Q&A with our MD, Mandy Fazelynia
Everyone at Zest4 was thrilled when Mandy was announced as Entrepreneur of the Year at this year’s Comms National Awards. A well-deserved accolade, which has made us want to dive-deeper and find out what makes Mandy such a great leader and businesswoman.
We asked a series of three questions, if you’ve got anything else you’d like to ask her, then please let us know and we’ll get an answer to you.
What’s been the secret of Zest4’s success over the years?
One of the biggest contributors to our success has been the amazing team with shared goals, strong friendships, and a drive for success.
The people really make the business, and everyone at Zest4 brings something exciting and new to the table, they make me proud every day with their hard work and dedication. It is incredibly rewarding to watch as new recruits enter the business, that I can mentor and help, to see how they flourish and grow.
My first business in telecoms was formed 30 years ago, and I’m proud to say that many of our existing Zest4 Team worked in this business (and our next venture Yes Telecom before joining Zest4). We picked the best of the best when forming Zest4 in terms of industry knowledge, expertise, and ‘can-do’ attitude.
We have maintained our focus at Zest4 on five pillars for success: Partners, People, Products, Pounds, and Profile. All goals across the business, whether they are at group level, departmental, team or individual feed into these pillars, this way we keep the whole business is aligned.
The team have an instinct for opportunity, and we pull together to commercialise these opportunities for our partners to deliver growth. So, we maintain our growth through helping our partners to grow.
As a successful entrepreneur and leader in the comms channel, what have you learned personally about how to make the biggest impact on the business?
Stay real, authentic, and sincere, to be a good communicator is essential, and to have empathy for colleagues, and to support them will generate great results for both them and the business.
You get out of your staff what you’re willing to put in, when you stop using draconian measures like time spent at laptops but start to measure quality of work instead of quantity individuals respond better. I am always willing to undertake any task that I give any of my team and they know it, I’ll muck in however is needed to get a job done.
When I first started in my career, I tended to be very risk averse, some of the team may say I still am – but over time, I have learned to be more daring, to listen for when the possible upsides will outweigh the risk and be bold. With this mindset I have developed the Zest4 portfolio with suitable additions, we have continued to grow our Partner base and we have grown and maintained our stability throughout the last ten years.
I’ve also learnt that not every idea works! But, if you don’t try new things, or to do things differently, you risk missing the one idea that will really take off.
So, support your team if they want to give something a go and ride the ups and downs together. Have fun with it and don’t take everything too seriously.
With additional investment secured, what can the channel expect to see from Zest4 over the coming year or two?
Many exciting developments are underway, we are continuing to broaden our product portfolio beyond traditional telecoms, and we are creating more opportunities than ever for increasing the revenue of our partners.
You can expect to see product launches in the I.T. space around cloud and security, to take advantage of the huge growth opportunities in this addressable marketplace.
We are continuing to ride the wave of IoT growth post-Covid. When we first brought IoT into our portfolio we were confident of its success, and now it’s really coming through.
It’s an exciting time to be a Zest4 partner.