Episode 100!!! Our Highlights, Challenges and Future Plans w/ Amardeep Parmar | The BAE HQ

Amardeep Parmar: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode 100 of the BAE HQ podcast. It's a massive milestone for us, which we've achieved in just over a year. And as I'm sure you can see, we've had some incredible guests on this podcast, but none of this would be possible without the love and support from the community. That's from you listening right now.

Amardeep Parmar: So thank you for supporting us and believing in us. So this a short episode where we're just going to go through some of the highlights of the journey so far. Some of the struggles and then what to expect in the future.

Amardeep Parmar: So if you're joining us for episode 100, but you haven't been following the BAE HQ or you aren't too sore about our journey so far, let me just run that over for you quickly, right? So the BAE HQ, and I basically only wear merch now, BAE stands for British Asian Entrepreneur. And our mission is to inspire, connect and scale British Asians.

Amardeep Parmar: And we changed, if you paid attention to the earlier episodes, the guide to scale. Because what we were saying there is about, it's about how do we get people [00:01:00] to build their dreams and go above and beyond what they thought they were capable of doing, right? That's what we're all about. And we want to actually scale them.

Amardeep Parmar: Like, how do you actually push them forward and really like set that rocket underneath them? So that's what we're all about. And we've done many different things in our journey. So you might know us for the podcast. We've done many events with the likes of HBC Innovation Banking, Octopus Ventures, Bulletin Capitals, Soho Works, and so many more.

Amardeep Parmar: So that part of what we're doing is really expanding next year. And make sure you check out our website because I spent loads of time updating it in the last few days to really show you all the differences we have going on. And there's a ton of free content because this is about serving you guys as a community.

Amardeep Parmar: I've also made a bunch of videos today. Me singing awkwardly by myself over the About Us and all of those videos as well. So if you go to her website you're going to find all of that. Please do like and share those videos too, because to get them done I have to sit in a room by myself with a camera, which is a bit weird now.

Amardeep Parmar: I say that though, some of you might remember episode 70 something. Where the guest cancelled last minute and I interviewed myself. So if you're looking for a laugh [00:02:00] and you just want to check out my story, check out that episode. So now onto the meat of the episode, right? So what are the highlights from the journey so far?

Amardeep Parmar: The BAE HQ, 100 episodes, just over a year, what are the highlights? Quick obvious highlight, we've reached episode 100. We've had some incredible guests on and what's happened over the last year and a bit is that now these top level guests are reaching out to us and people making these warm introductions.

Amardeep Parmar: At the beginning, it's always pushing that rock up the mountain. Now it's that case of everybody's coming to us and we love it. It's really great. And what we'll be seeing over the next month or two is us building our systems to have to process and to help serve everybody the best we can. We've had millions of cross platform views.

Amardeep Parmar: We've grown out the team, so we've got our board members, Dimple Patel, CEO of Nature Metrics and Jay Gujral, CTO of Blockdojo. So huge thank you to them. We tried to make sure we showed them enough appreciation, but can't emphasize enough how much we've loved having them on board. And you see what I did there?

Amardeep Parmar: Loved having them on board to help us when there's difficult decisions need to be made. [00:03:00] We've got Aamir Hussain, who's editing most of the podcasts. It's been a big help behind the scenes in terms of freeing up my time and to helping us scale this. We've also got a full time assistant, Saharah, who's been incredible and she's just done so much work behind the scenes that people don't get to see.

Amardeep Parmar: But it's massively appreciated. So shout out to Saharah. So if you've been watching us on LinkedIn, you might notice we have our own private office now. That's a big step for us. And it's something which we're going to be exploring in the future about how we maybe expand that and do different things in different ways.

Amardeep Parmar: We've got our exclusive legal partner in Joelson. Shout out to Joelson. And we've also got a headline partner for next year, which is being announced next week. So unfortunately it doesn't make the cut for this recording, but watch out for that. If I run over our event timeline for the year, so our first event, the launch event was actually six months into the BAE HQ, and that was a Balderton Capital, one of the top investment VCs in the country, in Europe, even.

Amardeep Parmar: We then had a couple of fireside chats at Soho Works, one was with Dimple Patel, one was with Navjot Sawhney, The Washing Machine Project. We had a [00:04:00] fireside chat at the National Franchise Exhibition with Asad Hamir, who does multiple different things. But it's currently rapidly scaling clip. We had a panel event after summer with HPC innovation banking, which had Jeff Chowdhury, Jay Gujral and Dimple Patel.

Amardeep Parmar: We then had a fishbowl, a Sifted Summit as community partners, where we had Varun Bhanot, Siddhi Mittal and Dhruvin Patel on the panel. An incredible crowd and massive thank you to the team at Sifted for helping us with that. I say that massive thanks to all of the teams, all of the events we did things with.

Amardeep Parmar: My list of people to say thank you to is way too big, but please do know that anybody that's helped us on this journey, we do appreciate you and lots of love for you. The next event was at the British International Franchise Exhibition, Smartful. That was with Safwan Adam, who was massively scaling multiple different franchises.

Amardeep Parmar: I was incredibly well for himself from humble beginnings. I then did a university talk at the University of Bath to the Bath Entrepreneurial Society. I did a quick talk at my old school, Ilford County High School. We did a panel event [00:05:00] with Nitya Gupta of Element Ventures, Matt Ong of Control Alt, and Nina Mohanty of Bloom Money.

Amardeep Parmar: And then our final big event of the year. was our anniversary party at Octopus Ventures. So that gives you an idea of some of the highlights of this year. And the things you don't see there is just how many incredible people we've met and chatted to and people showing us love and support, which we really do appreciate.

Amardeep Parmar: If you see me about with the BAE HQ logo on and you recognize me. Feed my egos. Come say hi to me. Like I'm happy to chat. Don't, don't pitch me to come on the podcast in person because that's always a bit awkward. I don't know what to do, but have a chat. If you love what we're doing, like we just love to hear that.

Amardeep Parmar: If there's things which you'd love to hear more about, give us feedback, exciting things that you want us to do more of, let us know. Now some of the struggles, right? So this could be a very long list and we bought, we built something from zero. We're basically new nobody to where we are today. And you can just look through the caliber of, I guess, these people are amazing.

Amardeep Parmar: Look at our events. Some of the people turning up, we're really very privileged to be where we are today. So how do we do that? Right? So some is sheer hard [00:06:00] work, but there's also a lot of strategy behind it. And there's a reason why we've been able to do this and other people haven't. One is that we really try hard to build that inclusive community.

Amardeep Parmar: Right. And doing that is a difficult thing because often we interact with people who maybe aren't so supportive or people think, why are you doing this? Like you don't, like, you can't do this. Like other people have tried and you've been able to do it. Right. So at the beginning we had to suffer with a lot of that.

Amardeep Parmar: And when we talked to corporate, some of them didn't believe in us. Some of them were like, Oh, like whatever. But we had to demonstrate that and show that. And we never got disheartened by this setbacks. But of course there was setbacks, right? We've talked to so many different organizations, and some of them were like, no.

Amardeep Parmar: Some of the people who wanted to come on the pod, I wanted to come on the podcast, said no. And very bluntly. So while you see those highlights and those wins. You don't necessarily all the rejections and all the time we were made to feel small along that way. So that resilience is a really important part of getting to where we are today.

Amardeep Parmar: Another challenge is the sheer breadth of what we're doing. And how to keep everything organized and under control and like building the systems, right? Because to scale it fast, [00:07:00] There's so many conversations being had, right? So early this year, I spoke to about 150 people a day on WhatsApp. Today, I probably got like 100 emails and that's a quiet day.

Amardeep Parmar: So when you get all this inbound, it's very difficult to deal with that. And that's one of the challenges we're having at the moment. And that's why you'll notice a lot of things changing in terms of streamlined systems to really get people involved as best we can and make everything a lot smoother. So there's growing pains, right?

Amardeep Parmar: It's a good thing to have, but we now have so much demand that we don't know what to do with it. But there's this persistence behind the scenes. They're going to make the difference to help us build that further. And this is where the advice we get from the people we work around with, the board really helps us out on that too.

Amardeep Parmar: The other obvious challenge that I've been into quite a lot in my own story is with grief and dealing with that and the mental side of things, right? And sometimes there's times where I took on more than I should have done because I was just trying to escape grief. And that's not healthy and it's not how you should deal with things.

Amardeep Parmar: And taking a little break for me really made a big difference. But remember, you don't see that with the Highlight Reel. It's also those low moments where I've struggled with things, Gurvir’s [00:08:00] struggled with things, and building that together. And also, it's a new dynamic of me and Gurvir being co founders, right?

Amardeep Parmar: Communicating clearly. We're very lucky in that we get along very well. We sometimes have miscommunications, but we've been able to work through that very well. That's a rare thing, right? We're very lucky that we've been able to work through things so consistently and well together, but there's so many times where you get really excited about something and it falls through and that's been, I think that's been one of the hardest things where you think something's going to happen and it doesn't and then picking yourself up and still sometimes you get egg on your face, right?

Amardeep Parmar: You tell people like this still is going to happen and we've said in the past and then it doesn't come through. So that's a really big challenge for us too. I'm trying to think of the other challenges because one of the interesting things people don't necessarily know too is that the podcast had already done 100 and something episodes before we started this.

Amardeep Parmar: So that helps a lot there. Another challenge is hiring the studio, right? Because we're hiring the studio, if people cancel last minute or they don't turn up, we've sort of got to cover a cost there. So that, that final decided to be very tough and very difficult and very strained on us. And now touch wood, things are [00:09:00] looking up on that side, which makes our lives a lot easier.

Amardeep Parmar: But these struggles do exist. It has been something behind the scenes you don't usually see. We do try to be open about it, but at the same time, there's only so much openness we can have while we're trying to deal with things because there's sensitivity around that, right? So we've talked about it in the past, but not so much in the future.

Amardeep Parmar: On that scaling side too, every morning on Mondays, 8am to 9am, I have an open office hours, so you can come and ask your questions. Make sure you use that because a lot of people would DM me privately and it's very hard for me to manage. You've got that hour of my time. Ask me your questions, like use me, right?

Amardeep Parmar: Like you've got that time to use me, make use of it. So with what I just said about not talking about things too far in advance, because all the stuff going on where we've said we're going to do something that hasn't quite worked out, 2024 is going to be massive. And while I won't get too many specifics, a big thing of what we're going to increase

Amardeep Parmar: a lot on is the school university talks, right? That's what I'm really excited about on that side was really amping up. Now that Gurvir’s come full time on the founder investor intros. So if you are looking for funding, we're looking for deal flow, do get in touch [00:10:00] with Gurvir. That's a huge part of what we're doing now.

Amardeep Parmar: They've got him back full time. Oon the content side, there's going to be absolute freaking explosion. So those of you don't know. Why I think I mentioned it earlier in the episode, maybe I didn't, is on Medium, I basically grew very quickly and enabled my full time day job. In the last year, with Grief, with admin, I haven't created that much original content like I'm doing right now.

Amardeep Parmar: But now that I'm in a more free time and we've got backing from a headline partner, I can really expand this. And I know all of the questions have been coming into me over the last year. That can get your content on so expect way, way more content, way more blog posts, way more YouTube, way more social media posts.

Amardeep Parmar: So keep an eye on that because we're really going to explode that content side of things. And it's all going to be driven by what you guys need. So make sure you're a part of that. Make sure you're keeping an eye on that. Another big thing that's new for next year as well as the mentorship schemes. So working on that, we're building out the processes.

Amardeep Parmar: If you're looking for a mentor or you want to be a mentor, reach out to [00:11:00] us because we're looking to build that system out. We want to understand what people need. So next year there'll be another 100 episodes. We have some incredible guests lined up and a headline partner as well, which I can't talk about, which is really frustrating, but there will be an announcement next week.

Amardeep Parmar: So to wrap things up massive, massive, thank you to every single one of you for supporting us, believing in us and expect huge, huge things for 2024. And there's so much more to come.

Amardeep Parmar: Hello, hello everyone. Thank you so much for listening, it means a huge amount to us. And we don't think you realize how important you are, because if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you leave us a 5 star review, it makes a world of difference. And if you believe in what we're trying to do here, to inspire, connect and guide the next generation of British Asians, if you do those things, you can help us achieve that mission, and you can help us make a bigger impact.

Amardeep Parmar: And by doing that, it means we can get bigger guests. We can host more events. We can do more for the community. [00:12:00] So you can play a huge part. So thank you so much for supporting us.

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