Roar Meets: Ifty Nasir, CEO of Vestd
Name: Ifty Nasir
Job title: Founder and CEO of Vestd
What inspired you to start your business?
I spent the bulk of my career in the energy industry where I worked my way up to Vice President at BP. It was a great ride but I wanted to make a big change and step into entrepreneurship. My thinking was that this would give me more time to spend with my family, but I also had a big ambition to help startups and SMEs.
The eventual result was Vestd! The platform provides a secure, cost-effective way to share ownership with employees, consultants, advisors, NEDs, contractors and anyone else who is important to the success of a company.
The idea came from research that I did into common business challenges. A great many of them, such as cash-flow, recruitment, retention, team alignment etc. can be solved with intelligent equity management. Basically, if you give somebody a slice of the pie, they’ll give you a greater level of commitment than somebody who is just being paid to do the job.
I wanted to make it as easy as possible for companies to get on board and start their share schemes.
When it came to your business, did you have a light bulb moment?
I guess the business was a notion in my mind for a good few years before moving forwards to get set up. The idea had been brewing for a while.
I guess the lightbulb moment came when we started researching for our original business idea, and we realised that if we did something more in line with what we now do, that we’d help a lot more people. So that’s how we pivoted away and it’s worked, we have helped a lot of people!
And what helps you to get into a positive mindset and sets you up for success?
This is just a small thing, but whenever I'm doing a sales call, or having a conversation with third parties, I will always stand up. I also sometimes stand for some of our internal meetings, but always for external meetings because you're almost performing. And by standing, you’re getting yourself into ‘actor mode’.
Every interaction is a performance to a certain extent, but you only have two dimensions through the screen so you have to maximise what you can do with that. Over the last couple of years, this has become even more important because every interaction has been remote near enough. By standing up, you can be more expressive and allow your body language to communicate that bit better.
Okay, so what part of your daily routine is non negotiable?
My morning run has become non-negotiable over the past year. There have been three or four days when I haven’t done it but I’ve had good reasons! I run 5k every morning along the river and up Richmond Hill, through the Terrace Gardens and it allows me to feel fresh in my mind.
It really sets you up for the day, putting you in a positive mood. Partially that’s because I’ve done something good for myself first thing in the morning and got it out of the way, but also, I often work things out during my morning runs. They just allow me to crystallise ideas, and often those things are the things you’ve been chewing on the night before or earlier that morning.
What motivates you and gives you energy for the business?
The fact that we're making a difference motivates me. We are actively helping people and that’s so important. Equity should not, and is not, just for those folk with cash. No business exists just on cash alone. You can't achieve anything or go anywhere without your team. And I’m not just talking about employees, but all the consultants and odd bits of help you get from other specialists as you build your business.
They should all be rewarded with equity.
On the back of that, when you give somebody a stake in the business, they become really passionate about it. So it works for everybody. What’s motivating now is that our platform removes the cost complexity and the other barriers that some founders might feel about sharing equity. That's why I still enjoy doing sales calls, because it gives me the opportunity to help another person. And I learn so much from those calls. We are so fortunate that we get to speak to all these business leaders and to learn about their philosophies and business practices. These are such valuable interactions to me, and I love them. I wish that I could just do sales all day sometimes.
What's the big picture for your business?
The big picture is to help as many businesses in the UK as possible to benefit from the Vestd platform.
By sharing equity, more businesses will be activating ‘the ownership effect’ and that brings a host of benefits. If somebody owns something, they bring so much more to the table. And of course, they get the individual reward of equity above and beyond their salary. It’s about being part of something and not just ‘working for the man’ but building something for yourself.
What's the biggest challenge that you've overcome?
Actually, the biggest challenge was getting to cash flow breakeven. It seemed at times like an eternal journey, like we were never going to get there. But we had a very clear determination that we would by the end of 2019, and happily, we achieved that.
Up until then it was just a case of trying to get as far as we could without digging too deeply into my own personal resources. In terms of other challenges, we do, as a business, regularly ask ourselves, ‘Okay, what do we want to achieve by the end of this year?’ and often, the results of those conversations can seem like a tall order. For example, wanting to double in size by this point or that.
However, at the end of the day, whatever the challenge, achieving it is just a mathematical equation. So that’s how we approach it. If X is the end goal, what is it that we need to do to make that happen? How many leads do we need to have coming in? How much content do we need? What is it that we need to turn up or down?
It’s all planning, all strategy.
What's the best thing that you've ever done for your business?
I guess the best thing that I’ve done is to have found the right people and helped them join this moving train as best I can. It's a constant effort to make sure that we've got the bedrock and the ability to to keep bringing on more and more people in the right way. I’m also sensitive to bringing people in with the right philosophical mindset and getting them up and running so that they are able to contribute as soon as they’d like to, because that makes people feel happy.
One of the most important things to me is to meet with every new person who is about to join the team. Even as the team grows, I’m committed to doing that. I’ve always made sure that I spend lots of time with the different teams. In my previous life [in the energy industry] there was potential to become quite removed, if you were that way inclined. But that sort of dynamic isn’t for me, I love being part of a team.
Everybody is important, everybody is bringing something different and unique to the mix and I always strive to value that.
And what would you do differently next time around?
There's so many things I can think of….one of them would be not to go so far down the road with my own money! But then every experience has benefits and there are definite benefits, looking back, at taking the route that we did, even though it felt difficult at times.
I guess it’s like the Sliding doors situation. If you change one tiny thing, everything would look markedly different. So while there are things that were maybe difficult to handle at the time, and seemed disappointing, the fact that those things happened have resulted in where we are. All of the detours and reroutes we have taken have led us to becoming the really strong business we are today.
What are you excited about for the future?
Well, having built this incredible enterprise, we’ve arrived at a point that we planned to get to, which is thrilling in itself. But beyond that, we can see the horizons now too which gives us impetus to set and break new goals.
We want to help as many people as we can, and we’ve grown enough and matured enough that we are in a great position to do that. We want to drive a movement to see billions of people across the world to be fairly rewarded for their work with equity. I’m excited that Vestd will play a significant role in moving the dial towards a fairer world for everybody.
