Abeer Raza

Abeer is on a mission to revolutionize the world by facilitating entrepreneurship and assisting people to disrupt their domains. He is the founding partner of a leading digital solutions company, Tekrevol, He ensures today’s leaders and revolutionary thinkers by making sure their visions are brought to life in the most effective way.

With a flair for untapped opportunities, Abeer thrives on structuring, developing, and implementing business strategies that lead to accelerated growth and augmented returns. And as an avid business strategist, he delivers creative tech solutions driven by quality standards that set new industry benchmarks.

He has over a decade of experience of in cultivating teams of leaders and building digital products, which he channels into the strategic leadership of five distinct brands, each of which delivers solutions to different markets and customer bases, with offices spanning the globe.

Where did the idea for Tekrevol come from?

Tekrevol is a combination of two words that describe the mission for which we created the company. It’s Technology + Revolution. Tekrevol’s mission is to bring a revolution within the technology world. We want to change the way the current technological landscape operates and use tech to change lives across the globe.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

My day starts with my family. I recently became a father of a wonderful child, so every day I wake up, that’s my first thought. I spend a few hours with my family and do my daily meditation before heading to work. At work, my day revolves around various meetings and scrums with my sales team and marketing team. Early in the day, I sit down with the marketing team to discuss progress on our campaigns and to brainstorm new ideas that we can implement to improve our performance. After that, most of my time is spent in two things. First, ideating and implementing my vision for the expansion of the company and second on client meetings. Late in the day, I have my meeting with the sales team which follows a similar structure as the marketing scrum. In the middle, I sometimes engage with my people over a game of table tennis or chess, just to relax a bit. Then there’s my post-work workout and then it’s back home with my family. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours working on new ideas on my own time before heading to bed.
That’s pretty much what a typical day in my life is like.
I think the meditation helps me stay productive and coupled with a few games of chess or table tennis, it really helps me refresh and reorient myself, which I feel really adds to my daily productivity.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Short answer – By believing in them with all my heart.
But in all honesty, I think what I always try to do is mold ideas in a way that they become a unique way of solving a problem. Every idea is a potential solution that can really make a difference in the status quo. At Tekrevol, we work with our clients to make sure that their ideas fill a gap in the market. We are a technology company and we provide digital solutions, be it mobile apps, websites, game apps, software solutions, and a lot more but I try and think of our work as empowering others to solve problems that mean something to them. We try to answer one simple question every time we need to bring an idea to life. That question is, “what problem are we solving and how can we solve it better?”
That’s how we bring ideas to life.

What’s one trend that excites you?

I work with clients on large agile and digital transformations. These have accelerated since the pandemic, and I’ve been excited by the ways digital can improve how we manage risk and compliance, particularly in more regulated industries such as banking and insurance. I find that most organizations are still using legacy, check-the-box risk, and compliance tools to assess the risk of a new product or feature. Therefore, I’m super-excited about the way technology can reduce challenges and introduce new opportunities in the tech world.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

I think meditation generally helps me improve my productivity significantly as a human being and consequently as an entrepreneur. It helps me centralize myself every day and allows me to focus on my day from even before I step into the office.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Fall in love with falling down. I think that’s what I’d advise my younger self. My journey as an entrepreneur has had a lot of failures. From failed businesses to unsuccessful campaigns, I’ve seen it all. But every time I’ve fallen down, I’ve taken it as an opportunity to learn from my hurts and used them to do better and achieve better.
I didn’t always have this way of thinking and it took years to develop this kind of a mindset and I think if my younger self had this kind of a mindset, I wouldn’t have spent so much time as a child under stress.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

I think the one thing nobody agrees with me on is my approach to experimentation. I am a huge fan of trial and error and everyone around me sees my willingness to experiment so frequently as rashness. Despite that, I believe a huge portion of my success can be dedicated to that experimentation because it helped me learn a lot as a human being, as an entrepreneur, and as a leader.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

I think people should listen more often. There is a lot of power in listening and most people don’t do that. There’s a difference between hearing someone and listening to them and that difference is something people should recognize.
If you can start listening be it your audience, your team, your employees, your clients, you’ll do a better job in every walk of life.
Specifically, as an entrepreneur, I think listening helps you understand the problem that you’re solving from a much more diverse perspective, which can drastically improve your decision-making.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

I think the one strategy that’s worked for Tekrevol is to always look into emerging market gaps. Let me explain what that means. When you enter a market, there’s a gap that you fill. This becomes your USP. Over time, that market evolves and while the gap you filled years ago might still be a relevant USP, with new technologies and evolving market dynamics and society, new gaps always emerge. Identifying those gaps requires a lot of investment in learning, staying updated with tech, trends, news, and in general what people are talking about.
At Tekrevol, we invest a lot of time in keeping updated with emerging market gaps. This allows our team to develop new ideas and come up with innovative ways to fill that gap before our competitors.
That’s perhaps one of the best ways to grow your business and to always stay relevant to your target audience.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

I could give a story about one of my many businesses that failed and how I learned to deal with that loss and learn from my mistakes but that would be extremely cliché. Although, that is still part of my story.
Instead, I think this story makes more sense. Earlier in my life, I launched a call center. I was a teenager from a background that wasn’t very privileged. I had to stop my education and pursue a business because my financial circumstances required me to do so.
The call center wasn’t a success but we had some profit, which for a teenager isn’t bad at all. I spent a few years doing that and growing the business.
I think the failure there was that I don’t think I left that behind me when I should’ve. I had grown dispassionate about the business because it wasn’t enough for my dreams. It wasn’t enough for the vision I had and the mission I wanted to pursue.
I failed to realize that while the business was generating profit, money isn’t the end goal. Money or profit is a utility used to achieve the end goal, which has to be greater than yourself.
I left that behind, worked a few years in the corporate world, and still felt like there was something inside of me that was hollow. It simply wasn’t enough. I wanted to make a bigger difference and that’s when I decided to launch Tekrevol.
With Tekrevol, I feel that the change I wanted to make is achievable and we’re close to achieving that. I think often entrepreneurs forget that businesses are supposed to solve problems. With the call center, I had lost sight of that for a while and I think that was my biggest failure as an entrepreneur.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

I think right now given the state of technology, a blockchain-based receiver wallet is a business idea that can be worked upon to create a disruptive business. Right now, the world is at a stage where both crypto and blockchain are booming, if someone can create a receiver wallet that works, it could change the way we think about neo-banking, drastically.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

I think the best $100 I’ve spent recently was my investment into team training. The $100 was spent to help our marketing team take advanced Martech courses to improve their utilization of technology to create marketing campaigns that are data-driven and impact-oriented. For a lot of marketers, this investment is something they have to make themselves or learn these things with time. At Tekrevol, training is central to our vision and I’d say that’s perhaps the best $100 I’ve spent recently.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Google Calendar is my go-to productivity app and it has been for years. I like to plan out my day to the hour and dedicate time slots to my various duties. This helps me ensure that I’m always forced by the calendar to achieve my daily goals and targets. Integrating my work day with my calendar is incredibly useful to me personally and makes me more productive, even on days when I’m not feeling on top of my game.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

I always suggest Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. It is a great guide for how to think to lean as a business and constantly evolve your service or product to ensure relevancy and competitive advantage regardless of your industry. It’s one of the books I read very early in my journey as an entrepreneur and it taught me a lot about how to think about my business, successes, and failure.

What is your favorite quote?

That’s a hard one because there are so many of them but one that I feel people should think more about is this one.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates