How an entrepreneur destroyed a mediocre business to create a great company

Recently, the US Department of Defense made an order to the firm of Ahmad Ishak ByteCubed to create a platform to accompany government contractors related to small businesses.

Ahmad Ishak fostered a stable big data business that attracted subcontractors to the projects of the American government. But then the immigrant from Afghanistan realized that he had not dreamed about it. So he started everything from scratch - in Arlington (Va.), Where his ByteCubed settled.
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Here is what he told Kate Rockwood:

My parents moved to America near the end of the Cold War, fleeing the massacre that began in Afghanistan. I was then about 4 years old, and my first memory was a trip from the Los Angeles airport straight to the coast. There are no beaches in Afghanistan. It seemed that a completely unfamiliar world had opened up before me.

We did not have a penny, but obtaining political asylum gave us a chance to start a new life . My father took on any job - selling drinks in a shopping center, was a taxi driver. I helped him to open an export-import company. But I always had the desire to do something more and repay a debt to a country that gave my family a second chance.

After graduating from college, I moved from California to Washington. I did my undergraduate practice at the Ministry of Defense, and I managed to stay there as a manager of government programs. One of the projects I have led, A-Space, has been awarded the title of the best design by Time magazine. It is a closed social network for intelligence workers, where they can share their ideas and information.

I switched to major military contractors, but when faced with bureaucracy, I quickly became disillusioned. I would like to be engaged in business, bringing real benefit to the state, and not to waste my time on raking internal bureaucracy. I thought, “Why don't I run my own business ?”

So in 2011, I took up the creation of ByteCubbed. I wanted to understand how to help the government extract information from documents, analyze it and make smarter decisions. But start-ups usually find it difficult to get the right to conclude a basic contract, much more often they act as subcontractors. It was from this point that I started: I cooperated with large companies and used those crumbs that they gave me. I agreed to any suggestion.

We grew up, and I brought home almost half a million dollars as a salary. But he was still deeply unhappy. All this did not correspond to my understanding of the present case. I wanted to rule over my fate, but I was forced to depend on the whims of those very large contractors.

When my wife carried our first child under the heart, the moment came “now or never.” I was afraid that if I didn’t do anything radical in the near future, then I wouldn’t be able to start from scratch. Therefore, I refused to rent an office monthly, reduced expenses to a minimum and sold all my subcontracts for pennies. This gave the business 8 months of savings. The number of employees has been reduced from 10 to 2 people.

Over the first project I fought for several months, and then followed a period of painful waiting. I looked at my phone so often that in the end my spouse persuaded me to make a little trip in order to relax. We were in a hotel room when the news came that ByteCubbed got a 5-year contract with the Ministry of Defense worth $ 1.2 million a year. My wife was beside herself with delight.

But I began to recruit new employees and rent an office only a few months later, when the second and third contracts were concluded. When our staff reached 40 people, I found a great room of 450 m². Then we got another order. Now we have 140 employees, and we finally moved to a new office. It has more than 1500 m². And we have room to grow.

PS We recommend another useful article on the topic of business development - Lessons learned from 7 of their failures from very successful people .

The author of the translation is Vyacheslav Davidenko, the founder of the TESTutor company.