XL15: RACHIT DAYAL - Entrepreneurship and The Road Not Taken in Growing an Agency From 0 to 10m+ in Sales

You may know Rachit Dayal already, he’s the cofounder of our previous podcast guest Prantik Mazumdar. Together they grew their digital agency to over $10m in sales and later acquisition by Dentsu. In this successful team, Rachit was the original founder, the one who didn’t take the corporate salaryman route of safe, comfortable career with all its trappings and bragging rites for distant family. Instead, Rachit tells the story of survival mode and eating Maggi Noodles for the first 3 years of his business life. Not easy when your University peers are getting ahead with impressive hires in management consultancies and safe blue chip companies.But then, to be a successful entrepreneur you not only have to think different, but be different. You have to be the kind of person who both is annealed to the expectations of others and also confident that somehow things are going to work out okay in the future. This baseline of operations allows you to ignore the voices and grow your business on your terms. In this podcast, Rachit shares how his focus on daily metrics and the constant evolution (“Kaizen”) of those numbers rather than the big picture goals helped him keep the business on track.Rachit’s story is, to me, the lesser heard story of entrepreneurship. It’s less about raising large amounts of capital early in the game and growing at breakneck speeds. And it’s not so much about the end goal of the exit to measure the worth of our efforts. Instead, it’s the constant evolution, growth and belief in a path that leads forward. It’s about enjoying the game while we’re playing it and the joy of proving a few of our doubters wrong along the way.