Five Things I Learned Building a Business That Almost Broke Me
I sold my car to make payroll.
I asked friends’ parents for loans. I taught securitization companies how to evaluate my own financing requests. I sat in high-level technical meetings with no technical background and walked out with the project moving forward.
I lost over fifty consecutive bids before winning one.
Here is what each of those situations actually taught me.
1. The deadline is smarter than you are
I spent a full day unable to decide whether to pay 9,000 reais a month for an engineer I hadn’t budgeted for. The doubt was real. The alternatives were unclear.
What resolved it was the registration deadline. A week to get the engineer on record. Bids scheduled. The cost of not deciding became calculable and concrete.
The deadline eliminated the options that weren’t actually viable, leaving only the one that was. Clarity by elimination.
When you can’t decide, look for the deadline. It often knows something your deliberation doesn’t.
2. Your network is not your contacts. It’s your character.
The $300,000 investment that funded my company’s growth came from someone I had known for a decade — someone I had once told to hold his money because the structure I was entering wasn’t solid enough for it.
That decision, made ten years earlier with no expectation of return, was the actual investment. The capital was just the interest.
Behave well in small moments. Consistently. Over years. Don’t track it. The account builds on its own.
3. Your employees need certainty more than you need comfort
Payroll was always the first priority. Not because employees are more important than suppliers in some abstract sense — but because the operational capacity of a company runs on trust.
I paid subcontractors late. I delayed suppliers. I didn’t pay myself. I sold my car. The team always got paid.
Establish your hierarchy before the crisis. When the pressure hits, you execute it — you don’t invent it.
4. You don’t need to know everything. You need to know your domain.
I walked into technical meetings with no engineering background. I managed this by being very clear about what I did and didn’t own.
I didn’t fake expertise I didn’t have. I operated with full confidence in the expertise I did have — and directed the conversation to the level where that expertise was relevant.
People can feel the difference between someone performing knowledge and someone operating within their actual domain. The latter is more credible, not less.
5. The months with no results are the most important months
I entered over fifty bids and lost all of them. None of this felt like progress. It was progress.
The people who build things that last are the ones who keep moving when the feedback is silence — when the results haven’t arrived yet and there’s no way to know if they will. That period is where the separation happens. Most people stop there. The ones who don’t end up with something.
Vinicius Araujo learned all of this the hard way. His book, No Eggs, No Chicken, No Pan, is the field guide he didn’t have.