Hi,
My name is Tawheed.
Today I am going to address talent, this is one of the financial aspects of the previous edition that I listed and this is just to talk about the formation of your team in terms of how your business can take off.
I am going to share some personal experiences in one of my major business being an IT firm. It is our mantra to enhance business productivity and efficiency through technology adoption, we are a Microsoft partner with multiple specializations. So if you have manual processes within your business—i) there are bottlenecks, ii) there are leakages that you need to plug, iii) there are issues around how the process and the people within your organization are driven—we come in, use technology, to make it better.
This business was set up by myself and two partners. I manage the finance and operations, one of them manages the business development, and the other handles the technology. And if you remember, in another one of my previous editions, I talked about my journey as an employee turned entrepreneur. One of the things that I did was to truly understand the nature of the business of the organization in which I worked at and there were three aspects to it that I decided to just learn more about, the credit, business development, and technology.
Without further ado, I am just going to talk about the talent, this is key. I mean it is a subject matter that has been overflogged if I may say so, but then again it is because of how essential it is to make or mar the progress of any business irrespective of the level. If the team is not cohesive, they are not working together, they are competing internally rather than externally, issues like these tend to limit the progress and the growth of the business and in some extreme cases bring down the business.
Before starting the IT firm that I work at, I had the intention initially to go at it alone and one of the things that gave me this belief, irrespective of how daunting the task might have seemed and the risk I was imminently going to embark on considering my survival. I mean I was going to leave paid employment to entrepreneurship, look for customers and more or less handover my survival to prospective clients because it was not certain that businesses will come my way.
But what gave me the belief was the true understanding of the nature of the business that I had, and because I like to take up challenges, and I had been nurturing this entrepreneurial mindset of mine right from my university days. If I may digress a little bit, one of the things that I wished I did differently was back in the days in my university, I wish I had some internship experiences, delved into some businesses to just get hands on approach and understanding of how many things work.
But it was not too late for me because when I had the opportunity to work in an organisation, all those delayed explorations if I put it that way, I just used that as a platform to drive my ambition, to test the waters, understand my capacity and in some cases to my surprise, and others to my understanding, I was able to really gauge myself in terms of what I can do, what I was good at, my strengths, my weaknesses.
Back to the matter, I initially wanted to start the business on my own, it was something that I believed in, I thought I would have been able to conquer. However, I realized that it was going to take me some time because this was back in 2019 before COVID and a lot of things changed in 2020 during the pandemic that even helped our business take off. Some of the things that we preach like digital transformation, working from home, stuff like that were not really embraced as much pre covid, but during covid and post covid, it took off.
For those businesses that were laid back, undecided about adopting technology due to the costs, they did not even want to consider the benefits, they just felt like this is cost that they can avoid. But, the cost of nothing is better than the cost of something. And to explain that, prior to COVID, it was nothing in terms of the effect it had on their business, they felt like they were paying for nothing. They quickly realized that the impact of digital transformation in businesses was one of the things that defined survivability. Businesses that lagged or were too late and may be did not embrace technology struggled a lot, some died. So for those that quickly realized the importance, they started adopting it, in some cases late, but in some cases some act swiftly, and that was the opportunity for us.
And when we started the IT firm in February of 2020, about to be five years old now. I wanted to start the business initially on my own, and actually even registered the company myself, done some preliminary activities including the expenses, trying to create an online presence that I was going to use as my office space for people to just get to know me. However, the winds of life made it worthy to consider engaging my partners. It was tumultous in our previous place of work and realised that we may have to leave.
Rather than just move on to another organization, we had conversations and we thought to give it a try, and so far so good it has worked out. It was a synergy between the three of us, combined efforts of the three of us was even far more than the aggregate of the three of us, and that is how we started building the foundation of our business up to the pillars and then the roof. Right now, we are about 15 in staff strength, we are growing, we are even at this early stage thinking about the succession of the business.
We also understand that we are transitioning from self employed to business owners. Because if a business that you are engaged in revolves around you, the founder, no matter how you look at it or how you want to paint it, you are self employed. Because if anything happens to you, you are unavailable for any reason, the business is going to be stifled. And if you want to classify yourself as a business owner which is a situation whereby things run and operate in your absence—a typical example of how people put it is when you are making money in your sleep—you need to be able to get the right people to drive the right process so you can make money essentially.
So it is absolutely important for you to get your team right. This is something that requires careful consideration and several conversations. As much as the mindsets will not be on the same level, the time and effort that we put into the building of the business will also not be the same, you need to actually all be at least on the same page and there needs to be a level that is good enough for all the respective founders no matter how low. Once you are able to reach that agreement, then you can kick things off, you need to also document, it is very, very important.
You do not want to start a business as a partnership and not have Partnership Deed. That is just setting yourself up for failure, there are lots of businesses that fail as a result of team dynamics. I also have that experience, but that was more or less like one of my trainings, trying to set up a business with some individual, but story for another day. Anyway, think about the kind of people you want to work with, how you work with them, the relationship with them is also integral.
If you do not have a good working relationship with your partners, the working relationship with your customers will be difficult and that is the worst kind of experience you want to bring to your customers. Customers are coming to you for the experience even if you are selling a product or providing a service, the experience is what they are coming to, so that is where you can really differentiate yourself. You just need to be able to create an element of experience that is better.
The working relationship between yourselves as founders or partners, between the superiors and the subordinates within the organization, between the clients, decision makers, influencers, other employees. There just need to be a good balance because if your relationship internally is bad, it is going to cascade down to the external relationships. And it is not because customers are king or always right that you treat the customers well, then internally it is a different conversation. Everything just needs to work hand in hand, basically.
So in this edition, I hope I was able to share some useful feedback, some useful information with you, at least about my story and how you can lean from that to build your own business empire.
As usual think BIG, start small.
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