ETURI CORP, THE WORLD LEADERS IN CROSS-PLATFORM MOBILE SOLUTIONS BRING YOU THE INNOVATIVE MOTIV APP
“Stay true to your values, always deliver on quality, and surround yourself with the best talent” – Amir Moussavian
Established in 2014, Eturi Corp was a product idea very personal to Amir Moussavian, the founder. The father of two felt the need to find a way firsthand to manage the screen time. He started to feel that his family time was being hijacked by extended screen time.
Following the events, he decided to write a pact that positioned device use as a privilege and outlined expectations for that privilege to continue: no screens during family meals, for an hour before bed, and during homework time. In theory, while the kids made great progress, the orchestration still lacked accountability. Often, he would find himself gazing at the dos and don’ts taped to the refrigerator until one fine day he had an ‘Aha’ moment.
Amir realized that technology was both the problem and the solution. From that day, he set out to develop an app that would help families limit screen time. This was the moment that gave birth to ‘OurPact’, Powered by Eturi Corp.
MORE ABOUT THE FOUNDER & CEO – AMIR MOUSSAVIAN
With over two decades of technology management experience and a successful entrepreneur. Amir has specialized knowledge in nurturing innovative technology companies from start-up to dynamic growth to acquisition. Amir epitomizes what a CEO should be- he inspires, motivates, challenges, and leads his team effectively to drive company success through innovation. Throughout the pandemic, he ensured the success of the company. He has always put his teams’ safety and health first. But if you ask Amir who he is, he will say he’s a father, a husband, a mentor, and a person who has always been wired to think about how technology can tackle problems and inefficiencies.
In a conversation with the editorial team of CEO Review, Amir Moussavian talks more about the company, how did the idea reach him, the goals, the challenges, success secrets, leadership, etc. read below the excerpts from the interview.
FACTORS OF SUCCESS
Primarily the vision needs to be crystal clear, and you must be passionate about it. You need to know your company’s vision inside and out, and you need to believe it wholeheartedly. This is particularly true as one looks to expand the portfolio outside of the parental screen time monitoring and parent target. Secondly, ensure your team understands your vision. To have everyone rowing in the same direction, the team needs to also be clear on the company vision and individual missions executed within the company. If your team doesn’t have a clear path, it will get lost very quickly.
Then, empower your team. People are the biggest asset any company will have. Bringing in the people with the right skills and mindset sets you up for success, but you must empower them beyond that. That means you help them develop and expand their skills and knowledge and encourage them to use their talents. Finally, have a strong culture. One should always consider culture to be a critical element to the success of a company. But you cannot expect culture to happen accidentally. Part of what makes Eturi successful is that it has spent time defining and cultivating the organization’s culture.
“I lean into my Team Leaders to help refine and guide our culture, ensure it is clear and well communicated to the entire company and that we all live it. It has proved invaluable when the pandemic hit, and we began working fully remote. It has allowed our team to stay connected and as innovative as ever” states Amir.
THE JOURNEY OF AN ENTREPRENEUR
Amir has always been on an entrepreneurial journey. If he saw a challenge or problem, his mind would automatically start spinning to determine a way it can be solved via technology. Pushing boundaries and being innovative is in his blood, and he is fully driven to be entrepreneurial. He strongly believes curiosity is the spark behind every great idea. And because he remains curious, being a voracious reader allows him to stay on top of market trends. In addition, having such a strong, innovative, and trained team also helps keep him at the forefront of market trends. If there happens to be something he missed, the team always ensures to highlight it to him with a recommendation on how it may help Eturi achieve its goals.
Amir added, “Early in my career, I worked with a prominent entrepreneur who became an investor in one of my companies. Besides investing, he spent time mentoring me and always encouraged me to look at mistakes as investments and think outside of the box, particularly when making important decisions. At one point, my CFO recommended a layoff due as distribution was delaying payment. However, later talking to my mentor, he encouraged me to relook at expenses to identify every other option available to avoid a layoff. Ultimately, we arranged a temporary pay cut for the company’s most expensive team members and executives.”
Once they re-stabilized, they were able to pay back the individuals who took a pay cut and ultimately keep the entire team intact. If he had given a thought to the initial advice he was given, a lot of people would have been unnecessarily impacted, and the company would have been at a significant loss. They went on to have great success and witnessed the moment as a turning point in the journey.
GOALS FOR THE JOURNEY AHEAD
Over the next 12 months, they have an aggressive growth plan for the newest app, Motiv. They’ll be adding features vertically and horizontally working in lockstep with the needs of the users, providing frequent releases to meet and exceed their needs. The flagship product, OurPact, is also within the roadmap and they are looking to add several innovative features to an already incredible product.
They have just launched major enhancements that will improve the OurPact user experience which helps to keep OurPact the leader in the parental screen control market. Amir, of course, keeps an eye out for the next new opportunity to use technology to make people’s lives better and expects over the next few years to expand the portfolio, ensuring they can address other challenges with technology in the most innovative way.
OFF THE WORK LIFESTYLE
Amir is actively involved in mentoring within the community, and on a continuous hunt for opportunities for students to gain business skills. While the Pandemic slowed this situation down, he is working on ways to ramp up mentoring this year and next. Because he is laser-focused with mentoring, it helped him quickly appreciate the critical nature of having the right team and nurturing them for the most significant level of success.
Besides spending time with his family, mentoring, and reading, Amir loves to enjoy some time listening to podcasts like Scott Galloway’s; the Pivot Podcast is his favorite. He also follows Scott’s writings and finds his business predictions intriguing and enjoys reading his POVs on business and marketing. He also is a bit of a car aficionado.
Amir asserts, “The Chinese have a symbol, Wei-chi, meaning ‘opportunity in crisis’, I look at every ‘crisis’ or challenge with an eye to how I can help solve that with technology. It’s not something I’d change, but vital to my long-term success.”
CHANGES IN THE INDUSTRY AFTER PANDEMIC
When the company first entered the Pandemic, the founder’s priority was to ensure the safety of his team, which meant a quick pivot to work from home. But with that shift, he experienced how challenging it was to lead effectively from a decentralized operation. He always valued the corner office vantage point – being able to tune into the hum and buzz of the team collaborating. Who is meeting with who? Is the product manager getting enough minutes with appropriate stakeholders in advance of an upcoming release?
With the shift to remote work, that view went away, but he could get a similar picture with technology. With Eturi’s years of experience in remote monitoring software, he knew he has the best team to develop a convenient, easy-to-use app. Now, he could access those key insights from the device and subsequently use them to make decisions and drive business effectively.
“I am most proud of the incredible team we have at Eturi Corp. During the first couple of years of the company, I have been able to recruit an innovative, eager, curious, and hard-working group of individuals. They are constantly amazing me with their ideas and solutions. In my opinion, an essential component of my success has been my teams. My first investment in innovation is focused on recruiting and maintaining the best talent in the industry. It all starts with having the right team; when you have the best talent and provide them a clear vision and a solid strategy, the innovation flows and that translates to success”, Amir further added.
LEADERSHIP SKILL IN THE ORGANIZATION
One of the most decisions and commitments the founder has is that he never compromises on quality or rushes the product to the market. If there is a legitimate need for the product and an urgent market gap, one can ship a product—even before it is ready. The catch here is the quality directly reflects the effectiveness of that organization’s process and can also stain the reputation. “Negative press and brand impressions are difficult to come back from — much harder than the temporary disappointment from missing an internal deadline or not rising to investors’ satisfaction. Always cross your T’s and dot your I’s”.
It is best to encourage creative thinking as the leader of the organization. Every person from the top shelf to the interns is passionate about solving everyday problems with technology. To do so, they:
- Trust the team and coworkers implicitly
- Challenge every convention; do not settle for the status quo
- Communicate with clarity and listen with the intent
- Collaborate openly because it’s through all ideas the company pushes themselves
- Try to be innovative to deliver leading-edge products
“A key element of ensuring we continue to motivate the teams and drive business starts is making sureyou’ve built that strong work culture and populated your company with the right talent This allows our talented staff to be surrounded by other talented individuals, all aligned to the culture I’ve developed. From there, we ensure they have ongoing training, they are empowered to drive the vision, strategy, and products we develop, they have every opportunity to innovate, and, importantly, recognition of their achievements”, asserts Amir.
IDEAS AND ADVICE FOR AN ENTREPRENEUR
Great ideas come from everywhere within the organization. Amir not only encourages that but also rewards it. Open communication is foundational to the company’s success, and he learned a long time ago that following this process helps spark great ideas from the entire company.
“I think it would be that failures are part of the entrepreneurial journey, and while they are frustrating, they offer up a great opportunity to learn. A failure is only a failure if you do not learn from it. Course correct, adjust, communicate what occurred to key stakeholders, and move forward quickly. This also sets up an environment where the team recognizes that failure is a part of the process, so they are more inclined to push boundaries, break ceilings and be innovative”, emphasizes Amir.
All three, the mission, vision, and core values, are intertwined, and it is significant to remember that. It is impossible to rank one over the other. For Amir, communication would be the most important. While a clear mission, strong core values, and an innovative vision are essential elements to a successful company, if they are not clearly communicated and passionately embraced, it’s like not having them. One of the most important ways to communicate core values to the company is to demonstrate them day in and day out. He expects the same from his leadership team, and they have never let him down. While the founder is always communicating with the team, having short, productive company meetings where they integrate into some fun activity also helps to reinforce.
MORE ABOUT MOTIV APP
The entire nature of the workforce has turned on its heel in early 2020. No company was exempt from the impacts – both in terms of immediate responses and looking forward/making plans. That included Eturi. There was a defined roadmap slated for 2020 and early 2021. However, this major shift in business drove a rich enhancement to the portfolio. Amir realized that many business leaders, including himself, needed a way to help manage the remote workforce. That leads to the vision of the Motiv app.
Amir had a vision of what he wanted to see and do with the Motiv app. He wanted an app that CEOs and business leaders could easily use on the go to be able to understand how their team leaders were performing while in a decentralized work situation. It would allow them to monitor if collaborations were occurring as they should if there was a potential for conference call burnout, and if the teams were being efficient. With a vision laid out, he engaged a team of brilliant engineers to work through logistics and execution. They worked tirelessly to develop the initial product, which has recently launched, along with an aggressive roadmap for enhancements throughout the year.
