Amicus Partners

To be honest, this has been a while in the making. As an entrepreneur, you live by the hope that victory is just around the corner, right after another crushing failure. You are certain that the first success will beget another, and then another. And so on and so forth.  

After all, isn’t that the way the world works?

I am no longer sure.

Fairly early on in my career, I was taught just how important failure is. How much it can teach you. Patience, humility, perseverance – these are just a few of the things that a good failure teaches. If you are lucky.

Of course, right there and then, failure can sting. It can bite into your confidence, your self-belief, entangle you in self-doubt. Recovery can take days, weeks, months and years. But recover you must and recover you will. And you will learn and learn some more.

You will learn that failures are often just what you needed to find success, and that there is a joy in attaining that which was once denied to you. You will learn that giving up is not an option.

Until it is.

Which, for me, is now.

Of course, the signs were there all along.

Even as a global pandemic came and went, the LLM admissions vertical stabilized, ensuring revenue through the admission cycle. Venturing into the outreach and student recruitment consultancy allowed for a far more consistent revenue model, no longer dependent on the typical four or five months which make up the admissions cycle.

Within three years, there were enough profits that could be invested back into the business, and plans involving expansion began to be considered. The hope was to create a separate agency focused on south-east asian student recruitment for foreign law schools.

But, bit by bit, this work – dealing with student recruitments – began to taper out. The overall increase in costs of recruitment certainly had a part to pay, but I think the plain reason for the decline was that there was no paying customer.

In other words, it was a failure.

I just chose not to acknowledge it.

Until I had to. What really pushed this conversation from a corner of my mind to front and center was this book by K. Vaitheeswaran, “Failing to Succeed”, – a lot of what he discussed rang discomfortingly true. Bottom line – failure is hard to admit no doubt, but it needs to be done.

And now that I have, I must also spare a few thoughts on the lessons learnt. Lessons about the world, about people, about businesses, and about myself. This failure has also allowed me to meet, listen to, and argue with some incredibly intelligent people – these are deeply fulfilling experiences that are to be cherished.

I have also learned that there is a strange joy in creating something out of nothing, a distinct thrill that, I think, only comes with entrepreneurship.

I learned that story telling is an inherently human skill; everyone has it, some just need help to eke it out. And that in an increasingly digital world, there is some hope for an analog existence. 

I learned that hopes and aspirations are deeply entwined with education, and that the weight we place on educational institutions are heavy and, sometimes, unreasonable.

Most importantly, I have learned that there is a courage in knowing when to stop. To move on to another round of failures and success. Of learning and living and learning.

Which is where I stand right now.

I don’t quite know what is next, but I do know that there will be many failures ahead. Hopefully a few successes too.

That is how the way the world works.