{"id":153,"date":"2026-10-14T14:11:54","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T06:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/?p=153"},"modified":"2026-10-14T14:11:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T06:11:55","slug":"founders-seems-to-know-what-works-then-why-are-they-struggling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/founders-seems-to-know-what-works-then-why-are-they-struggling\/","title":{"rendered":"Founders seems to know what works then why are they struggling?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At some point in 2018 I got so invested in Tennis that my YouTube feed was full of how to improve tennis videos. I would watch every grand slam, when I am not playing I am watching how to improve my game on YouTube or any reels on IG and this obsession took me to join this tennis academy called Ace<\/a> which wasn\u2019t that far from my home or office. I was playing there almost three times a week and yes my game did improve but something that improved even more was my relationship with the founder and we became good friends.
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In 2025 I took a career break from my then role of Country Head for Accenture Song and went about spending some time with my parents, brother and myself. My brother himself is an entrepreneur running his own business since he was 18 years old with my dad called Gulati School Uniforms<\/a>. This was the first time in years when I had time to be with him and mentally I was fully present with him. I saw how he operated and ran his business especially the logistic part. There would be tons of conversation with him about his challenges and how he has found the hacks around them and experimented and they seem to be working great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same feeling I had when I spent some time watching my tennis coach friend run his academy. The space in my mind made me observe things which otherwise I was completely blind to and this got me to draw a pattern between my coach and my brother and many such founders who understand their business inside out. They know where things are broken, they understand their customers, they can preempt who their staff will react and they are already moving thinking phase to doing phase. One thing that has always amazed me with these founders is their speed of execution. From the time they have an idea to the point it goes into execution is phenomenal. Each time they implemented their hack it would work, the vision, the execution the details everything will seem to work. And just when it starts working they get pulled into another crisis or opportunity or find something more pressing that needs their complete focus. Not to forget they have families to run just like you and me. Handing over the hack and the process to their staff more or less would have the same end, it would start with training \u2192 partial or weak execution \u2192 infinite patience from the founders \u2192 frustration and finally a premature death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have been super lucky to have this time on my hand to peacefully shadow these founders and observe what\u2019s going on without any judgement and I discovered the<\/em> founders always seem to know what\u2019s working and have a complete context to the variables which ensures the hack will work and it does<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Then what happens that the hack instead of helping the business grow becomes a point of contention between the staff and the founder. Few discoveries:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. The founder businesses DO NOT HAVE CORPORATE HIERARCHY<\/strong>: I know hierarchy as a word has always had a negative connotation and brings in memories of bureaucracy and red tape culture where authority is absolute and power is corrupt. But in this case I am talking about the corporate hierarchy as a pyramid structure of the team where the CEO has a COO or Senior Vice President, a Chief Marketing Officer has a marketing head. Each of the roles have someone below them who is being groomed to take on their role. The distance between the leader and his next in command is not that big. They can discuss, explain, deliberate and improve the process and the system. In the entrepreneur world there is the founder and the last mile execution staff. There is no Pyramid. The joke I had with my brother was you are the Chief Architect and then your have labor who knows how to lay the bricks, nothing in between. This gap may seem small but when it comes to process driven execution it becomes larger than the Pacific ocean which is the largest and deepest ocean in the world. There is no one to discuss or even explain the vision. It\u2019s simply too big a gap to fill.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The founders are simply by themselves<\/strong>: The founders do not have the IT department, the marketing department, the HR or any other help. They have to figure it out themselves. Each proposal, each client meeting, each new lead, each new process everything needs to be done by them on their own. We are talking about cyborgs and AI taking over humanity. We are having existential crisis as a race and these founders are still figuring out how to automate the process of sending invoices or how to create a system that can make proposals and costing. More often than not it\u2019s their wife doing it. After the kids go to sleep the couple sits down to wrap up banking transactions and making proposals. These are things they cannot show, share or discuss with anyone.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. The founders struggle with technology<\/strong>: With so much already on their shoulders there is no time to log into a system and start learning. Sure there are tons of SaaS systems that do tons of automation but all of these have steep learning curves. They need understanding of not just the system but also everything that goes into the mixer to make the system work. Think of website, so simple nowadays to set it up with one voice command but then there is domain pointing, there is content like imagery, finding a source of free image, selecting one (this is a process tougher than learning tennis), resizing it, compressing it, uploading, adding alt text, giving credit. Once all these small task add up its not a simple task anymore. And imagine there are so many micro task like this that it\u2019s just madness.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. The founders do it all:<\/strong> By the time the founder has implemented the hack, it\u2019s time to file the company report and the company secretary called to say the deadline is in one week so leave everything and come to my office. Each of these task is last minute and a can of worms that opens like the Russian dolls. Solve one and five more are born. It\u2019s a zombie movie scene where each one of them infests the other one and in a blink of eye there are so many that don\u2019t know where to start and where to run.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. The founders have their unique ways<\/strong> of doing business: Like a rive never follows the shortest straight path to the ocean, founders also find their own unique ways to tackle roadblocks and scale despite all the challenges. As the business grows it grows like a river flows, in a zig zag path with each obstacle being circumvented and a new path created. The founders know what they are doing and it makes perfect sense in that context but eventually becomes a roadblock for scale and growth because only they know it. The wisdom gets stored in their database and goes hiding under the layer of frustration which arises watching others do things without context. When I started building a booking engine for my coaches academy he told me something so interesting: not every student needs a court. The beginner students just need drills next to the court since they are still learning how to hold the racquet and get the hand eye coordination right that truly was a eureka moment for me that a straight forward court booking system will work against his business and not for it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \n

    We are talking about cyborgs and AI taking over humanity. We are having existential crisis as a race and these founders are still figuring out how to automate the process of sending invoices or how to create a system that can make proposals and costing. More often than not it\u2019s their wife doing it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    This year sometime I felt I have to help these guys claim their life back and it was not out of some awakening and purpose discovery but stemmed simply from the feeling that if I need more of their time then I have to free it for them so they can spend it with me having fun. Out of this feeling of monkeys dancing together was born Techno Ape<\/a>: An AI-based automation studio helping businesses put AI to work in practical, revenue-driving ways. I strongly feel the founders know what works. We the Apes make sure we can automate it in a unique way that is totally theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If you did find ay part that resonated with you do drop a hi in the comments or reach out to me here<\/a>, may be you have a unique idea that we can help scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The founders always seem to know what\u2019s working and have a complete context to the variables which ensures the hack will work and it does then what happens that the hack instead of helping the business grow becomes a point of contention between the staff and the founder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,10,32,33],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-local-seo","tag-malaysia-sme","tag-sme-founders","tag-startup-struggles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technoape.tech\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}