Farida Kanwal reached to busiest city Karachi from calm and
quite valley of Hunza when she was only two years old. Hunza – a mountainous
valley – at the extreme north side of Pakistan, where her family lived in a
remote village. Farida’s mother sought good education as the only solution for
getting prosperity and decided to leave the family home and shifted to Karachi
for giving her daughter a promising future.
“My mother struggled a lot,” admits Farida.
“She wanted me to do better than others. She had differences with her own
family over the move, but her brother supported her and that made all the
difference.”
Farida and her colleague named Muhammad Zubair strived to
develop a school project into an App, but couldn’t be successful. In this situation,
Muhammed Zubair suggested to get job which Farida refused as one should create
jobs rather than only picking jobs and advised him to take another attempt. While they were busy to find new ideas, one
of their friend had a concern to know full about his son’s school activities. As
Farida had an experience of teaching in a school and was well-known about the
problems arising in day-to-day school management. So, she decided to work on an
App made for school systems. Queno came into being when their another colleague
named Mudassir Khanani joined them.
Queno is an innovative mobile App that controls much of the
teacher’s manual work, from attendance and test diaries to the test calendar.
Due to having access the information, parents are well aware about their
children’s actual activities and positions in their schools. Customization in
App according to school needs can also be done. Farida claims “Queno is all you
need in one application,” and “We put a school into a mobile App.”
Before any school tries their system, the partners had to
approach several schools for this purpose. “It was difficult in the beginning
to change mindsets,” admits Farida. “The teachers found it difficult to switch
over from a manual system, but we gave them hands-on training for a month, and
they caught on. Now, they say the system saves time and is more efficient.”
A good market is available here,” says Farida, “but, we were
not aware to align until we were chosen for an incubation programme managed by
Karandaaz Women Entrepreneurship Challenge at Invest to Innovate (i2i). The Karandaaz intervention gave us
mentors to help with marketing techniques. We met investors and changed our
business plan.”
The participants went outside their comfort zone though this
programme, as sessions in Lahore and Islamabad, and a network started to form
into place. Queno added on schools in Islamabad on client base that had been restricted
to Karachi only through this network. As Farida did never travelled outside
from Karachi so this experience proved to be a game changer. “The not only
pivoted our business plan,” affirms Farida “They changed my personality.” As
once she was so shy even for a group presentation now a smiling, calm young
lady having details of her business at her finger tips.
She analyzes that Queno’s founders instead of being
technical experts had not business acumen. “Investors would ask for our
accounts sheets,” she adds, “but we didn’t have anything to show.” All of
changing shown when the incubator gave Queno a virtual CFO. Farida and Zubair
learnt to make accounts sheets, evaluating the company and setting expenses
against incomes. After getting the sufficient informations, they started to
concentrate on growing their business. At the moment, there are three fulltime
and two part time employees in Queno except from their founders. Farida desires
to enhance her marketing network and add members to her team. That way, she
declares, “More people will learn new skills, and become familiar with the
needs of that she took the right decision,” utters Farida, “She brought me up to
be strong enough to manage my own business and my own life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment