Create Value: Spot, Filter, Execute
A note to young leaders.
Every great entrepreneur I know can pick up the Financial Review and spot three business opportunities before reaching the back page.
But the rarer talent is in knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing, and acting while everyone else is still musing and pontificating.
Spotting, filtering, executing. Three distinct skills – and nature seldom issues them to the same person.
My friend, Zeryab Cheema, has mastered all three, three times, before turning 30.
Zeryab started his first business in Year 9: a taxi payments app. A few years later, he learned that London’s black cabs were being compelled to accept credit card payments. He reached out to iZettle, a Swedish payments company, showed them his app and together they launched a payments solution for London cabs. He scaled it as the regulations took effect in 2016, and sold it in the same year for just over GBP 2 million. He was 19.
While that sale was still going through, he was already looking at the next thing: supplying rental vehicles to the growing ride-share market. He needed a fleet partner, so he messaged Hertz executives on LinkedIn, one after another, until one of them replied. That became HOP, a platform supplying rental cars to ride-share and logistics operators.
Then he spotted articles about Amazon scaling its delivery network in Australia, and did the same thing again. He messaged Amazon executives, in Australia and abroad, until someone made an introduction.
Amazon’s first request was hardly the stuff of entrepreneurial legend. They needed 20 rental vehicles on two days’ notice. Zeryab said yes. His team shuttled the cars from Mascot to Regents Park and back. Nobody will ever make a film of it. I am barely managing a paragraph. But it was a job well done, and he now had his foot in the door.
In 2024, Amazon came back with a proposal to partner on its last-mile delivery network. The projected profit was AUD 100,000 to 200,000. Hardly a king’s ransom, given the effort involved. He said yes anyway, and then from a standing start hired 40 staff and built every process Amazon Logistics required, in 10 weeks.
Today, HOP has 70 full-time staff, and is on track for AUD 11M in annual recurring revenue.
The temptation in hearing all this is to shake our heads and file it under “luck and hustle”. But it’s more than that.
First, the spotting. Zeryab was not scanning the world for opportunity. Every one of his yeses was in transport, a market he understood.
Second, the filtering. His “big breaks” were not that big. Zeryab’s filter was never: “Will this make me rich?” – it was: “Where might this lead?”
Third, the execution. It was fast. And in each case, it began with him approaching a stranger – at iZettle, at Hertz, at Amazon – and continuing until someone answered. He didn’t wait for doors to open. He knocked.
Spot. Filter. Execute. Do all three, and the next opportunity won’t need to be chased.
It will come looking for you.