The Reality of Building Without a Corporate Background

By Chethan Kumar N P, Founder & CEO – Bayard Vacations

I didn't come from a corporate background.

I never had a job before starting this journey. I had no training in SOPs, no understanding of C-suites, no idea what "structured leadership" even meant. For a long time, I genuinely believed business was simple: there are owners, and there are employees. That's it.

What I didn't realise then — and what took me years to truly understand — is how much more complex, and how much more human, it actually is.

Where It Really Started

My journey didn't begin with a strategy deck or a business plan.

It began with hesitation.

I stammered. And because of that, I held myself back — from expressing ideas, from entering conversations, from being seen. The fear of being judged quietly ran a lot of my early decisions. At one point, I chose the idea of a "job" over entrepreneurship — not because I wanted stability, but because it felt safer than being exposed.

But life doesn't always respect our safe choices.

When I eventually stepped into entrepreneurship, I had no theory. No framework. No mentor who had walked this exact path before me. What I had was a problem in front of me, and the simple, urgent need to solve it. That's where my real education began — not in a classroom, not in a boardroom, but in the middle of things going wrong.

Learning Business the Hard Way

In the early days, business felt almost pure.

There were no processes. No hierarchy. No confusion about who does what. There was just: a problem, a solution, and the need to survive. Profit mattered, yes — but more than profit, it was about solving something real for someone who trusted you with their holiday, their honeymoon, their family trip.

Every day was a lesson. Every decision was ours — completely ours — to make and own. There were no benchmarks to chase, no competitors to compare ourselves against. Just building, one booking at a time.

Looking back, that simplicity was a gift. I just didn't know it then.

The Moment Everything Changed: Hiring People

Growth changes everything — but not in the way you expect.

The moment we started hiring, the hardest lessons began. I quickly understood something that no business book had ever explained clearly to me:

An owner thinks, "I am giving everything to build this."
An employee thinks, "What do I get in return?"

Neither is wrong. Both are valid. But the gap between those two mindsets — if you don't see it clearly — is where most leadership struggles begin. I learned this the hard way, through decisions that cost us time, money, and sometimes, good people.

Scaling Is Not Growth—It's Complexity

When we started scaling, I thought the hard part would be growth.

It wasn't.

Managing people was.

We built our team mostly from freshers — young people with no travel industry background, no polished resumes. But they had something I've rarely seen in experienced hires: genuine ownership. If one client left a negative review, it didn't just affect the person who handled that booking. The whole team felt it. That kind of collective accountability — where everyone takes a stranger's disappointment personally — cannot be manufactured. It is built, slowly, through culture.

I didn't engineer that culture. It grew on its own, because the people we brought in early genuinely cared.

The "Experience vs Culture" Mistake

There came a point where we believed that hiring experienced professionals would push us to the next level.

Technically, they were strong. Professionally, they were polished. On paper, it looked like the right move.

But something didn't fit.

They brought systems from their previous environments — systems that worked perfectly well there, but clashed with how we had always done things here. The friction wasn't about skill. It was about alignment. I learned then that experience only adds value when it fits the culture it enters. Otherwise, it doesn't elevate things — it disrupts them.

This wasn't their failure. It was my lesson.

What a Team Actually Means

I've stopped thinking about team in terms of org charts or job descriptions.

For me, a team is simply: a group of people working toward one shared objective.

That objective, at Bayard, has always been the same — build something meaningful, serve the client well, and grow together. The rewards differ: employees earn salaries, owners take profit, clients receive experiences. But the effort is shared. The founder isn't above that effort. I see myself as part of the team — not above it.

That shift in perspective changed how I lead.

The Workforce Is Changing — And So Must We

Something has shifted fundamentally in the way people think about work.

Earlier, people worked for stability, income, and security — because those things weren't guaranteed. Now, for many young people, the basics are already in place. What they're looking for is something harder to give: stimulation, flexibility, and meaning.

At the same time, the external environment has accelerated beyond recognition. Ideas get outdated faster. Competition is everywhere. What used to take five years to change now changes in six months. And with AI entering every corner of business — including ours — that pace will only increase.

This isn't a threat. But it does demand a different kind of honesty from leaders. You can't manage a 2026 team with a 2010 mindset.

The Danger of Too Many Comparisons

We live in a time of radical over-exposure.

Everyone is watching everyone else — comparing companies, cultures, funding rounds, team sizes, office setups, LinkedIn posts. It has created this strange pressure where businesses feel they need to look and operate like someone else to be considered serious.

To me, it's like comparing a naturally grown fruit to a chemically enhanced one. Both may look similar on the surface. But they weren't built the same way, they don't nourish in the same way, and one of them carries a cost that isn't visible yet.

Not everything that works in a large corporate needs to exist in a growing startup. And not everything about a startup needs to be defended against corporate thinking. The key is to know what you are building — and build that, honestly.

What I Actually Believe Now

I don't see the world in terms of corporate vs startup, or employee vs owner. Those are frames, not truths.

What I believe in is clarity.

I work for two people: my client and my team. I see myself as part of both, not outside either. The real mission — the one that keeps me going — is bigger than revenue or business growth. It is about building an ecosystem: clients, team, vendors, partners, and systems that support all of them together. When each of them grows, the business grows. That's not a strategy. It's just what I've seen to be true.

A Final Honest Thought

I didn't learn business from corporate.

I learned it from mistakes that stung. From people who trusted me before I earned it. From pressure that felt impossible until it wasn't. From responsibility that arrived before I felt ready.

And I'm still learning.

Because business — real business — is not about having the right structure or the right processes. It is about staying relevant in a world that keeps changing faster than any of us expected. It is about staying human in systems that often reward removing humanity. It is about building things that outlast the panic of the moment.

That's the only business education that has ever really mattered to me.

Chethan Kumar N P is the Founder & CEO of Bayard Vacations, a travel company based in Bengaluru, India, building experiences for travellers across 100+ destinations.

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