In a conversation with Abul Bashar Md. Sharif, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Autonemo Limited and Chief Strategy Officer of Vivasoft Limited. He has shared with us about his professional life experiences, his leadership style, about Autonemo and more. So, let’s get started.
Q. Hi, Hope you are doing well. Would you kindly tell me about your background, childhood, education, career, and what you are doing today?
I spent my childhood 5 -10 years in Australia. Then we returned to Bangladesh and my father (Dr. Md. Shams-Ud-Din) was a professor of Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensigh and at the same time, he was the Vice-Chancellor of Patuakhali Science and Technology University, even after his retirement, he is now the Vice-Chancellor of German University Bangladesh. I started my education in Australia. But after coming here to Bangladesh, I grew up in Mymensingh and I finished my school and college there. I did my BBA in MIS from East West University. I used to work in a call center as a part-time job holder. After graduation, I took a job at GrameenPhone Office as a part-timer then contractual and after that as a full-timer I worked there. My career turned when I got the scope of working in the product development department of Grameenphone where I worked for the next 10 years and learned so much from there at the same time, my boss there was really good and helpful for which I was able to adopt a lot of skills from him. Then after some time, I left that job to execute my own business plan which is basically technology-based, after that I started Autonemo Ltd., mainly an IOT and Fleet Management and GPS Tracking Service Provider.
Q. Before founding Autonemo, you have worked in reputed companies such as Beximco Communication Ltd., Grameenphone, would you kindly share your experience with me working there? Have prior working experience helped you in any way to start your own business?
I had a business organization for 4 years in partnership before I left that. The genesis behind this were issues of partnership complexity and misunderstanding.
But I did a lot for that company. I established it and nourished it to become a successful brand in the GPS tracking system/automobile industry. That was my dream and closest to my heart but due to some reasons, I had to give up on this and I left that company. Here is some advice for an entrepreneur that “If someone is planning to start his own business, he must have to be aware of the documentation that should be stated properly along with deciding the honorarium of co-workers at the very beginning”. So, after this, I worked as a Technical Product Manager at Beximco Communications (Akash) and I worked there for 11 months. After that when I made up my mind to start my own business, I started to look for partnerships and investors to pitch my idea. Gratefully my idea was accepted and embraced by 5-6 investors and at the end of the day, Vivasoft Limited decided to work with us on a partnership. This is how I had to start from zero to establish my new identity, my own new company, “Autonemo”.
With my knowledge and 5 years of professional skill and experience there, I am highly confident that I shall be able to establish Autonemo as a brand in the next 1 to 2 years by utilizing 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) skills in this highly competitive and challenging world of the 21st century. And I am hoping that I can put new services to this company along with tracking services.
Q. What are the services you are offering now? How much have the service/services evolved over the past months?
We are working on premium and standard products with Advanced Telematics and IOT Services. We have different types of European products, Chinese as well. And we are looking forward to establishing our brand as a premium service provider where we’ll ensure a premium product with premium after-sales services. Our back-office system, payment system, and installation system are automated. As We hired experienced technicians, it is going well.
Q. Corporate culture is an important aspect of any corporation. Would you like to tell us about the corporate culture at Autonemo.
As Vivasoft Limited is our mother company, we like open culture for our working space. This office consists of an open desk for all, also known as hot-desking, and no one has a separate room except the management room. We do not like bossing around behavior that’s why we openly communicate with each other. We take feedback from everyone. Before taking any decision or executing any plan on the market, we discuss with each other respectfully. We try to help each other by nourishing skills of each other and modifying our weak points to work properly and for the betterment of the company. I have even given them the scope to point out my mistakes and say them to me without any hesitation. The best part is, we colleagues are going out together for hangouts. We also do a lot to celebrate our events.
Q. What are the challenges for Autonemo now and what challenges do you anticipate in the future?
Basically, this marketplace is getting saturated as many inexperienced people with their companies are coming to this platform to work and this matter is affecting the after-sales service crucially. They are confusing the customer around with low-cost devices and subscription charges. We are trying to create awareness about a service-oriented business, which cannot be bought for once. And the customer has to pay to get quality-oriented service every month. Because the service we are providing is always getting updated with time. Without the service charge, one cannot provide a good quality service to their target audience. And so far, the inexperienced companies who are grabbing the attention of the customer by providing low-budget one-time service is the main challenge for Autonemo till now.
Q. You have 17+ years’ of experience in Product Development, Strategic Planning, Operation Management, Automation, Service, Expansion Management, System & Process Development, Risk Management & Stakeholder Management area. Would you kindly share your experiences with our audiences?
As I mentioned before, most of the working experience of mine are from Grameenphone & whatever knowledge and experience I learned from there which are all helping me to implement them in my company business to make it successful and how a company can be profitable and work on a paperless system. You all might know that Grameenphone had 5 thousand employees at first. I learned how to make a company process-oriented, and the manager will work by himself by inspiring others, looking over tasks if it is going in the right direction or not, as well as the manager must be able to take key decisions and therefore the company happens to be not dependent. And from Grameenphone I got motivated to build a process-oriented company, where no one is going to be dependent on each other. And there will be a management team along with the whole company who is going to lead the brand. Most importantly, I learned about how to handle after-sales management. At present in our company, whenever a customer makes complaints about our service, we try to look upon it immediately and solve it, ensuring the customer a better service with a good quality experience. So, these are some of the important skills I adapted from Grameenphone and I will always try to implement them in my life as well as in our company.
Q. What is your process for evaluating the success of a product? What do you think is the most important thing to remember when launching a new product?
Throughout my career life, I always got to work on and for the product. So, I have a good knowledge of how to do product testing and develop a product by taking feedback from customers and knowing a customer’s user experience. Therefore, we use these terms before developing a product as well as before launching a product. Here I want to share my personal story. Whenever we build a product, we always test the product on my car for 1 or 2 months before launching it for the customer. Even I test the mobile app development by myself along with the management and colleagues. So, after going through a lot of testing, when we are sure of the product’s service quality, then we launch the product in the market. Again, we try to design our product by observing the customer’s feedback and we keep the pricing by customers’ feasibility of buying the product and ensuring the fact that they get the proper benefit from it.
Q. What leadership skills do you find most useful & how do you describe your leadership style?
As I stated before, I like the open culture system and therefore, I try to work on this path. We are trying to build our company like that. At the same time, we are getting enough responses from the people who want to join our office to work just because of this open culture system. My partner who is from Vivasoft Ltd, he also has 15 years of working experience in the software Industry. So, from our experience, we work in a manner by following the previous knowledge and skills. We gave our employees the flexibility to make the decision, we always maintain good bonding with each other and we inspire them.
Q. How do you spend your free time? What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
I am a sports-loving person and I am very enthusiastic about it. And we have a sports team in Uttara of the SSC 98 batch named 98’ Avengers. I play with that team every week. Even I, along with the sports team, sometimes make plans about get together. At the same time, I love to hang out a lot with my friends. Overall, I think that my sport hobby is important to create networks with people, knowing new people and their experiences might help in the business as well. Also in my leisure time, I love to listen to music. The biggest achievement of my life is that I gained my 15-year-working knowledge. where I learned a lot of important things that include how an organization can start from zero. Grameenphone helped me a lot to achieve and enrich these skills. I learned about organizational culture. I learned honesty.
I always tried to avoid corporate politics. On the other hand, I believe that my colleagues (5000+) who are from the Grameenphone office are helping me and always going to help me to make my company successful and to reach its goal. So, we already have 500 plus current GP Colleagues and Former GP Colleagues who are my customers and they are promoting as well as referring my brand to their friends and family. I handle all the upcoming calls by myself and even sometimes look over the after-sales service. So, I am mostly proud of myself that I have made a good bonding with my colleagues for which they help me, inspire me, and help me to reach my brand’s goal.
Q. Do you want to give our audiences tips or advice’s who want to start their own business or join corporates? It would be beneficial if you mention some of the general skills which are super essential.
Well, I would say that, before starting anything in this world, you must gather enough knowledge about what you want to start. Even if you want to do your own business, you must have to gain knowledge and gain skills and one should join a company before doing business because the experience will help in the long run. At the same time, to start a business, “money”’ and ‘’investment’’ are the most essential elements to execute the plan. So, one must do a job in an institution and learn skills from that as well as he/she must save money if he or she intends to do business. Again, if one wants to do business in partnership terms, then he/she must prove themselves capable enough and their idea must be strong to convince the party to do partnership with them.
I think that, at present time, a startup is something very difficult to do, as one has to build their idea and build the company to introduce it to the market and making it profitable is really hard work to do in the current highly competitive and challenging situation. I saw a few people who made their own startups/businesses and even got investors to help them with their ideas. But after 1 or 2 years, they just disappeared as they could not make it up to the market because of a lack of knowledge, experience, and skills. So, therefore, I think that one should not concentrate on setting up a fancy office first rather than make proper use of investors’ investment for the company’s revenue to ensure the operating cost. After ensuring the operating cost and executing the plan properly, when the company starts generating revenue then one can pay attention to make a better working environment. With an investor’s investment it is very easy to spend but making it successful is way harder if you do not know how to utilize money and manpower. Because earning revenue, and onboarding and charging customers is a really tough task to be done.
