I made mistakes with my own money before helping anyone invest theirs. That is the simplest reason to listen to me.

I joined the family business in 2003, after three and a half years in audit — internal, stock, statutory and tax. I read P&Ls for a living before I read them for anyone else.

I took a franchise of a bakery brand that year. In 2006 the company that owned it decided to discontinue the brand. My unit was fine. The system above it was the risk, and there was nothing I could do about it.

That same year we took back the cinema concession counters our family had leased out for years and ran them ourselves. Within twelve months they earned more than three times what the rent had been. Same space, same customers, different attention.

Then we built the thing properly: a 10,000 sq ft central kitchen to flight-catering standard, designed to supply twenty outlets. At peak we ran twenty stores — company-owned, franchise-owned and company-operated, and franchise-owned and franchise-operated, all at once. A pure-vegetarian bakery brand in a Mumbai that did not have one.

Four roles, one business: franchisee, franchisor, operator, owner.

Along the way, a mall kiosk that taught me the difference between footfall and demand. A distribution business into four national supermarket chains where sales rose exactly as projected and the costs rose by more — union payments at every delivery point, our own staff doing shelf work the retailer had contracted to do, and payments that arrived months late with deductions nobody explained. And a franchised outlet with four part-time owners, none of them authorised to decide anything, which failed on structure rather than on demand.

We exited the bakery business between 2017 and 2019, when the market filled with home bakers and turned price-sensitive. Competing on price would have meant compromising the way we worked. We chose to leave instead. I exited a nine-year distribution business on the same reasoning.

I currently lead finance and strategy at our family's cinema and construction company.

Which means I am not advising from theory. I am making the same kind of capital and operating decisions I help you think through — in a live business, every week. I obtained the MAHARERA registration for a multi-use project myself, structured an ₹11 crore facility across three loan types, negotiated an eighteen-year operating lease for a multiplex we decided not to run ourselves, and structured a joint venture that funded a redevelopment without the family borrowing for it.

That work is not something I offer you. It is the reason I recognise what I am looking at when you show me yours.

In June 2026 I stood at a fork on a Himalayan road and turned away from Chandratal.

Fifteen of us had spent twelve days driving through Spiti. Chandratal was meant to be one of the highlights. I had prepared for the road — 4x4s, mapped fuel stops, walkie-talkies, altitude medicine, offline maps.

Preparation was not the question. The question was whether the reward still justified the risk.

The single-lane road was choked. Twelve days in, I had already seen Spiti in full. Reaching one more lake meant a crowded, difficult road with very little margin for error. Three others agreed and we drove to Sissu instead.

That night the rest of the group caught up. Their verdict was simple: Chandratal was fine, but it was not worth what it cost to get there.

I think about franchise decisions the same way. People become fixed on reaching the destination — owning the brand, opening the outlet, becoming an entrepreneur. My job is the less exciting question. Is the reward worth what it will cost you to get there?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the right decision is to drive on.

Unit-level profit is everything. A brand can be excellent and a unit still lose money. Nothing above the unit rescues economics that do not work at the unit.

Skin in the game is what makes advice trustworthy. Every read I give you comes from having lived the downside, not from having studied it.

Here is the thing I have to admit, given everything above.

Even I — the operator who had seen it from the inside, who had run twenty outlets across three formats — still needed an outside eye. In 2012 I had a proposal in front of me to build our franchise systems properly, and I could not convince my partners to pay for it. I lost that argument, and I have thought about it since.

That is what I am now. The outside eye I did not manage to buy.