"Aston Business School has always been known to be a world-class business school and having so many family friends who have studied at Aston University and recommended it, I knew it was the right choice for me."

Tell us about your journey so far

Wow! It’s been a rough ride, we have worked tirelessly with landlords to create a solution that perfectly fits their needs, brightLET was built by landlords and for landlords to allow them to effectively manage their property portfolio from anywhere in the world using any computer, laptop, tablet or mobile.

What has your start-up achieved?

Some of our achievements to date:

  • Currently Shortlisted for KPMG’s Best British Mobile Start-Up 2019
  • Recently won Best property management software 2018 at the Build awards 2 months ago.
  • Rapidly developed a service to help landlords comply with the ‘Right To Rent’ national immigration checks.
  • Saved hundreds of thousands in technology infrastructure and branding costs. Commercial and partnership signed with the YMCA, allowing us to enter a £10B+ housing association and provider market. Finalists for NatWest GBEA Awards for 2017.
  • Finalists for KPMG Best British Mobile & Technology Startups for 2017. Selected as UK's top 20 high-growth and expected global companies to join The University of Cambridge scale-up programme -Top University in the UK and Europe.
  • Won Barclays Best Innovative Start-Up for 2017.
Why did you decide to study at Aston Business School?

Aston Business School has always been known to be a world-class business school and having so many family friends who have studied at Aston University and recommended it, I knew it was the right choice for me, plus I’ve always lived in Birmingham, and believed that Aston University has the best Business School in Birmingham, so it was a natural choice for me.

What was the highlight of your Aston experience?

I think the highlight for me was meeting so many people from all walks of life, different cities, as well as different countries, and the atmosphere around campus was always amazing, with so many things constantly going on all the time, I truly made a lot of lifelong friends there.

How has your time at Aston helped your business?

Aston University Lecturers always provided real-life business examples from businesses that exist today, and would always teach you the positives and negatives of running a business using a range of different strategies, and how it can affect your overall profits and turnover. These strategies have stayed with me today and helped me run my company effectively, given there is a lot of trial and error, and the same strategy will not always establish the same result, but those strategies also include pivoting when the market changes, and we believe that the Property Market is changing today, and we want to be at the forefront of that change.

What is next on the career horizon for you?

To turn brightLET into the next biggest thing to come to the property market, we have already made a lot of noise, attracted interest from huge companies, and won a lot of awards! Our next move is to take brightLET global and have a solution that is fit for the international market that will allow people to buy, let and manage property from anywhere in the world through the power of automation.

What advice would you give to someone looking to start or run their own business?

You can spend hours on YouTube watching all the motivational videos in the world, you can attend as many networking events as you want, but till you execute your vision and start building your business, you have absolutely nothing, everyone has great ideas, but till you execute them, they will always remain as an idea, and quite frankly, ideas are cheap without execution. Execution is key, yes knowledge and motivation are definitely part of building any vision, but you have to execute and start doing whatever you want to do today.

My second piece of advice would be never ever be put off by the competition. They were there before you, they may well be there after you, but there is absolutely no reason at all that you can’t become their competition. Today’s world population is 7.2 Billion people, and it is predicted to rise to 9.6 billion by 2050, that’s just over 30 years from now, and that means that there will be an additional 2.4 billion people that require products and services, the world is constantly becoming smaller due to technical innovation and automation that connects us with the rest of the planet, this also means that every year up until that point, the population will grow, which means demand will rise, because it has too.

If you ever think that something has already been done, just go to the supermarket and look around, you will find tonnes of products and brands there from successful businesses and guess what, just like you are always looking for the next best thing, so is everyone else, so don’t be put off and just go for it, even if it fails, learn why it failed and apply the lessons you learned from your failure to your next venture, and never give up!