“I don’t want to follow the herd. I’m going to make my own life.”
Sneha said this describing the instinct that has shaped almost every decision of her adult life, starting with the one she made straight out of college.
It sounds like a throwaway line until you count how many times, she actually acted on it. Skip the MBA everyone else was queueing up for. Move to another country for a boyfriend, on the condition that it came with a wedding first. Quit a banking job she loved because she wanted her mornings back. None of it looks dramatic from the outside. All of it required the same quiet, repeated refusal to do the expected thing simply because it was expected.
At Decoding Draupadi, we aim to push forward more female voices and share stories of SUPER women who are rewriting their stories.
Sneha Jain is the co-founder of Bay Leaf, a Mumbai salon chain she built with her business partner Gauri that has grown to ten outlets over nine years. Before that, she spent over a decade in banking, at ICICI Bank in London, ABN AMRO as a lobby head at their Sakhar Bhavan branch, and four years at Deutsche Bank. She graduated from Mithibai College with a B.Com, choosing to start working straight away instead of pursuing an MBA so her younger sister, four years her junior, could go on to top her university in psychology in the US. Sneha started her first salon business, Basel, from scratch, sold it in 2019, and built Bay Leaf right after. She is now also building a coaching practice alongside it. We sat down with her to talk about why she quit a banking job she genuinely loved, what nine years of running a business with a friend as her partner has taught her, and how she is raising a teenage daughter to make her own decisions, badly timed math classes included.
Here are our key takeaways from our chat:
1. Skipping the traditional path isn’t reckless. It’s just a different kind of confidence.
Everyone around her was preparing for CET and an MBA, the default next step after a commerce degree. The financial situation at home wasn’t desperate, but there wasn’t comfortable room for another two years of study either, especially with a younger sister who was clearly the sharper student and deserved a shot at studying abroad. So the decision was made early and without much agonising: skip the MBA, start working, let her sister’s education come first.
What’s easy to miss is that this wasn’t a sacrifice dressed up as a virtue, it was a calculated bet on courage over credentials. An average student in school and college, with no illusions about getting into an IIM anyway, chose to start earning and learning on the job instead. It worked, not because the degree didn’t matter, but because the willingness to walk into rooms unqualified on paper and prove otherwise mattered more.
2. Quitting a job you love isn’t proof that something is wrong with the job. It’s proof something else is right.
Sneha didn’t leave Deutsche Bank because she was unhappy there. It was, by her own account, one of the best places she ever worked, with a boss she is still in touch with today. The real reason surfaced after her daughter Vedika was born: back from maternity leave, giving it her honest best shot, she still couldn’t gather the courage to leave the house at 6 pm every evening and feel fully present for either her job or her child.
The bigger tell is what happened next. Before the baby even arrived, she and her husband took out a one crore housing loan for a bigger home in Mumbai, and then, once she quit, they rented that new home out and lived in a small rented flat for four years to make the finances work. That is not the story of someone running from a job. It is the story of someone running toward a specific kind of freedom, flexibility, and being willing to structurally rearrange her finances to get it.
3. Financial independence isn’t about the money in the bank. It’s about who gets to say no.
The line comes up almost casually: if you are financially independent, you have the power to say no. Homemakers should ideally have that same power too, but in practice, it is rarely extended to them the same way. It is a small observation with a large implication, because the ability to say no to a bad job, a bad boss, or a bad situation has almost nothing to do with how much courage a person has in the abstract, and everything to do with whether they can actually afford the consequences of saying it.
This tracks with what larger research on gender and economic opportunity keeps finding: closing the financial gap between men and women does more than move numbers on a balance sheet, it reshapes what women feel free to choose. Advancing women’s economic parity is ultimately a story about agency, not just income. At Decoding Draupadi, this is the thread running under almost every conversation we have, whether the woman across from us is talking about a boardroom or a marriage.
4. The right mentor doesn’t tell you what to do. They just make room for you to grow.
A boss at ICICI Bank in London helped land a job that changed the entire trajectory of a career, the kind of introduction that comes from someone choosing to vouch for potential rather than a polished resume. That relationship has lasted twenty-five years, with a birthday thank-you sent every single year without exception. It is a small ritual, but rituals like that are usually a sign that the relationship mattered more than any single favour inside it.
Not every boss along the way was generous or easy, and that turned out to matter too, since difficult managers taught exactly what kind of leader to never become. The pattern holds up under scrutiny: employees who have real mentors, not just assigned ones, consistently report faster career progression and stronger retention. Structured mentoring programs tend to outperform informal ones precisely because someone is deliberately making room, not just occasionally offering advice.
5. Manifestation is just a nicer word for courage plus timing.
During COVID, with all three salon outlets shut and no clear idea of how rent was going to get paid once things reopened, Sneha kept telling her business partner Gauri, almost daily, that she wanted a big outlet in Bandra. Not as a wish, more as a fixed idea she couldn’t stop repeating. There was no plan behind it, no funding lined up, nothing but a location she had decided, in her head, already belonged to her.
Weeks later, as restrictions started lifting, an agent called about a fully set-up 500 square foot salon space on Linking Road in Bandra, whose owner wanted out. Sneha and Gauri saw it once and said yes on the spot. She is upfront that she doesn’t buy into manifestation as a theory, what she believes in instead is courage plus acting fast when the moment shows up, whether or not you dress that up with a nicer word for it.
6. Teaching a teenager to choose her own path starts with resisting the urge to choose it for her.
Vedika switched her stream three times in a single year, from PCM to PCB to PCM again, each switch requiring fresh fees, a refund request, and an awkward conversation with a school. Any parent would have found it frustrating, and this one did too, enough to ask her daughter to sit through three extra math classes after school before deciding anything for good. Vedika did the classes and came back saying math felt like therapy, that she couldn’t leave it, whatever came of it professionally.
What stands out is that the switching back and forth wasn’t treated as indecision to be corrected, it was treated as a decision still being made in real time, which is a very different thing to sit through as a parent. Research on how parents handle a first career decision backs this instinct up: teenagers who feel genuinely supported in choosing, rather than steered, tend to land on choices they are more satisfied with and more motivated to follow through on. At Decoding Draupadi, we hear some version of this from almost every mother we talk to: the hardest part of raising an independent daughter is staying quiet long enough to let her actually be one.
From a B.Com degree she was told wasn’t enough, to boardroom-adjacent banking jobs across two continents, to ten salon outlets and a coaching practice she is only just starting, Sneha’s story keeps circling back to the same idea: figure out what you actually want, then stop waiting for the right time to go get it, because the right time was never coming anyway.
Until next time
Team Decoding Draupadi