BIO: Mohammed Aneez is a multidisciplinary designer and has been Co-founder and Design Director at Emnicent Designs.
STORY: Mohammed co-founded a design studio with three friends from college. Even though the company was profitable, the co-founders didn’t have enough entrepreneurial experience to scale the business according to their goals.
LEARNING: Focus on good leadership. Learn from other leaders.
“Good leadership will build you a profitable company.”
Mohammed Aneez
Guest profile
Mohammed Aneez is a multidisciplinary designer and has been Co-founder and Design Director at Emnicent Designs. His expertise lies in product design for enterprise solutions, digital transformation, and usability design for business-to-business (SaaS) products across domains. With cross-domain experience and a veteran of design methodologies, Aneez leads multiple teams in-house and at client locations. He also provides free design consultations for various startups from India.
He believes that creativity and entrepreneurship are skills that are innate in every human being and must be embraced. He likes to indulge in design practices that are experimental.
Worst investment ever
After college, Mohammed and his three friends started a design studio. The four were good designers, but none had business experience. However, they succeeded in running a profitable company. The company was cash-flow positive in under a year and had many projects coming in. Their problem was high demand and low supply at the end of the first year. They didn’t have sufficient designers for the demand.
Due to a lack of entrepreneurial experience, the four were just going by the gist of it. They had zero structure for handling sales, marketing, finance, hiring, etc.
By the end of the first year, one of Mohammed’s co-founders had a family emergency, and he felt getting a job would be better. He was not into the entrepreneurial spirit, so he left the company. At the end of the second year, another co-founder left because he felt the company was more focused on making profits than the initial goal. When the co-founders came together, their goal was to do much more research and drive the design community forward. Now the company was just a design studio that provided services to different companies.
After the second guy left, Mohammed started to think about why he had launched the business. He realized that his lack of leadership skills had made the co-founders and the business generally stray from its initial goal.
Lessons learned
- Learn leadership qualities and how to ensure that it’s imbibed in the company culture.
- Learn from other leaders. Get to know how they keep the ball rolling and become great.
- Focus on building the right team.
Andrew’s takeaways
- Scaling is very crucial for a company to continue running.
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Mohammed’s goal for the next 12 months is to learn to be a better leader.
Parting words
“You don’t need a lot of people to trust and be around you. Just find that one person who is ready to listen and talk.”
Mohammed Aneez
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