The Mumbai entrepreneur on why an MBA, a marketing career, and two decades of watching people work turned out to be the perfect training for something completely different.
Sixteen years. An MBA. A career that looked excellent on paper and felt, eventually, like a ceiling. At 41, Mehernosh Subedar stopped climbing someone else’s ladder. Here is what he built instead — and what it taught him about starting over.
The industry he chose surprised people. Not finance, not consulting, not something that mapped neatly onto his marketing background. Recruitment. His reasoning was characteristically precise: sixteen years of watching people work across different departments had given him something most recruiters spend years trying to develop — an instinctive understanding of what a role actually requires, and what kind of person will actually thrive in it. “I enjoy matching the right people to the right job,” he says. For Mehernosh, recruitment was not a pivot. It was an application.
He is candid about what came next.
The first year was hard. Revenues were hard to come by. Mehernosh — who had spent two decades being the person who knew what he was doing — had to sit with the unfamiliar discomfort of being a beginner. Not for a week. For months.
“In my first year of recruitment, while revenues were hard to come by, the learning was very good.”
Read that again.
A difficult year, reframed not as a loss but as an investment. That is not spin. That is how Mehernosh Subedar thinks — and it is probably why he is still here.
What helped was the infrastructure that Talent Corner HR Services provided. As a franchise partner, Mehernosh had access to two decades of hiring experience, established systems for billing and collections, and a support structure that meant he could focus on the actual work of recruitment rather than the operational complexity of running a business from scratch. “Once you teach a child how to walk, he will learn to run by himself,” he says of the support model. “They are always there whenever you are stuck somewhere.” For someone building something new after a long corporate career, that kind of scaffolding — present when you need it, invisible when you don’t — made a significant difference.
Over the last couple of years, Mehernosh’s business has grown — and so has he. The professional growth shows in the clients he now works with, the positions he fills, the confidence that comes from having done this long enough to know what good work looks like. The personal growth shows in something quieter: patience, developed not as a virtue but as a professional discipline. His next move is deliberate — he plans to grow his team, gradually, at a pace the business can sustain. In recruitment, you do not hire people you cannot pay. That plan is its own answer.
His analogy for this mindset is unexpected and precisely right. Roger Federer won approximately fifty percent of all the points he played in his career. Fifty percent. And he did not do too badly. Mehernosh applies the same logic to recruitment: a forty to fifty percent success rate on positions is genuinely good. The goal is not perfection. The goal is consistency, persistence, and the discipline to keep going when the results are not yet visible.
For anyone considering a similar transition — particularly those with corporate experience who feel the ceiling closing in — Mehernosh’s advice is grounded and practical. Understand the work before you start. Bring your corporate knowledge with you — it is more relevant than you think. Develop patience before you need it. And find a structure that lets you learn without having to build everything from scratch at the same time.
Mehernosh Subedar is still under construction. Deliberately, patiently, at a pace he controls. For a man who spent sixteen years inside organisations that moved fast and broke things, that is not a small thing. That is the whole point.
Mehernosh Subedar is a franchise partner at Talent Corner HR Services, based in Mumbai. He holds an MBA in Marketing and brings over sixteen years of corporate experience to the recruitment industry.
About Talent Corner HR Services: Talent Corner HR Services is India’s leading recruitment franchise network, with over 90 active franchise partners across more than 25 cities. Founded in 2002, the company has successfully filled over 25,000 positions for 3,100+ client companies across India.
