Stop Trying to Create Entrepreneurs Out of Job Seekers

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work by Saurabh Mukherjea, Nandita Rajhansa and Sapana Bhavsar. It’s a book about India on the edge: 8 million graduates a year, shrinking salaried jobs, AI quietly eating white‑collar work, and a middle class trying to hold onto an old story that no longer fits.

If the old “study hard, get a degree, get a safe job” script is dying, then the only real safety left is in how we think, decide, and build. The story below is one example of what that shift looks like on the ground.

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You Can’t Manufacture Entrepreneurs

In 2013, a billionaire Indian founder tried to solve a simple problem: help ordinary families earn ₹30,000 a month from their own business. He had capital, credibility, and a beautiful blueprint called “Business in a Box.” Three years later, almost nothing worked – until he changed one uncomfortable assumption most founders still cling to.

Anand Deshpande built a ₹70,000+ crore IT services company, Persistent Systems, on a simple personal motto: learn, earn, return.

In his “return” phase, he started seeing the same pattern across India’s small towns: families working brutally hard inside tiny shops and micro‑businesses, yet unable to cross the line into a stable, decent life. Anand picked a clear target: help a family earn at least ₹30,000 a month from their own business. If he could solve that, he thought, he could move millions of people a notch up the ladder.

So he launched deAsra and designed what every management consultant loves: a complete “Business in a Box”.
A 6×6 grid laying out everything an entrepreneur needed to do: market analysis, pricing, compliance, working capital, hiring, bookkeeping, marketing, and so on. If a would‑be entrepreneur followed the plan, they should, in theory, have a functioning business.

On paper, it was flawless.
In the real world, almost nobody used it.

Early‑stage founders didn’t want to sit and fill out detailed grids. They were improvising, hustling, reacting. The people deAsra reached through skilling and education partners weren’t really entrepreneurs at all – they were training for jobs, not trying to create them.

After a few years, deAsra had helped roughly 3,000 businesses. For most NGOs that would be a success. For Anand, it was proof the model was wrong. The gap between the PowerPoint and the pavement was too wide.

So he flipped the problem.

Instead of trying to manufacture entrepreneurs from job‑seekers, deAsra narrowed its focus to people who were already running a micro‑business and were frustrated by its limits. These owners had real customers, real cashflow, and very real pain.

And instead of offering a grand, all‑inclusive “Business in a Box”, deAsra disaggregated its help into small, concrete jobs:

• Set up a GST registration.

• Secure a working capital loan.

• Fix basic bookkeeping.

• Standardize one process.

• Run a simple promo that actually moves inventory.

Each service was defined by a specific outcome an owner already cared about, not by what looked “complete” to an expert.

With this shift, adoption took off. Technology let deAsra deliver narrow, well‑defined interventions at scale, instead of hoping busy, under‑resourced founders would embrace a full curriculum. The organization stopped trying to convert the uninterested and started pouring leverage into the already‑committed.

For Anand, the lesson was humbling: the constraint wasn’t intelligence, motivation, or even capital. It was who he chose to serve and how he defined the job he was doing for them.

That choice made the difference between a smart idea that sat in a binder and a system that actually moved livelihoods.

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Lessons

1. Don’t sell transformation to people who want a job.
   If someone’s core goal is employment, you will exhaust yourself trying to turn them into an owner. Your best leverage is with people who already decided to bet on themselves.

2. Design for real behavior, not your ideal user.
   Entrepreneurs won’t complete 36‑cell grids; neither will your customers or your team. Tools must match how people actually work under pressure, not how they behave in workshops.

3. Narrow from “everything” to the next painful step.
   “Business in a Box” tried to solve the whole journey. The scaled version solved one concrete bottleneck at a time. Specific jobs get done; vague missions get nodded at.

4. Scale by disaggregating, then productizing.
   Breaking support into small, outcome‑based services let deAsra use tech, standardize, and reach far more businesses. The same move exists in almost every company: unbundle the value, then systematize delivery.

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On Monday, do this

1. Audit your ICP
   List your current customers or users. Mark who is already “all‑in” on the outcome you serve vs who is half‑interested or externally pressured. Decide, in writing, that your next 10 customers will come only from the already‑committed group.

2. Kill one beautiful but unused artifact
   Find the equivalent of your 6×6 grid: a deck, dashboard, playbook, or process nobody on the front lines actually uses. Either strip it down to the 20% they do use or retire it.

3. Define the single next bottleneck you solve
   Rewrite your core offer in one line: “We help [very specific customer] go from [current state] to [next milestone] by [mechanism].” Remove anything that isn’t part of that next step.

4. Disaggregate one “big” service
   Take a flagship project or retainer and split it into 3–5 standalone micro‑services with clear outcomes and prices. Ask: “If a scrappy founder could only buy one, which would hurt enough to pay for today?” Build that one out first.

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One last thing

The middle‑class script might be breaking, but that’s exactly where builders get their chance. In a world of brittle plans, the people who stay close to reality and keep adjusting will quietly own the next chapter.

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I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.