How I lost my A-Team.

August 2016, I lost 70% of my Top Team or as I liked to call them my A-Team. It was one of the strongest teams I ever built and been part of. We were motivated, driven, and ready to take on the world. But after just 8, short, but remarkable months, everything crashed. All of a sudden there was nothing but darkness in front of me. I was alone.

Back in November 2015, on the 25th day to be precise, I had commenced operations in a new garment manufacturing factory that I had set up with the help and support of my Father and Chacha (Uncle). I had nothing short of a dream start. Everything was working like clockwork despite some initial challenges and we shipped out our very first order of around 33,000 units in approximately 30 days with flying colors.

Everybody was happy and it was certainly a massive achievement for a brand new team. I still remember the day because I was traveling and got a congratulatory email from my Father. It felt like I was in heaven, well at least my version of it. My vision had converted into reality and I was super proud of my team and our achievements.

But there are always 2 sides to a coin! Till January 2016, there was a lot of enthusiasm and support from my Father and Uncle. But suddenly things started changing, to be honest, I didn’t realize what was happening because I was on a mission to launch one of the best garment manufacturing facilities in North India. I was not interested in anything else and settling for anything less.

However, soon I was sucked into this dark hole of aggressive questioning and push back. On top of that people from my Father and Uncle’s factory were playing politics and I couldn’t do anything to stop it because I was part of the “new team”. I was always an outsider to my family business, and could never create a name for myself. Hence, I left in some sense and set up my own company.

What followed was an onslaught on me, my team, and my new company. I was working on building a grand company and converting my vision into reality. What I didn’t realize was that I was trying to do it all alone. I was reinventing the wheel more often than not. Had we simply used the knowledge we already had it would have saved me a lot of time and effort. Instead, there were, what felt like a million people from the “old team” sitting ready to poke holes in my vision and company. They were ready with all the tricks in the book.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to make anyone look bad or blame anyone, whatever happened was totally my responsibility. No one had a gun to my head, I was just too new in the game to realize what was going and I was completely blinded by my vision. Anyway, I kept chugging along, I kept trying to satisfy My Father and Uncle but it was of no use. They did not see any value in what I had built.

Slowly, things started to go out of my control because I was always feeling “not good enough” and “not smart enough”. Now, you might be wondering what was going on, well the biggest thing was that I was not making money, my company was an unnecessary expense item on the books. The team, the performance, the quality of goods, the culture… all those things did not matter. The only thing that mattered was MONEY. Plain and simple. If you make money, great, if you don’t then you are a failure and you don’t know what you are doing.

I kept holding on for as long as I could, and despite everything that was going on we kept increasing our production capacity and delivering with quality. But I finally succumbed to the pressure from my bosses. As a result, I was no longer protecting my A-Team or my company. I started believing that I am not good enough and I do not know what I am doing.

That was the end of everything, it started with 2 people and the rest just followed. The way they were treated and the things that happened were totally avoidable and certainly wrong. I do not want to get into the details because it’s important to understand that I am not trying to blame anyone or show anyone in poor light. These are facts of my story and my side of the story. All the other people involved in this will have their own version which needs to be respected equally. And it is completely wrong to just have a one-sided view on things.

The biggest lesson I learned from this story is, that, you do not give up on your team under any circumstances. Fight for them, protect them, and do whatever it takes to maintain their dignity and reputation. I knew I had a great team, I knew we could achieve anything we wanted, but as their Leader, I failed to fight their case. Something I will never forget and I will never repeat.

Thank you so much for reading my story.

Comment below or reach out to me if you can relate to this.