Rayyan EshaghPour, Director, Vision77
Setting up a business is no walk in the park. It takes unwavering determination, focus, and courage to nurture a company towards success. However, to launch and run multiple businesses while investing time and energy into them without the fear of failure takes a very driven business person with certain traits. While many entrepreneurs start a single business and ride it out for its lifetime, there are few who work their way from one business to another with an optimistic outlook, a willingness to take risks, and most importantly – a hunger or grit to achieve success. One such courageous entrepreneur who has built and led multiple ventures with sheer perseverance, commitment, dedication, and a vision to deliver a strong value proposition is Rayyan EshaghPour.
Rayyan’s inspiration to become entrepreneur roots back to his childhood when he learned his early lesson of business acumen from his father. Being the eldest son in his family, Rayyan grew up spending most of his time with his father in his Optical Retail & Wholesale Empire. This is when he learned the trading skills and developed a strong sense of business which set the foundation for his entrepreneurial journey.
“I still recall I was only 9 years old when my dad would leave me at one of his shops to run the business end-to-end while he was away for a few hours. I’m certainly blessed to have such a progressive-minded father who had faith in such a young boy to run his business,” asserts Rayyan.
Rayyan’s First Real Venture into the Tech World
Rayyan started fully operating his father’s business while managing everything end-to-end from the factories to sales at the age of 14. While handling the responsibilities at the Optical Retail shops, he realized how passionate he is when it comes to selling something of value to others. However, meanwhile, he also discovered his unrelenting curiosity about technology. As a teenager, he was curious to understand the inner workings of everything he could get his hands on, whether it was a computer, spectacles, websites, cars, buildings or branding.
Driven by this inquisitiveness, Rayyan co-founded & invested his savings into an online dating website at the age of 16, thus, making his first real venture into the tech world. Though he had to shut down the website later as insisted by his father, this experience sparked off the tech-fever within him. He started troubleshooting the tech and IT related issues faced by his friends and family. By the time he was studying in university, he had already created 2-3 substantial revenue streams.
In 2004, Rayyan decided to start a full-fledged design studio along with his brother Ayman EshaghPour. As they had closed a USD 2,000,000 deal, they needed to scale and build a team fast to deliver the 2-weeks campaign as promised to their client.
“It was an exhilarating experience because all we really had was a room, one Macbook pro, and the two of us who were determined to make it all happen. Our design studio did well for about a year after that, with an expanding team, and clients like Blackberry, Gucci, MontBlanc, and many other iconic names,” shares Rayyan.
The Challenging Journey towards Success
After completing his graduation, when Rayyan was looking forward to doing something new, his father entrusted him to set up his entire manufacturing & logistics infrastructure for his optical business. This is when he ended up travelling extensively to negotiate with French and American partners.
Recalling one of the experiences of those days Rayyan shares, “I still remember how a French engineer came to our city to supervise and train the team, which at the time my father and I didn’t have. Consequently, I ended up doing it all solo, on my own in the manufacturing plant, spending days creating the infrastructure single-handedly.”
In 2010, Rayyan moved to Malaysia and started a BBQ-Grill restaurant over there. Alongside the restaurant, he also got involved in court-translation work with the government in Malaysia. This is when he met his life partner, Tina Ong. As he got married and had a family, things changed and so did his priorities. Attaining stability in career became more important at that point in time. Thus, Rayyan decided to put his entrepreneurial adventures on hold and started looking for a full-time job for more predictable month-to-month bankability. He landed up at a very reputable SI company that carried NetSuite, Google, and Salesforce in 2012. Eventually, his reputation in terms of sales performance led him to a job at Clarizen, a globally renowned project management company in the US. With a well-paying job and a happy family, life was great for Rayyan except for the fact that deep down inside he was still missing the entrepreneur within.
“The entrepreneur in me wasn’t ever truly gone. He was merely dormant, quietly waiting to strike again. A part of me really wanted to start-up a tech-venture of my own in Malaysia,” states Rayyan.
Around that same time, he came up with a great idea for the early-childhood care industry. Thus, he secured a family-office investor, founded a tech-company and very quickly scaled up a team and co-founders to build a mobile app. The goal was to empower pre-schools & kindergartens by providing visibility and connectivity to both, parents and teachers in an innovative manner as their children attend school.
The Emergence of Vision77
While the idea of early-childhood care app was quite innovative, after about a year, he realized that it wasn’t as exciting as he had originally thought. Thus, he started planning an exit strategy. This is when 2X TEDx Speaker, Dr. A.J Minai approached him to invest his efforts and resources into a very promising creative agency and from there began their journey as unshakeable business partners. Later, they started a blockchain advisory, a training company, a commodities company, and so many more different ventures together.
They realized that when they come together to work on something as a tag-team, it would often result in a positive outcome for all who were involved. This realization and the little milestones and lessons over the years led both to embrace one core belief that—business & its growth is fundamentally about the right people. Over time, the number of projects increased and hence they decided to officially position all these projects under one roof and that’s when the Vision77 was born.
Today, around 15 companies are housed under Vision77 banner and it is further gearing up to acquire more ventures under its name before 2030. The dream behind Vision77 is to be able to own seventy-seven different businesses that are truly changing the world, each with a profitable purpose that’s value-centric as opposed to merely revenue-obsessed.
“Vision77 wants each one of its ventures to be something that rattles the cages from an innovation perspective. Something that’s different not just for the sake of marketing gimmickry, but more so that each of those businesses actually impacts human life and adds value, albeit in the smallest or the biggest of ways,” affirms Rayyan.
Poised To Make Vision77 a Global Brand
Currently, the company is working towards its mission to successfully establish itself as a global brand comprising of 77 companies that are disrupting the status quo, shaping lives, adding real value, and solving old problems in new ways.
“I know in my heart and in my mind—that with the right partners, the right team, and the right character, our vision of 77 ventures around the world will one day be a shining reality, states Rayyan.
As an individual, Rayyan envisions a peaceful world without borders, where the lives will be fuelled by mutual respect, kindness, and tolerance towards one another irrespective of colour, creed, or status.
Success Is All About Helping Others Build Their Dreams
While there are many factors that contributed to his success, Rayyan’s emphasis on transparency, teamwork, empathy, faith, work-life balance, has been the cornerstone. Through his entrepreneur journey, he learned the importance of hard work, resilience, astute finance management, and willingness to get better. Rayyan is someone who views obstacles as lessons to learn. Today he is capitalizing on those lessons to run a company that never compromises quality for the sake of saving a penny. Most of the businesses these days are gearing up towards becoming a money-making machine. However, Vision77 is driven by values rather than profit. “I believe success goes beyond money, fame, or power,” says Rayyan. “At the core, it’s all about helping others build their dreams. And to do that I first need to enable myself by cultivating the right state-of-mind, finding the purpose of my life and eliminating the limitations that hold me back,” he adds.