RWE: What do you really need to worry about when starting a business?

In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, Bhairav and Alan dig into a question every business owner wrestles with: what’s actually worth worrying about? Between cash flow, co-founders, market reception and the things you genuinely cannot see coming, it’s easy to spend energy in the wrong places. Alan and Bhairav talk through how they’ve each dealt with the unexpected over the years, including a deeply personal story from Alan about a cancer diagnosis that tested everything he believed about planning and control.
What You Will Learn From Listening
- A simple test for deciding whether something is actually worth worrying about
- Why detailed planning gives a false sense of control, and why that’s not actually a problem
- The difference between risks worth preparing for and risks not worth the effort
- How COVID exposed which businesses could adapt and which couldn’t
- Why Eisenhower’s two quotes on planning are more useful than any risk register
- How Bhairav’s experience selling Atom challenged his own assumptions about strategy
- Why founders should run a “hit by a bus” scenario on themselves, not just key staff
- Alan’s personal account of being diagnosed with cancer two weeks after buying a company
- What the “trough of disillusionment” is and why it hits most founders around six months in
- How to tell the difference between problems worth carrying yourself and problems you can hand off