How I Failed Three Times Before I Finally Built Something That Lasts
- Jun 26
- 6 min read
Kalpi Prasad is the founder of Renown Lending, a specialist Australian private lender focused on asset-backed and construction finance, and Renown Wealth, its investment arm serving high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and sophisticated investors.
Most people who meet me today see a private credit business and a loan book worth close to $400 million. What they don't see straight away is the road that got me here: a prison sentence, a long stretch of closed doors, and more rejection than I can easily count. I have failed in ways that were public, costly, and entirely my own doing. Here is what each of those failures taught me, and why I believe almost anyone can rebuild from the bottom up, as long as they are willing to be honest about how they ended up there.
Why I talk openly about failing
When I sit down with a potential client for the first time, I often tell them within the first few minutes that I spent time in prison for fraud. Some people get up and leave. Many stay. I have learned that the people who stay are usually the ones I want to work with anyway.
I lead with my failures on purpose. In business, and especially in finance, there is enormous pressure to present a flawless version of yourself. I tried that once, and it nearly destroyed me. So now I do the opposite. I think a leader earns trust not by pretending to be perfect, but by being honest about where they have fallen short and what they did about it. That is the lens I want you to read this article through. These are not war stories meant to impress you. They are the three failures that shaped the way I run a business today.
Failure one: the choices that sent me to prison
My first failure was not a business that collapsed. It was a series of choices I made as a young man that crossed a line I had no business crossing.
Years ago, I defrauded the Australian Taxation Office and harmed people who trusted me, including an international student who came to me for help. I pleaded guilty. I went to prison. There is no version of that story where I am the hero, and I have stopped trying to tell one. I was young and I was reckless, and I caused real damage to real people. I still think about the people I wronged, and a large part of why I work the way I do now is that I want to prove, through actions rather than words, that I have changed.
I share this first because it is the failure against which everything else is measured. When your lowest point is a matter of public record, you lose the option of hiding. Strangely, that turned out to be a gift. I could either spend my life managing a secret, or I could build something in full view of everyone who knew the worst thing about me. I chose the second path.
Failure two: discovering that every door was closed
My second failure was quieter, but in some ways it hurt more. I assumed that once I had served my time, I could simply rejoin the working world and start again. I was wrong.
The traditional career pathways I had counted on were closed to me. Employers did not return calls. Relationships I had taken for granted fell away. Some of the people I had gone to school with would no longer acknowledge me, and several members of my own family stopped speaking to me. Every conventional route back into a stable professional life seemed to end at a locked door.
For a while, I treated this as a second sentence I had to serve. The failure here was not that the doors were closed. It was that I spent months believing the closed doors were the end of the story, rather than a signal that I needed to build a different kind of door entirely. The turning point came when I stopped asking the existing system to let me back in and started asking what I could create that did not depend on its permission.
Failure three: nearly losing the business before it started
My third failure happened at the very beginning of Renown Lending, the non-bank private credit firm I founded in 2023. I had spotted a real gap in the market. Since the 2018 financial services royal commission, the bigger banks had pulled back from lending to riskier, less established borrowers, and whole categories of people, including small business owners, hospitality operators and commercial property developers, were struggling to access fair finance. I knew from painful personal experience how damaging it is to be locked out of the system. I thought my story would help me connect with the people I wanted to serve.
Instead, in the early days, my story kept costing me deals. I would disclose my past, and the conversation would end. Investors hesitated. Brokers were wary. There were stretches where it felt like the business would fail before it had really begun, not because the idea was wrong, but because no one could see past where I had come from.
The failure was not the rejection itself. It was that I almost let the rejection convince me to stop being transparent. I considered burying my past, leading with the loan book instead of the truth, and becoming exactly the kind of person who had gotten me into trouble in the first place. Choosing to keep telling the truth, even when it cost me, was the hardest business decision I have made. It is also the one that eventually built the trust that the company now runs on.
What three failures taught me
Looking back, each failure gave me something I could not have learned any other way. Prison taught me accountability. When you cannot outrun your worst decision, you learn to own it completely, and ownership turns out to be the foundation of every honest business relationship. The closed doors taught me to build rather than beg.
When the existing system has no place for you, you stop waiting to be chosen and start creating value on your own terms. The near-collapse of the business taught me that transparency is not a weakness to be managed but a competitive advantage. In an industry where ASIC is increasingly scrutinising private lenders and trust is in short supply, being the person who tells you the uncomfortable truth up front is worth more than any pitch.
Today, that hard-won approach to ethical due diligence is central to how we operate. Sometimes the most valuable thing a lender can say is no, and I learned that the hard way.
How a second chance became a business model
The reason I keep telling this story is that my whole business is built on the idea that people and ventures deserve a fair second look. Renown has now funded around 300 deals across residential, commercial and small business lending, and we have committed significant private capital specifically to back struggling, family-owned businesses that the larger institutions had written off.
That is not a coincidence. I lend to the kinds of borrowers I once was: people with a real plan who do not fit neatly into the traditional system. Asian investors I work with often put it well, telling me that the real strength of an economy is the mums and dads running small businesses. I agree. Giving capable people a fair chance is not charity. It is good business, and it is the most honest way I know to make amends for the harm I once caused.
If there is one idea I want you to take from my three failures, it is this. Your lowest point does not have to be your final chapter, but only if you are willing to be honest about it, learn from it, and build something useful out of what you learn.
Start your own comeback today
If you have failed, been written off, or felt that the conventional doors are closed to you, I want you to know that a setback and a life sentence are not the same thing. The difference is what you choose to build next.
If you are a small business owner or developer who has been turned away by the banks, or simply someone trying to rebuild after a hard chapter, I would like to help. You can learn more about how we approach fair, transparent lending at Renown Lending, and if you want a deeper guide to this part of the market, my book, Private Lending in Australia, walks developers and alternative investors through how it really works. Reach out, tell me your story, and let's talk about what comes next.
Read more from Kalpi Prasad
Kalpi Prasad, Private Lending & Wealth Specialist
Kalpi Prasad is the founder of Renown Lending, a specialist Australian private lender focused on asset-backed and construction finance. Through its sister division, Renown Wealth, he connects high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and sophisticated investors with secured private credit opportunities. Kalpi works hands-on across deal origination, credit assessment, and transaction structuring, bringing a disciplined, lender-protective approach to complex commercial finance. He writes about private credit, property and development finance, and the growing role of non-bank lending in the Australian market. His mission is to make private capital more transparent and accessible for borrowers and investors alike.
