The Road Not Taken: Leaving My Startup For Business School

I had spent years building a startup. And just as it began to gain momentum, I decided to leave it.

The journey to that crossroads, however, had begun long before.

In 2022, as a newly qualified Chartered Accountant, life felt remarkably settled. I had followed in my father’s footsteps. Becoming a Chartered Accountant had demanded years of discipline, sacrifice, and perseverance. For a while, it felt like the natural culmination of my educational journey.

Yet even as I celebrated the achievement, a lingering question remained: What next?

I wanted to venture beyond the boundaries of what I already knew— to move beyond the technical confines of accounting; develop a broader understanding of strategy, finance, and operations; and eventually take on roles where I could contribute to decisions shaping a business rather than simply reporting on them.

As I began studying the trajectories of global business leaders, one qualification appeared repeatedly: an MBA.

Like countless aspiring applicants before me, I soon found myself immersed in the world of business school research. Cambridge, Harvard, Wharton – all the big names in global business education initially seemed impossibly distant. Gaining admission required considerably more than a strong academic record and consistent career success.

There was the GMAT, the essays, recommendations, interviews, career plans—and, above all, the challenge of convincing an admissions committee that my past experiences formed a coherent foundation for the future I wanted to build.

But the application itself was only one part of the equation.

Eventually, in 2025, after securing the score I had worked towards, a far more consequential decision loomed: whether to leave behind a business I had spent years building in pursuit of an MBA.

At first, the entire process felt like an enormous puzzle, with no obvious solution. In hindsight, however, the pieces were easier to connect than they appeared. Each question, once unraveled, revealed the next, gradually bringing the larger picture into focus. What was required was not a shortcut, but consistency, curiosity, and the patience to see the process through.

The decision, therefore, was to take it one step at a time.

And the first step was the GMAT.

1. THE GMAT

I enrolled at a local coaching institute and began preparing for my first GMAT attempt.

The preparation, however, was anything but methodical. I studied whenever I could find the time, worked through questions without sufficiently examining my mistakes, and measured progress by the number of problems solved.

The result was predictable:

I scored a dismal 480 on my final mock. I remember the moment vividly. A sudden burst of heat. Sweat forming across my forehead. A feeling I had not experienced in a long time.

It was a sobering number. More unsettling than the score itself was the more consequential question that confronted me:

Was I genuinely competitive for the schools I aspired to attend?

The 480 made one thing clear: there was a long way to go.

Instead of dwelling on the score, I began looking for answers. Conversations followed—with peers who had scored highly, students and alumni from schools I admired, and professionals who had already navigated the MBA journey.

The objective was not to uncover a secret formula. It was to identify patterns.

One conversation stayed with me in particular. A friend who had scored 750 and gained admission to Wharton recommended a tutor in India, Top One Perce. This person helped me understand something I had overlooked: structure mattered as much as effort.

The structure to crack was more analytical. It was about understanding why the answers were wrong, distinguishing conceptual gaps from careless errors, and valuing accuracy over volume and reflection over repetition.

For instance, I noticed that I was often rushing through quantitative questions I considered straightforward, overlooking a small detail in the wording and arriving at an incorrect answer despite knowing the underlying concept.

Instead of simply marking the question wrong and moving on, I began maintaining an error log, recording not only the correct approach but also the reason behind my mistake—whether it was a conceptual gap, a misread question, or an avoidable calculation error.

That realization fundamentally altered my approach.

Preparation became more deliberate.

The approach worked. A more systematic, deliberate, and feedback-driven preparation improved my score by 200 points.

That improvement changed the conversation. I was no longer simply hoping to enter a good business school; I had given myself a genuine opportunity to compete for some of the world’s leading MBA programs.

But the most valuable outcome was not the score.

It was the lesson that meaningful improvement rarely comes from effort alone. It comes from diagnosing weaknesses honestly, seeking perspectives beyond your own, asking better questions, and allowing consistency to compound over time.

In hindsight, the GMAT was never really the obstacle.

My approach to it was.

2. THE BUSINESS IDEA

With the GMAT finally behind me, another ambition briefly took centre stage.

For more than two years, I had been contemplating the idea of starting a business of my own. With one long-standing goal finally behind me, it felt like the right time to stop ideating and start building.

In 2024, I co-founded Fimansy Consulting, a boutique consulting firm in India. The original idea was straightforward: make financial management more accessible to growing businesses. The difference was our technology-first platform, which leveraged AI and API integrations to automate accounting processes through SaaS platforms. At the time, only a handful of Indian companies were offering a similar model, giving us an edge in helping growing businesses access and manage their finance functions.

The ambition, however, was considerably larger.

At the outset, Fimansy was something I expected to build alongside my professional career. I had no idea how central it would eventually become to my MBA story.

In many ways, Fimansy changed the narrative of my profile. I was no longer simply a consultant advising businesses; I was becoming a founder building one.

Building a company while working full-time was an entirely different education. There was no syllabus. No prescribed methodology. No answer key. There were simply problems—and the responsibility of figuring out how to solve them.

I found myself involved in everything from establishing the business and hiring people to developing proposals, speaking with prospective clients, and designing internal processes.

Some problems were daunting. Others were exhausting.

Over time, something unexpected became apparent: the business was quietly preparing me for the MBA journey.

Almost every difficult situation at Fimansy eventually became a potential answer to an interview question. The startup became my practice field.

More importantly, the answers were not manufactured to fit what an admissions committee might want to hear.

I didn’t have to manufacture compelling answers. I had lived them.

Fimansy gave me something more valuable than anecdotes. It gave me experiences that forced me to confront ambiguity, make decisions with incomplete information, and take responsibility for the consequences.

By the time my first set of application essays was ready, it was already December of 2024. Many of the schools I was considering were approaching their later application rounds. I chose to apply.

I submitted applications to the National University of Singapore, UCLA, and Oxford for the 2025 intake.

Unsurprisingly, the rejections followed. Having applied in the later rounds, when many of the available places had already been filled, the outcome was disappointing but hardly unexpected. Still, for the first time, I seriously questioned whether the MBA was still worth pursuing.

At the same time, the startup had begun to take off. As a young boutique consulting firm, we had acquired more than 20 clients within our first six months. Revenue was significantly ahead of projections, and the team was growing rapidly.

Perhaps the business was the path. Perhaps the MBA no longer was.

At such a juncture, leaving a successful startup—and stepping away from its day-to-day operations—hardly seemed like the obvious decision.

The MBA rejections only reinforced that view….until one realization changed the equation.

Fimansy might not fuel my MBA. But an MBA could fuel Fimansy.

3. THE RESURRECTION OF THE MBA DREAM

The greatest potential benefit of an MBA was not the qualification itself. It was the opportunity to be exposed to new markets and ideas. More than that, I could build a network of extraordinary people – the kind of individuals who could challenge and broaden the way I saw the world.

That thought brought me back to two companies that had inspired the original vision for Fimansy: TCS and Infosys.

These were two Indian companies that had transformed themselves from domestic service providers into globally competitive businesses.

The question suddenly became more ambitious:

What if Fimansy could do in finance what TCS and Infosys had done in IT?

That shift in perspective changed everything.

The question was no longer “Why an MBA?”

It became: “Why not an MBA?”

So I started again.

This time, I approached the process from an entirely different perspective. Rather than asking which schools I could realistically gain admission to, I began asking a more fundamental question:

“Which school is right for what I want to build?”

The MBA was no longer simply a credential or a means to advance my career. It became an accelerator that could help turn Fimansy’s into a global ambition.

4. CAMBRIDGE WAS MEANT TO BE

With greater clarity about where I wanted to go, I began looking for schools that offered more than strong academics or impressive rankings: an ecosystem with access to entrepreneurs, investors, operators, and ideas.

I explored schools across Asia and Europe.

I applied to SMU, IMD and IESE, and eventually Cambridge Judge.

This time, the process was fundamentally different.

I wasn’t trying to reverse-engineer my story around what I imagined an admissions committee wanted to hear. Instead, I was drawing from the experiences I had actually lived, allowing the schools to see my journey for what it was rather than what I thought it needed to be.

Then came the decisions.

I received offers from several schools.

After years of uncertainty, I had arrived at an entirely unfamiliar problem: I had to choose.

And then came the email that made the decision considerably easier.

“Congratulations. Welcome to Cambridge.”

I knew almost immediately where I wanted to go.

The University’s eight-century legacy and global reputation were impossible to overlook.

But ultimately, it was not the name that persuaded me.

It was the ecosystem. The people. The culture.

Cambridge’s Silicon Fen, one of Europe’s leading technology and innovation clusters, offered an exceptional environment in which to pursue an MBA. The combination of a remarkably diverse cohort, renowned faculty, and the global standing of the University of Cambridge created an experience that few other schools could match.

Perhaps it was destiny that got me there. After all, my first school as a child was named Bombay Cambridge School.

EVERY REJECTION WAS A REDIRECTION

Now, just a few weeks from beginning my MBA, I find myself looking back at a journey that once seemed remarkably unlikely.

It began with a 480 on a GMAT mock test.

There were failed attempts, disappointing scores, rejected applications and moments when I genuinely questioned whether I should walk away.

When I began this journey, I thought of the MBA as a destination. I no longer do.

The MBA is another beginning.

The rejections forced me to become more deliberate about what I wanted, more honest about where I was falling short, and more thoughtful about why I wanted an MBA in the first place.

Looking back, I no longer see those rejections as closed doors.

They were redirections.

And perhaps, in the end, they were taking me exactly where I needed to go.

Cambridge was meant to be.

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Aman Attra is the co-founder of Fimansy Consulting and an MBA candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School, Class of 2027. A Chartered Accountant from India, he has previously worked across consulting and banking before turning to entrepreneurship. Beyond his professional pursuits, Aman has a background in competitive cricket and enjoys running and racquet sports. His interests in business, sport, and entrepreneurship continue to shape his journey as he prepares to begin his MBA at Cambridge. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.

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