Asif Ahmed is a founder advising founders. Currently Head of Early Stage, Tech & High Growth at Cooper Parry - a firm of accountants and business advisers supporting fast-growth businesses in the UK - Asif’s unique career has been centred on advising early stage startups, while also working for the government and writing a book along the way.
Cecily Motley interviewed Asif about his unexpected career journey, why we should be building sports teams at work instead of families, and how to get more bang for your buck in the working week.
Cecily Motley: How did you get to where you are in your career today?
Asif Ahmed: Right now, I head up the early stage team at Cooper Parry. We have the deepest concentration of Founders and Venture backed scale ups in the whole accounting industry, probably the whole advisory industry.
I qualified as a chartered accountant from PwC and had no intention of going into practice - my father ran a small accounting firm from the spare room of our house and seeing how much hard, and often thankless, work that was was enough to put me off it. But just when I qualified, my father’s cancer came back for the sixth time and he had to stop working. I had no choice but to take over his business. He was too ill to even give me a handover; I had to go through his files just to figure out who his clients were.
So I thought, ok, if I have to do this, how can I do it effectively? I reached out to family and friends who ran their own businesses, and they agreed to take me on as their accountant - probably because I was so inexperienced they knew I would be the cheapest they could get. Back then, in 2009, it was easy to see the edges of what was becoming the London start-up ecosystem. And as someone doing accounting in that space, it was very easy to become widely known. Since then, I’ve continued to grow an offering for early stage founders. Cooper Parry acquired my company last year, and now here I am.
CM: It’s really inspiring how you made success in such a hard situation. Next question is: if your career were a best-selling novel, what would its title be?
AA: The best way to describe my career is the book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Mainly because it captures the entrepreneurial journey - and mine was really more of an entrepreneurial journey than an accounting journey. And it’s that background that gives me a genuine empathy for the founders I work with. I feel like that’s a rare quality in advisors nowadays - whether that’s accountants, lawyers, whatever. They’re well intentioned but don’t really know what it takes to do the thing. I stand out in that regard.
CM: And do you have a favourite startup story you share at dinner parties to break the ice?
AA: I've always tried to detach the word “startup” from things that are ‘cool’, because there are a lot of founders out there that don't get given the same credibility for being a founder, simply because they're just not in that tech ecosystem, they’re not mixing with those people.
So this story is a reminder of why that approach is so valuable. Back when my father was running his business, one of his clients was a freelance construction worker. My father advised him to set up a limited company and build a brand around it, but the client had no clue how to do any of that. He said he was happy to go ahead with it, as long as my father could manage it all for him. That was back in 1992.
Fast-forward to when I took over the company from my dad, and this client was doing pretty well. He didn’t know the first thing about me other than I was my father’s son, but he said he would stay with me because of what my father did for him. I'm still working with that guy to this day. His company now turns over the best part of £30m a year, has around 300 employees and is one of the preeminent construction companies in central London. And still, the client is like: “Because of what your dad did for me? I'm never gonna leave you. All this tech stuff you're doing now is great, but you're still gonna work with me.” So it's a rare story, but it underpins everything I do in my business now.
CM: Amazing. Ok, and what is your biggest challenge as a manager now?
AA: The hardest thing is working with people who clearly haven't realised that they don't want from this career what they profess to want from this career. It's like helping the people that don't want to be helped. As an eternal optimist, I find that really difficult to navigate: trying to give people opportunities while they are not reciprocating your enthusiasm. I’ve learned that I can’t assume anything about what people want from their lives, based on where they are or what they’re doing because everyone has different motivations, restrictions, aspirations. It’s been a real life lesson for me as well as a management lesson.
CM: Very interesting. And what is the biggest difference in the management challenges between a large team of 130 people, say, and a smaller team?
AA: When you’re a small team, it feels more like family. But I think family is actually really detrimental to a startup. This idea has become increasingly popular: large teams need to be more like sports teams than families. Everyone needs to be pulling their own weight and contributing to the outcome, as opposed to families where you might carry someone who’s a bit of a dead weight. That’s not the philosophy you should be building teams around.
So, if it’s more like a sports team than a family, you need to change what it is you’re asking people to invest in. We focus more on our mission, culture and values. But we ask everybody to build their own version of what that looks like. It’s like giving everyone the same set of building blocks but accepting that they will all build something slightly different with those blocks, based on who they are as individuals.
CM: That’s a really interesting point. And what is your slam dunk interview question?
AA: “What will you add to the culture of our firm?” It's not a trick question by any means but it does give you an insight into how people perceive their own role in a team and helps you imagine how the person will fit. Not only from an hierarchical perspective, but from a tone of voice, culture, philosophical perspective.
CM: And what are your interview ‘red flags’?
AA: When people struggle to articulate their own challenges and weaknesses. This can manifest itself in loads of other ways in their work and we really don't want to hire people - particularly at scale - that are not seeking the truth. So, I suppose anyone that's visibly glossing over the truth is probably my biggest red flag.
CM: Yeah, self-knowledge, the truth, that's absolutely key. What is the bane of your professional life and what do you spend the most time on?
AA: Notifications. They turn me into a terrible dinner guest. And meetings. Unnecessary meetings are just an unforgivable waste of time.
CM: Is AI going to take your job?
AA: No. At the moment, some portion of accounting work is always administrative and we're looking forward to just wiping out that entire need and cost. But that will just allow us to focus on helping founders with value-add stuff that AI can’t replace.
CM: What would you pay good money to know about your peers and competitors?
AA: I don’t really think about my competitors. What we focus on building is something that's unique and true to our understanding of this market. That would get a little bit maligned if we spent too much time thinking about what our competitors are doing.
CM: What are the most interesting areas of growth in the market right now, from your perspective?
AA: There are two, which are to some extent at odds with each other. As you would imagine, about 90% of what I'm working on right now is in some way underpinned by AI. We’re riding a wave of technological change. But I think that the people who will capture the most value from that change are not necessarily the ones building the infrastructure, but rather the ones who will utilise it for societal benefit. What I mean by that is that a lot of the most valuable outcomes from the AI revolution are yet to be seen. Once the infrastructure kinks have been ironed out, people will come in who can leverage the technology and just run with it. I heard the other day that the company who benefited most from refrigeration technology was Coca Cola - not any of the fridge businesses. That’s how I think about AI, too.
The other sector to pay attention to is the experience economy. The more that people are living in their devices and in front of their screens the more they are going to value real, tangible experiences again, just because it will be nothing like the rest of our digital lives.
CM: Last question: what is your cheat code that no one else knows?
AA: I'm a big proponent of starting every meeting by defining the intention of the meeting and I'm also very comfortable with asking people to cancel meetings if they haven’t been prepared for. Another cheat code - somewhat annoyingly - is Sunday evening. Sunday evening is my extra day of work - it can be three hours or so just after my kids have gone to bed but I can probably do the equivalent of three working days in those three hours.