Kubair Shirazee Of Agilitea On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Take time to explore and discover what is really going on in your business, in the market, with your customers and competitors. And not just now, you need to take a mid to long term view. Be customer-centric but be sure not to fall into the trap of scaling to meet the needs of one customer. Know what jobs your customers are in need of getting done and continuously innovate to enable them to do it better, more efficiently, more effectively.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Kubair Shirazee.
Kubair Shirazee is a startup expert with a history of building businesses to sell on. He uses his wealth of experience to coach individuals and businesses on adopting Agile principles, values and using agile ways of working for defining and meeting outcomes through his company Agilitea. Kubair is also the co-founder of the Peace Through Prosperity charity which enables and empowers individuals from marginalized communities to use their skills for personal and community development.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
My childhood was spent in Britain, Pakistan and UAE, so I had a rich and varied upbringing. As a teenager I developed a passion for politics, and this has remained throughout my life, however I also focused on academic success and entrepreneurialism and by the age of just 23 I had graduated from City University in London and already launched and sold my first startup — UKGunindex.com — an outdoor sport online portal.
I then founded Ikonami Ltd — a healthcare-focused company that brought a number of successful digital products to market in the UK. Ikonami played a significant part in the implementation of NHS’s Agenda for Change, by introducing Agile principles, values and frameworks to the Department of Health and the NHS.
My business success continued, but in 2010 a personal tragedy pivoted my raison d’etre. My brother Abid was murdered by extremists in Karachi. This tragedy re-awakened a commitment to social justice and a desire to understand the motives. I set about researching the motives and causes of extremism and terrorism through primary and secondary research including interviews with individuals holding extremist views/positions as well as designing and orchestrating the largest survey of marginalised trades (500 interviews) in Pakistan that act as a recruitment grounds for extremist organisations. It was this experience which prompted me to co-found Peace Through Prosperity with my wife Sahar Zaidi-Shirazee — a charity to empower micro entrepreneurs from marginalized groups, to bring about social transformation.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
In 2011, a year after my brother was murdered, I returned to work as a co-director of Ikonami, a thriving software business used by the Department of Health as part of their Agenda for Change framework. However, upon return I realized that my environment was not agile, it was not fulfilling its very ethic. I was grieving but was expected to attend sales meetings, I had to stick to someone else’s idea of how I should act, that got in the way of being authentic. So with one of my co-directors I took the decision to sell the business, together with members who were not catering for agile ways of being in their own business. It was one of the bravest business decisions I have made, to sell a successful and growing company and start from scratch, but it is one I have never regretted. I went on to advise colleagues, connections and networks on agile ways of working and being, and realized this is what I was raison d’etre, to facilitate others in their journey of continuous improvement. I have been told that my training, mentorship and coaching has transformed lives. I realized I must make it my life to bring Agility to as many people and communities as possible — so I founded Agilitea. Sometimes the hardest, and what seem the most crazy, decisions, can be the best of your life. Don’t ever be afraid to follow your instinct!
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
Together with Sahar, I launched Peace Through Prosperity, an innovation lab for low cost, immediate impact social transformation programs that once validated are open sourced for others to use in alleviating poverty and improving livelihood security.
We started our experimentation to help empower people initially in Pakistan, and have scaled it to Egypt and Yemen too. Peace Through Prosperity’s approach is rooted in systems thinking and spiral dynamics; we take what we know and continue to learn about transforming complex systems — such as large enterprises — and cross pollinate it to transforming super complex systems — such as society!
Peace Through Prosperity’s most successful experiment to date is our mini-MBA program. We engage with participants through pragmatic, interactive content and exercises to bring a number of principles, values, tools and practices to life that enable them to be better owner managers of their business.
Participants learn how to achieve faster, managed growth, improved revenue and profitability, greater clarity over their personal goals, drivers and greater confidence in the future.
The mini-MBA enables participants to build a valuable business that will be a vehicle for them to create their own narrative of social change. Creating robustness and resilience in themselves, their family and community.The approach provides a counter narrative to socio-economic and political transformation than that peddled by extremist organisations.
To date the program has helped more than 2100 micro-entrepreneurs from marginalized communities to increase their revenues on average by 25% and profitability on average by 68% growth in profitability. It has positively impacted more than 13,500 lives, created 265 jobs across 26 marginalized communities in Pakistan, Yemen and Egypt. And the journey continues.
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?
I certainly can, and it is one that has led to me reevaluating how I recruit and scale teams. When I launched Peace Through Prosperity in Pakistan I recruited from the leading academic institutions. I sought out highly educated and dynamic candidates, the real ‘cream of the crop’ to join our team and bring our programmes to life. My four winning candidates went through three months of training and were all high-flyers, but when it came to entering the communities we wanted to work in, they were too afraid. They could do on paper what they were not willing to do in reality. I needed people not just to deliver the programmes but to understand what life was like for those we were helping and build relationships with those communities as coaches, mentors and consultants. When they realized the localities they would be working in — deprived areas,high crime rates and presence of extremist organisations — all four resigned.
I had to rethink my recruiting strategy. This time I went directly to the communities we would be working in and with. I sought out literate candidates, but more High School level than graduates. I recruited people who not only had the intellectual capacity, but the learned experience of living in marginalized communities. The four successful candidates who joined our team, did and continue to do amazing work, and are still with us 12 years later!
The mistake I made was thinking academic achievements could outweigh experiential ones. That agents of change can be parachuted in as opposed to being nurtured from within. I won’t make that mistake again. It is as much about the person, and their intrinsic motivations as their academic prowess.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
Finding and convincing the right individuals to share their valuable time to mentor, coach, guide and be committed is a tall task.Whilst some mentors shied away calling me too ‘free spirited’ others have remained committed over decades and their guidance has proven to be indispensable in my journey.
A good mentor has the courage to have transparent, respectful conversations that remain focused on our continuous improvement. I have been fortunate to have a few good mentors in my corner over the years guiding and facilitating me achieve my target outcomes.
Once you’re afforded the privilege of having good mentors, it is essential that you give back as much if not more. I have been told that my mentoring has been key for many successes my peers have achieved and that makes me immensely proud and privileged to enable and facilitate others to achieve their outcomes.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
There is no single individual I could point to! I inspect, adapt and try to learn from the work and life of individuals who have overcome challenges, been true to their authentic self and continue to operate from a place of empathy. I have been inspired by my team members, my clients, family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers. Leadership is servitude and I make time to learn from any individual I find serving people and communities for the better with selflessness.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
- Ask yourself ‘why’?
The key question you must ask is why am I scaling my business? Is it to create/make or compete? And who are we scaling for? Is it for one customer? Or for a growing market? The answers to these questions will be key to creating a strategy and a transformation plan if you are looking to attract people, customers, users, investors and partners.
2. Explore your market.
Take time to explore and discover what is really going on in your business, in the market, with your customers and competitors. And not just now, you need to take a mid to long term view. Be customer-centric but be sure not to fall into the trap of scaling to meet the needs of one customer. Know what jobs your customers are in need of getting done and continuously innovate to enable them to do it better, more efficiently, more effectively.
3. Set target outcomes.
What are your target outcomes to achieve through scaling? Use these to create a plan, and have the discipline to stick to it, and the courage to inspect and adapt it. What does each stage of scaling look like? What is the minimum you need to do to achieve it? And how might you measure it? Use this to create a timetable and assess investments and returns. Then ask yourself, what does good look like? And how might you measure it?
4. Know your limitations, and embrace them.
You do not need to be great at everything, you need to be confident that you can achieve what you intend to do. Explore your own limitations as a leader, explore limitations of your current leadership and teams and identify future skills needed by all people in the business. Then take this information and put in place development paths to keep upskilling your existing teams as you add new people and skills to your talent pool. Don’t forget your people — be loyal and generous and you’ll be repaid in loyalty and commitment.
5. Be Agile!
For me this is key, and a successful business cannot work without an agile approach. I have mentioned loyalty, but loyalty is also honesty. Make time yourself and allow all in your business to make time to reflect, inspect and adapt often. Starting with yourself. Engage in bold experiments and work in small timeboxes, so that you close the feedback loop sooner rather than later.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
Too many times people adopt what they see as a ‘winning formula’ without accounting for changes in the landscape, be they tech driven or societal. Each organisation’s scaling journey is unique, embrace your uniqueness, build, inspect and adapt your strategy with that in mind.
The most common mistake I see organisations of all sizes make is to equate scale to size!
Align on what is needed to achieve your outcomes, and if that need can be met without scaling! Employ the minimum number of people required to meet your strategic outcomes. Always be thinking what is my ‘minimum viable’ route to achieve my outcomes. Sure you will need to add people and assets as you scale up, however first reflect on how we might better use our existing people and assets. Scaling inefficiency exponentiates inefficiency! Give your people time, resources and psychological safety to experiment with scaling models, don’t force feed a ‘winning formula’ to your teams and people. One size does not fit all, so be agile about it! Inspect and adapt.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
Yes, don’t forget about culture through various stages of your scaling journey. Your organizational culture will change, accept it and have a plan in place to guide and nurture its evolution in the desired direction. Preserve the principles and values that drive innovation and happiness in your people. And have the courage to course correct your evolving culture as when and where needed. I once let go of a CTO who was keeping my operational teams from approaching me directly for 1:1 conversations. He was impeding the culture of equality and openness we wanted to preserve from our early days of being a team of 7 to one of 80+ people. As you grow in size, keep pulse of, and maintain your relationships with your operational teams, that’s where the magic happens!
Know the people you are employing, and what their needs are. Be open and flexible, a diverse team is a rich team bringing many influences, and just because one person cannot work 9–5, or one has personal commitments that mean less days in the office, that does not weaken the team, in fact it strengthens it. A happy person is a more effective team member, and by allowing ten minutes to recover from a stressful inbound commute, or accepting an early finish to pick up children, you instill a sense of value and self-worth in your team members, and they then build better teams. Little things matter, it is as much about the free snacks as it is about having the psychological safety to take frequent snack breaks!
Respect, trust, and be kind to your people; foster a climate of open, honest, rapid, respectful and empathetic communication.
Create and nurture psychological safety for everyone to be able to close the feedback loop, and your people will guide and course correct the culture as you grow.
Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
The key to success for teams I have built, served and coached whilst scaling has been regular, disciplined reflection, where we paused for a few hours every two or three weeks and reflected back on our list of things to do, what is in progress and what have we got done.
We leveraged metrics to drive improvement conversations, nurtured psychological safety for everyone to be able to voice their thoughts and ideas, and with that created measurable experiments to enact in the coming weeks, and with that we evolved our knowledge, skills, processes and tools incrementally over time. Do not underestimate the transformative power of a purposeful retrospective when followed through properly.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
For me and my teams it was and remains all about the user experience for our new team members, how effectively we can provide them with up to date minimal viable information to get them jump started with us, and with that bring them to the same spot as us in the journey, making their arrival and engagement purposeful and value adding. And from there how could we make deep diving into their areas of interest simple, easy and fun!
As for tools/software we inspected and adapted them too and changed the ones that no longer fit for purpose. And they key to being able to do this is to go with cloud native tools and focus on open source solutions to prevent you or your data being locked up inside a walled garden.
Same goes for tools/software we used/use to manage our transformation backlog, our OKRs from a portfolio to product/project levels. Use tools for sure they make measurement easy, don’t get beholden to specific tools, inspect and adapt your choice of tools often and don’t shy away from the effort of change.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
Explore how you can play your part in bringing peace through prosperity in communities you live in, engage with or know of. By enabling people to empower themselves, give them the opportunity to build a better future for themselves, their family and their community, by their own hands.
Be people centric, be empathetic towards those you know, those you don’t know and even those you will never get to know. Make time on your way into work or from work to give that homeless person the gift of ten minutes of your time for a conversation. Develop yourself with the view of developing others, be it in your team or your community. Have an open source mindset, share. Share your knowledge, your resources and your wealth to facilitate and enable others to create their own narrative of change. Don’t ever forget your privilege and the responsibility that comes with it. Be human.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I frequently blog on my personal website, and also add many useful tools on the Agilitea website, through which anyone can contact me. Feel free to grab 15 mins from my calendar to share a virtual coffee/tea.
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
