For most CAT aspirants, the exam feels like the peak of a long and arduous journey. Months of preparation collapse into a single score, and it is tempting to treat that number as a final verdict. Yet the real pressure often begins afterwards, when institutes stop asking how fast you solved questions and start watching how you think under constraint, how you choose, and what you are willing to cut or protect when every option has a cost.
That is why “what an IIM gives you” is a better question than “what an IIM gets you”. The salary narratives are flashy and loud but they rarely, if ever, capture the point. What survives and sustains year after year is the right mental model: seeing constraints early, reading situations without panic, and making decisions that protect the system rather than the ego. When those habits exist, even a bad month becomes a problem to solve. When they do not, even a good opportunity can become a slow leak.
Sarathbabu Elumalai, founder of FoodKing and an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, frames this advantage as structured judgement across stakeholders, the ability to weigh every decision across all the people it affects. He traces it back to a moment when structure mattered more than optimism. Within months of starting out, he says he had expanded into multiple food outlets that were “making money” but not enough profit to cover overheads, until the arithmetic caught up with him.
“I was totally broke at the end of eight months, with just ₹200 left in my pocket,” he recalls, describing a night he slept on a railway platform after missing a train and running out of options.
The recovery, he explains, began with decisions that felt unglamorous in the moment. He shut down his central kitchen and office, then reduced the number of outlets until the economics could breathe. The lesson he learned was as painful as it was simple: your idea cannot outrun your overheads for long. “Cut fixed costs first, then rebuild,” he advises, describing it as the first move when a business is bleeding cash.
For him, his years at IIM Ahmedabad were crucial in forming a way of thinking that refuses to isolate one variable from the rest. Case studies, he notes, trained him to check the same situation from the customer’s side, the business side, the operations side, the finance side, and the market side, instead of leaning on a single lens. Over time, that approach became a reflex, and it now shapes how he diagnoses businesses, including those he mentors.
He points to a recent mentoring call with a home-cooked food platform that had scale on paper, with thousands of home cooks, yet daily orders that stayed thin. The problem, he felt, was trust. The supply was wide, but quality was uneven, which made customers hesitant to repeat. His suggestion was to narrow supply to consistently strong cooks, focus on the PIN codes already showing demand, and raise prices only after quality became predictable. “People will pay more when they trust what arrives,” he says, arguing that growth follows when trust is built into the system, not when sign-ups are.
A similar realisation arrived early in his own work. He recalls how he once took on well-known corporate clients with low headcounts, assuming the association would translate into stability. It did not. “Volume, volume,” he emphasises, returning to the constraint that decides most food businesses. Reputation and recognition, he argues, do not replace a base that pays for people, operations, and cash flow.
That discipline of accepting constraints, he adds, was also what separated his fourth CAT attempt from the first three. Elumalai wrote CAT four times and cleared it only on the fourth. The shift, he suggests, came down to full commitment. “If you’re not 100% committed, don’t even open the book,” he chuckles. He remembers writing that retest while down with viral fever, treating illness as background noise rather than a reason to stop.
In business, pressure is less episodic and more relentless. Cash flow and payroll leave little room for fantasy, and stability cannot be postponed. He draws a hard line on responsibility, especially for young professionals caught in the clash between ambition and everyday obligations. “When people depend on you, that is the priority. When your child is hungry, that is your purpose. You cannot speak about higher goals if basic needs are not secure. Stability comes first. Purpose follows.”
What follows the test is less predictable than the routines that are built before it. The numbers lose their power surprisingly quickly, replaced by conversations, impressions, and the patterns others notice in you. Whether you are anticipating your attempt or looking back at your score, the path you have chosen asks for a different presence of mind, one that cannot be faked or borrowed. What matters now is not only what you know, but how you navigate what comes next, even when the course is uncertain.