We were lucky to catch up with Tanvir Arfi recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Tanvir, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I draw my resilience from a combination of personal traits, experiences and strategic approaches. The first and foremost to me is focus on the Mission. For me, the mission needs to be clear and needs to have purpose. When I genuinely believe in what I am doing, the impact it could create AND enjoy doing it, thats a combination destined to drive success!
Every entrepreneurs journey is riddled with setbacks, adversity and challenges. Resilience for me is about being adaptable and continuously learning from setbacks and adversity. Every setback is an opportunity to iterate and improve. Embracing change and seeing challenges as learning experiences keeps me resilient
Resilience also comes from surrounding yourself with talented people that make up for the deficiencies you have in your experience and skillset. The most obvious is Subject Matter Expertise. As a specific example, I am not a software developer. However, we have created an industry leading tech enabled services and software company. So, how is it that we are so successful in our end market with our products and services when the founder and CEO has no personal software development skill. I attribute this success mostly surrounding myself with a team that is more talented, more skilled and equally honed in on THE MISSION.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Professionally speaking, I am passionate about the automotive industry. I am amazed at the freedom of mobility an automobile provides its owner and the shared experiences that come with road trips, off roading, rallys and such. I also believe that that we are at an interesting time in the history of human mobility with two key transitions happening right in front of us. For over 100 years, human mobility has been powered by the internal combustion engines (ICE) driven by fossil fuels. We are now experiencing a shift away from ICE into electric powered mobility. Secondly, we are also on the cusp of a major technological breakthrough to provide autonomous human mobility, or self driving cars. These two changes are set to revolutionize human mobility within the next few years.
I have had the fortune to serve as the leader of two large cap publicly traded automotive companies from 2002 through 2018. As much as I enjoyed that experience, I entered a new era of my career in 2018, when I launched Banyan Technologies Group. Banyan started in my home office and has now grown to a major player in the Auto Aftermarket with leading brands, products and services that serve the entire automotive value chain. In 2023, Banyan’s portfolio of companies are expected to deliver $150M in annual revenue with an infrastructure across US and Canada to serve its clients where they need us most.
Banyan’s mission is “To accelerate and scale entrepreneurial businesses by leveraging their experience through uncommon business practices to create accretive value for all stakeholders.”
Banyan’s business platforms serves multiple end markets with diverse technologies, services, and products. Banyan current portfolio includes: Helm (www.helm.com), a 80-year industry leader in Brand Marketing and eCommerce Services, Publishing, Fulfilment services with high brand recognition in automotive; Helm Technologies (www.chatterspot.com), an industry leading SaaS Digital Marketing platform; Imperial (www.imperialmarketing.com), an industry leading provider of B2B training and consulting services and rewards/incentives programs; and Competition Specialties Inc, a leading regional provider of automotive accessories with 6 locations across the US west Coast. We expect to announce major new client engagements and additional additions to our current portfolio in the comings months.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I believe that hard work, perseverance, resilience, integrity and such are all excellent qualities… however, I consider those ‘table steaks.’ Meaning that just these are not enough to differentiate from the competition. Looking back, there are a few qualities and strategies I most rely upon to deliver better output.
The first is the power of 80/20. This is a strategy based on the Pareto principle (google it, if you have not heard of this before). This is a strategy to identify the 20% of actions/activities (vital few) that would deliver an 80% output, meaning disproportionately large benefit. Once you have correctly identified the 20% (vital few) of the actions that will deliver the 80% output – relentlessly focus only on those. This is an easy concept, but surprisingly few have mastered the skill of the focus this strategy brings. If properly deployed, this strategy delivers a significant differentiator
A second quality that helped me in my life and career was to seek out capable mentors to help you grow in areas that are crucial to your success, but could be in your ‘discomfort zone.’ Early in my career, when I was given my first opportunity to lead a business, my discomfort zone was sales. I was an engineer by education and grew my career through engineering and operations roles in major corporations. As a General Manager of a business unit, I had full responsbility for the P&L, but had never worked in sales. I was very apprehensive of sales calls, RFP responses, and stand up bid presentations at clients. I did not want to screw things up at a major client. So, I seeked out a senior sales executive, who actually reported to me, and asked him to be my mentor. This meant checking in your ego and pride at the door, and putting in real work to learn from someone who’s style, skill and results I admired.
My advise for young professionals looking to move up the corporate ladder and for early stage entrepreneurs is to surround yourselves with people smarter than yourself; to practice 80/20 and to identify you discomfort zone and recruit a mentor.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
Although there are no absolutes in life, in general, in a professional career it is better to be more well rounded versus going all in with just our strengths. I believe in continuous improvement, which means that we continue to find areas that are relevant in our careers that could be an area of weakness, and investing in coaching, training, continuing education and even self learning to continue to better ourselves.
I will provide a short personal story. Banyan acquired Helm Promotions in 2018, Helm Promotions is an industry leading marketing services and software provider. Helm is an 80 year old business that began as a trade bindery in 1943. I did not have any prior expertise in marketing services, especially with emerging and newer channels like social media. Helm has a wonderful team of experts who provide clients with services across multiple marketing channels, but I and wanted to be able to know enough to contribute. So, I prioritized my time to create capacity for me to go through some formal training in social media marketing, attended seminars and spend 1:1 time with Helm experts to learn. Bottom line is that I realized that I had hit a wall with how much I could learn and making that next leap would involve me doing it myself. Specifically, to learn how to build a social media presence, build followers organically, and to leverage the platform, I started at the ground level and created a new social media profile for my dog Gatsby. Over the next six months I made time on evenings and weekends to create content that was funny, witty, cute and otherwise interesting to fellow dog lovers. The work started to pay off and Gatsby gained over 7000 followers and I learned an important new skill set.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.banyantechgroup.com
- Instagram: @tanvirarfi
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanvir-arfi-b372465/
