What are the keys to growth in any industry? Happy customers and even happier employees.

Nazar Musa has over 20 years of experience in the online and travel industry and he has demonstrated success driving multimillion dollar sales growth and award winning sales and marketing leadership in many markets. 

He’s the former General Manager and Regional CEO of LivingSocial and he’s now CEO of Medical Channel, a digital OOH media company that provides content to digital display screens in health practices.

Watch the talk here:

Being acquired and acquiring

Nazar has been on both sides of an acquisition. He spent 6 months at the height of the daily deals frenzy building and priming the travel vertical of his own deals business to be bought out. The secret? Know who you want to be bought by, then structure your business and processes after that. Being an early stage startup, the two key factors for valuation is revenue and scalability. By increasing the price of average sales through selling 5-star hotel deals, Nazar was able to raise the overall revenue, becoming an even more attractive investment to be acquired. 

On the flip side, Nazar acquired the Community Network last year as part of Medical Channel’s growth strategy. The $25million acquisition of their major competitor gave them scale and advertising opportunities across the nation. However, as with most acquisitions that initially look perfect on paper, the integration challenges soon came. The first was to rapidly grow the employee base from 9 to 90 over 5 months (hire someone you trust, and then let them do their job). Nazar balanced that with the bigger challenge of repairing broken relationships from Community Network. By taking the time to talk to upset advertisers and medical practices, he was able to empathise with them and solve their problems. As simple as it sounds, listening to your stakeholders and acting on their requests converts them to clients for life.

Growing the LivingSocial brand

As the Regional Manager of Asia for LivingSocial, Nazar oversaw the growth of its portfolio of acquired brands. Each country was distinct from the next, which meant that to compete, Nazar hired local experts who knew the market in depth, and then proceeded to create relevant products for those customers. 

His second lesson, become a karaoke master. Jokes aside, relationship building is extremely important to get business done in Asia. Cultivating the right relationships through social events along with leveraging social media influencers who were popular in the market were propellers that grew LivingSocial’s brand against Groupon in countries like Korea and Thailand.  

Bringing things offline

While tech companies are all the rage, Nazar also dabbled in starting his own boxing gym in Singapore with great success. To test whether there was a market, he created a fake page for the gym and spent $20 on Facebook ads over 7 days targeting potential customers in a 4km radius of the destined location. A set target of 100 likes would validate his new business idea. Overnight, the page received an astounding 400 likes and in 4 days another 600. That was more than enough validation for Nazar to open up his gym. 

It might have been well-crafted copy, the perfect location, or that he just got lucky, but Nazar shows how we can utilise lean startup methodologies and a very low budget to validate new ideas before executing. 

Key takeaways

• Never forget you’re serving a customer and a merchant- at the end of the day, if you are a marketplace, you have to understand your customers and merchants and make sure they’re are satisfied to be profitable.
• Capital comes to good businesses- there is an abundance of capital all over the world, if you have a good idea and you can prove traction or a path to revenue, you’ll be able to get capital (and this applies whether you are in tech or not!)
• Keep your employees engaged and happy- they are your biggest asset, build an environment they want to stay and grow in. If you hire people smarter than you, and let them do what they do best, the revenue will come. 
• Be nice to people- whether they are investors or clients, always be nice to people as you never know where you’ll meet them down the road.