Experience
From bouncer to founder
Twenty years. Six countries. Retail floors, contact centers, construction sites, telecom networks, and a software company built from nothing. On the surface they share nothing. Underneath they were all the same conversation.
The Roles
01
The ground floor
Moved to Canada for a BBA at the University of Windsor. Tuition does not pay itself. Construction sites in the summer. Tim Hortons shifts before early classes. Serving tables on weekends. Bouncing doors at clubs in downtown Toronto on the nights that paid the most. Concierge work when something steadier came up. Each job was whatever was available. None of it was a plan. All of it was the same lesson: you learn how people actually behave when you are standing in the middle of it, not reading about it.
02
The retail floor
Best Buy Canada taught one thing above everything else: people do not buy products. They buy confidence. A customer standing in front of a wall of televisions is not making a technical decision. They are managing the fear of getting it wrong. The job was to understand that fear faster than they could articulate it. Ranked top 20% of product experts on the West Coast. Promoted to the Future Leader Program as the youngest member in the region. Moved a department from 128th to 16th nationally. None of it came from knowing more about the products than the next person.
03
The systems years
Moved back to Pakistan. Joined telecom. Telenor first, then Zong. Contact centers, inbound teams, QA frameworks, regional audits across Sindh and Balochistan. This is where the lens started forming properly. Managing a 27 member team, running cross sell projects, hitting 95% customer satisfaction month after month, the realization kept sharpening: every system had the same thing hiding inside it. A gap nobody had formally named. Data that was always present, always available, quietly costing an amount that would have saved months of effort if anyone had asked the right question earlier.
04
The training architect
Moved from being inside the systems to building the people who would run them. QA frameworks for Sindh and Balochistan. A training methodology that drove 58% revenue increase and 178% growth in mobile broadband in a single cycle. A three day program for PCB umpiring staff later acknowledged by the ICC. Programs for Stylo, Sana Safinaz, PTCL, Serena Hotels, Ibex. The same pattern repeated everywhere: the process gaps that everyone attributed to people problems were actually gaps in the system those people operated inside. Fix the system. The people follow.
05
The commercial lens
Moved from training teams to running one. Manager of Sales and Customer Services at Zong. This is where the ground level became a commercial reality. A 58% revenue increase in a single cycle. 178% growth in mobile broadband sales. Not by changing the product. By changing how the sales operation was structured, measured, and run. Every day in this role was a live experiment in what actually moves a number versus what looks like it should move a number. The gap between those two things is where most sales strategies quietly die. This is also where the idea that would eventually become SELL 360 started forming. Not as a product. As a frustration with how distribution data moved, or more precisely how it did not.
06
The builder
Everything before this was someone else's system. 2017 was the first one built from scratch. The early years taught all the wrong lessons first. Built EBOB, a customer feedback platform, got selected by Web Summit, believed the world needed it. Stood in front of brands and showed them something carefully built. They said: do you have Magento? That is all we need. Flew home and started over. That failure encoded the rule that governs everything since: build what people cannot operate without, not what you think they should want. Eight years bootstrapped. Six countries. Zero external funding. The only question that ever mattered was whether the system worked better than it did before you touched it.
The Companies
Worked with,
worked for,
built for
As an employee, a trainer, a technology partner, and a founder. The same diagnostic applied in every one of them. The gap that most people missed was already in the data.
Organizations across six countries. Every one of them had a system with a gap in it. The data always knew before anyone asked.
None of it was planned. All of it was the same lesson.