in the news

Former consultant walks the talk

WENDY STUECK
British Columbia Bureau
Monday, June 19, 2000

Vancouver -- After 10 years of telling people how to run their companies, Syed Hasan is trying to build his own.

In November, Mr. Hasan, 31, left a consulting position with a prominent U.S. firm to launch ResponseTek Inc., a startup currently based in his Vancouver apartment.

High-level strategic consulting is "a dream job -- for a while," he says. "There's so much you can learn, and so much you can teach. And then you get to the stage you're milking it."

Most recently with Cambridge Technology Partners of Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Hasan had spent the previous three years providing strategic advice to major U.S. corporations, jetting between client offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco and touching down weekends in Vancouver.

Earlier, he'd worked in Britain, where he began his career with the pharmaceutical division of 3M after obtaining a degree in mechanical engineering and a business diploma.

He's been living in Vancouver since 1997, when he was recruited to launch a new strategic consulting division of a long-established engineering firm.

In early 1998, lured by the growing boom in e-commerce, he joined Cambridge Technology Partners, keeping Vancouver as his home base, even though he worked for the company's San Francisco office.

Most of the time, however, he was on airplanes and in hotels. Over the three years that he rented a Vancouver apartment, Mr. Hasan says he rarely had more than a carton of milk in the fridge.

He did, however, have a long-standing desire to test his own entrepreneurial mettle. His decision to jump off the consulting train was also influenced by exposure to his clients, as they scrambled to translate real-world service standards to the Internet.

Some of the problems he encountered, he says, required new tools to fix. Customers could send e-mails or call corporations when they had a problem, but those complaints could get lost in a shuffle.

As well, if customers were required to plug in their own e-mail address or other details to send a comment to the company, in many cases they wouldn't even bother. Mr. Hasan thought there should be an easy, painless way for customers to vent their beefs, and set out to build one.

"I wanted to create something for the Internet that, as things were broken and as things didn't work, you could collect that information really rapidly and get it to the guy who fixes it."

That concept has become a product called ResponseTek.com. Incorporated in October -- just a month before Mr. Hasan left his job of almost three years with Cambridge -- the company now has six employees, no revenue and software it hopes to launch in August.

The employees joined the company after Mr. Hasan sold them on the concept, which they've turned into a functioning program over the past few months.

The software would reside anonymously on a corporation's site. Using a graphical user interface, customers could take a few seconds and a mouse-click to voice a complaint about, for example, clumsy navigation on the site, or the fact that the vendor does not accept a certain credit card.

Mr. Hasan says several prospective customers have shown interest in the software, which could cut customer service costs and, potentially, boost revenue by wooing back to the site customers who previously would have been lost.

Some research shows that "people who complain will buy again if you deal with their issues quickly and effectively," Mr. Hasan says.

To date, ResponseTek has no significant financial backing. Mr. Hasan and his six employees are, he says, living on "savings, through spouses, on vision and energy -- all the good stuff."

When he started his company, Mr. Hasan realized that he had more contacts in San Francisco and Seattle than he did in Vancouver. Some U.S. venture capital firms have expressed interest in his company, he says, but won't commit to financing unless it moves south of the border.

Some Canadian firms have also shown interest, he says, and he hopes to build ResponseTek in Vancouver.

As to leaving the security of a consulting career, Mr. Hasan says it's too early in his new game to contemplate any regrets. If he's worried about the future, he doesn't show it, although he admits to sitting down regularly with his employees to talk about how long they can hang in without salaries to keep them going.

For heroes or role models, Mr. Hasan points to his father, an immigrant to Britain who has worked a lifetime at the same factory job, channelling his ambition through his children, who have all pursued advanced degrees and challenging careers.

His father's driving ambition, Mr. Hasan says, was to provide a stable environment that would allow his children to thrive.

"That's huge, that's something I carry around with me -- that kind of stability probably drives some of my confidence."