When I Spent All My Money on an Apartment, a Leaky Pipe Taught Me an Essential Business Lesson When something is truly your problem, you figure out how to fix it.
By Pav Kudlac Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the September 2021 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
I spent all my money buying my first flat — which meant I had no money to fix my first homeowner's problem. This was 2007, and I was a broke 20-something who'd pushed himself to the limit. I was sleeping on an air mattress because I couldn't afford furniture. Boxes were everywhere. Then I noticed a leaky pipe under the bath, which created a soggy puddle. I couldn't afford a plumber but didn't want to introduce myself to the neighbors by crashing through their wet ceiling.
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What to do? I took the bus to a nearby store and talked with the nice chap behind the counter. He explained how to fix it, let me try it out on some junk they had lying around the place, and sold me a pipe cutter and a bit of pipework. I went back home, pushed my head under the bath, and — admittedly, with a little swearing — got the job done.
It taught me a lesson that has since become a bit of a mantra for me: Upgrade your problems.
Having a soggy bathroom floor is a problem — and the day before I bought the place, I would have had a landlord to call.
But once the place was mine, this became my problem. I saw this as progress: You must own your own property to take care of this sort of situation.
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Years later, when I founded my professional services company, Ovyo, with my business partner, Adam, this mantra became core to how we approach the business. There have been many problems, and there will continue to be new ones. However, we remember the reason we have these problems — it's because we run our own business! A late-paying customer is a problem, but it's one we encounter only if we have paying customers. A mistake at our Bengaluru office is a problem, but it's one we encounter only because we have offices internationally.
That is why I still keep my pipe cutter on my desk today. It reminds me that, no matter my level of frustration, I am fortunate to face the problems I do. The more I solve them, the more I upgrade to even better ones.
