity on its laser cutter and press brake most afternoons. Its owner applies several lessons:
- Empathy: visiting farm customers, the owner notices how much time they spend repairing a common type of gate latch, and designs a simpler, more durable latch.
- Price for the many: by designing the latch to be cut and folded in minutes, the business can sell it at a price farmers readily accept, through rural supply stores.
- Idle capacity: the owner offers afternoon laser-cutting time to other local businesses at a fair rate.
- Shared capital: three local fabricators agree to share the cost of a powder-coating line, each booking time, after confirming with a lawyer that the arrangement involves no coordination on prices or customers.
- Story: the owner tells the story of the latch, designed with farmers for farmers, in local media and at field days.
Within two years, the latch is the business’s best-selling product, machine utilisation has risen sharply and the shared powder-coating line has reduced each business’s finishing costs.
Frequently asked questions
Is acting before analysing everything reckless? Not if the step is calculated and reversible. Test ideas in small, affordable ways, learn from the results and commit more as evidence builds. The danger lies in irreversible bets made without thought, not in action itself.
Can a small business really compete on price with research? Yes, when research focuses on design and process rather than laboratory science. Simplifying a product, reducing parts, choosing better materials or automating a slow step can cut costs substantially while improving quality.
How do I stay unique when competitors copy me? Keep improving. Copies chase where you were, while you move on. Distinctiveness built on expertise, relationships, service and brand is far harder to copy than a single product feature.
Summary
Successful founders act decisively, anticipate customers’ needs through empathy, connect idle capacity with demand and share capital and risk creatively, including with competitors where the law allows. They tell their story with conviction, build on people’s strengths, price for the many where research and design make it possible, work hard every day, stay distinctive and never compromise their integrity. Above all, they combine these habits with sound financial discipline.
Sources: small-business training notes on lessons from an Indian infrastructure finance founder, a biotechnology founder and a film actor, together with general business practice. Company details are drawn from publicly available information. Examples are illustrations. This article is general information, not legal advice.
