Music Intro
This is the sound that greets you when you go to the headquarters of The Accessory People, manufacturers of covers, chargers and other additions to mobile phones sold around the world. Pop music vidwos run throughout the day on large and small screens around the offices. So from the minute you step inside you know this is a business run by, and for, the young.
Nasa Khan, the Chairman of TAP, as the company is internationally known, is just 30 years old and was just 22 when he launched out on his own with $3,000 to invest. Now the son of Pakistani immigrants controls an enterprise with a turnover of over $400million, his own fortune is put at over $30million. I managed to get him away from the non-stop music to talk about his earliest memory of doing business.
"I was a child, and I was in the nursery schools, and we were selling little diaries, and buying them for 50 pence and selling them for a £1, and we knew where to get them from and no-one else did. It was as simple as that - buy and sell - a case of supply and demand."
Then you went on, I think, to college. You studied Economics, but presumably you always had the intention of being a businessman?
"From an early age I always wanted to do something for myself. We were always inspired from early roots to basically do something with our own individuality. University was a time that educated me and gave me lessons and an insight of how the business community works and so became a platform on which I basically built a foundation and then O moved into communications itself."
What about though starting out, because you're young now you must have looked very young when you started out. What about people like bank managers, did they take you seriously at all?
"I had to grow a long moustache and a beard etc"
You didn't really, did you ?
"Honestly I did. You have to make yourself more mature than you are. Although you may be mature in personality, they don't give you the opportunity because it's appearance that they look at first. So you've got to basically make sure that you're acceptable to the community and how you do that is by dressing well and also making yourself presentable. The way you do that is by making yourself look more mature. So I did genuinely have to grow a moustache unfortunately, as it really didn't suit me that much!"
So how did you get the idea for The Accessory People?
"I always wanted a synergy of a company which wasn't limited by brand; the brand was basically open and defined what we did. The Accessory People is simply like Coca Cola, it defines drinks and Anchor, which defines butter. It says what we do - we do accessories. We don't just do cellular accessories, computer accessories, we do everything which is accessory orientated around the world."
But what made you think this was a good idea, that this could be a moneymaker. What was the spark?
"The main inspiration behind it was the company ideology, which was set up first, which was all about people. I always had the idea that if you could make the people working behind you believe in your vision and transmit that clearly and make them understand where you want to get to then all of you are fightning one battle and overall you are winning the war."
But something like, say again, if we are talking about a bankk manager. You go into a bank manager and say look I want to make covers for mobile phones and he, presumable, is not going to be terribly excited about that.
"There was time in the early dayes when communications was a business tool, it was not a consumer tool; it was a time when people needed education about mobile phones; mobile phones were considered to be a yuppie tool and we had just come out of the filofax era.
Basically I forecast that it was going to become a tool that would be essential, would be used in emergencies, exactly how it has become. Now it has gone one step beyond - far beyond my expectations. It has gone to a point where it has now become part of a lifestyle, where if you don't have a mobile phone it's like not wearing a a watch, you wake up and the first thing you look at is you mobile phone. That's how we have been able to move forward but trying to convince the Bank Manager to believe it - well! The problem with banks is that they have certain key factors and flow charts that they have to agree to and if it goes out of the box they can't think, therefore they stop."
But yo say yourself that yo didn't expect it to get as big as it did but of course the mobile phone market is havin its own problems isn't it, has that affected your business at all?
"Not directly no. We have actually managed to keep growing in different areas. What we have been doing is buying assets in companies, acquiring them and putting them within parts of our overall group. We have actually grown this year by over 200-300% in total, we are on target for £345million this year."
Inside the headquarters, in a London suburb, the staff all look as young or younger than the boss and from there TAP buys in hi-tech products from all over the world. At the UK's National Business Awards Nasa Khan was named Entreepreneur of the Year. Another youthful Asian man won in the New Business of the Year category. And the British government is using the expertise of succesful British Asians to try and improve the general entrepreneurial spirit of the country.
That's happening in the United States as well. In California's Silicone Valley, American Asians can sell computer and English literacy plus, as the children of immigrants, they know how to adapt to a change in culture. The writer-broadcaster and on-line share-dealer, Alpesh Patel, has been examinig why people of Indian extraction like himself, do so well in business.
Music Intro
The upbeat sound at TAP headquarters and displays of colourful frivolous mobile phone covers, combine to convey a sense that business can be anything but boring. Both Alpesh Patel and Nasa Khan are involved with mentoring schemes, which have been started to encourage more young people to put their creativity onto business. The schemes provide budding entrepreneurs with regular support and advice.
Nasa Khan knows what it's like to take a big financial risk, and he seems happy to give up the time to pass on the lessons he has learnt.
"I work with many government agencies and government bodies and on top of that with The Bank of England on a few initiatives. One of the things, which I find as a barrier, is that young people fel that there aren't opportunities out there. They don't understand there are opportunities, but they can't see them - again it is communication. What we are trying to do is get the government in the United Kingdom to make themselves more accessible and make all the portals to be accessible for them to understand cearly. Sometimes you might label something, but the label might not identify the box. So we are trying to make it clearer.
Therefor a young gentleman or a young lady who wants to move forward into the community has a mentor or someone they can go to who they can ask. If you go and ask your bank manager about ideas or you ask someone trying to offer between 20-100 people mentoring. 20 people who I will spend a lot of time with and 80 people who I will spend say an hour a month with just to help them progress their businesses and basically to ensure that they succeed. If I can manage to change just one person's life, that's enough for me."
Just to go back a little bit - when you were raising your money I gather you actually sold off an awful lot of your possessions for finance - is that a true story ?
"Yeah - at an early stage obviously on-one wants to support you, no-one believes in what you are doing. You're a kid, you're a youngster, and as fas as they are concerned you're going to go back to 'mummy and daddy'. Unfortunately I didn't have the comfort zone there to do that, 'mummy and daddy' weren't there in that respect to support myself. So therefore I had to stand on my own two feet. So whatever resources I had, my own home, my flat, my cars etc, I had to sell them off at one stage to basically move forward and put my money where my mouth was. It's omething which everyone has to do in life either on a small scale or a bigger scale, unfortunately I had to do it on a big scale but it's paid off, so I'm happy and thankful."
And you enjoy your toys as well don't you - cars for example.
"Cars are my passion - it's one of my vices unfortunately. I don't smoke, I don't drink but that's one of the things that I have a passion about. I have a collection of cars, I love cars, it's one of my hobies."
When you say a collection what kind of cars do you have?
"The usual type of things, all the prestigious labels; Ferraris, Porsches, Bentleys, Turbos etc, you name it, we have it. What I also do is that not just i have the cars, my team have the cars as well. The team are rewarded with 'hand me downs' of the ones that i hand down as I get the newest one in. So everyone loves having the latest car and they can't wait for the one next month to be handed down, and we are talking Ferraris and the latest models."
I've seen a line of them out there - very impressive.
"Thank-you."
A hand-me-down like that I could do with.
"Although I say 'hand-me-down', it's actually about in a month when they get handed down so it's pretty good. I like to test drive them before they get them. So its all enjoyable, its all fun and games."
That word 'fun' again. The next time I hear someone say business is boring, and I hear it often, I'll point out just how much entertainment can be financed by a good idea plus hard work. And you might get a Ferrari!
END
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