Azfar Ahsan is the Founder and CEO of Nutshell Forum which is a leading conference management firm. Nutshell conducts local trainings and conferences as well as hosts and organizes international conferences in Pakistan. The forum has conducted over 400 national and international conferences, seminars, training workshops and group discussions in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore and Bahrain. BR Research recently had a chat with Azfar where he talked about his work and the community he has developed over the past decade through it.
On Nutshell
While recounting how the idea of Nutshell first came to him and how it was launched, Azfar tells us Nutshell was his passion. He has worked at three different jobs in three different sectors but soon he realized that he needed to delve into what he cared most about and make his passion his career. Officially, Nutshell was launched in 2003. For the first two years, the forum worked on a national basis, organizing local conferences, trainings and workshops but from 2005, it went international.
The forum has organized conferences with speakers from over 20 countries with expertise in different areas, while international consultantsalso used to visit Pakistan regularly through the Forum either to train or conduct seminars. However, Azfar recalls the poor political situation of Pakistan in 2007 to be a major setback in the work he was doing.
The law and order situation particularly in Karachi was extremely volatile at the time and as a result businesses started to go downhill. Many players in the training and conference management sector went out of the market. Azfar and his team decided to move operations permanently to Lahore and Islamabad in 2012.
While giving example of a successful international conference he has conducted, Azfar talked about the recently held Leaders in Islamabad Summit which he says, turned out to be Pakistan's biggest corporate summit with 20 global speakers and CEOs flying in. "We are now making this summit an annual event, and we will develop this into a brand in a few years. We are also planning to hold a similar event in Karachi in October".
Talking about the growth of this small industry in Pakistan, which he categorizes under "Services and Academic", Azfar says there is huge potential. He recalls that the South Asian summit that took place for a good three years had over 100 Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan delegates flying in. They had to change the conference name to Asian conference because it was difficult to limit to just South Asian countries due to security reasons, but now it has a much larger scope.
Azfar agrees that there are other companies in the business that are doing great work, but he also believes Nutshell is unique. "Terrabiz is doing a good job, and is also managing events in Dubai. But we don't manage events, we conduct our own conferences. We are not an event management firm, which puts us in a different league"
The conferences are mostly structured with key sponsors in place but nearly 60-70 percent of the conference visitors are paid delegates, while the rest come through sponsorships, through media or the government people.
Azfar believes that through these conferences-which put international and local expertise together in one place-he is trying to rebuild the image of Pakistan from what it is now, by introducing new aspects of the country to the discussion mix.
Azfar tells us that he could truly influence and promote this rebranding as he has been doing this for nearly 13 years. He has hosted more than 300 conferences, seminars, group discussions, training discussions and workshops, out of which a good chunk were on an international level. "We are focusing on less number of conferences but which are larger in size. Next year in Oct/Nov, we plan to go to Dubai, something that we have been planning for the last two years".
International engagement
The Dubai conference for Nutshell will be a firm foot in the doorway to going international. The theme for this conference is business and leadership. An event in Dubai cannot be anything less than amazing, Azfar says. "Nutshell has been planning for this conference for the past 15 months".
Pakistan is not only hosting this conference in Dubai, Azfar says it will also position Pakistan prominently with speakers from Pakistan ranging from top government officials, businessmen and executives as well as business strategists.
Dubai is an ideal location to engage, Azfar believes. People from Gulf and other countries can come through easily, put together with their counterparts in Pakistan. It is an interesting opportunity for people at different levels to network, build contacts and gain insight into how leadership and business is viewed across the world.
Bringing stakeholders together
One of the aims of Nutshell is to put different stakeholders of various national issues on one platform which Azfar says is Nutshell's "greatest expertise". The forum also serves as an informal think tank by making stakeholders collaborate, and put information together.
Azfar says: "My sole initiative was the concept of "Corporate Pakistan", which constituted a lot of collaboration. After two years, it has become a really strong community. We have diplomats, sector and issue experts and professionals as well as intelligentsia that debate on issues that matter to the country the most including power sector, exports, the economy, etc."
Reimagining Pakistan
When we are talking about image building as well as building a community of intellectuals and experts, the next step is to reach a much wider audience, and mainstream the ideas. Azfar narrates the journey of how he plans to do that: "About 5 years ago, a book came out called Reimagining Japan. Two years later, Reimagining India came out which Mckinsey published. That book was a collection of around 53 articles-30 percent of which were written by Indian leaders, and the rest by global leaders like Bill Gates, leaders of top corporations and top professors.
"I realized it is very possible for Pakistan to develop something like this for Pakistan. Since then, I have involved CEOs of different companies, one of which is a non-Pakistan, of Mitsubishi and we have short-listed about 25 names for the book, out of which we will go contact 15. We have people like Sania Nishtar, Babar Ali, and Hussain Dawood on board with us. We made sure we got representatives from different sectors as well. Our aim was also to get some big UK personalities on board as well - we had David Cameron in mind. We held talks with Belinda Lewis the deputy high commissioner of Karachi, and she really liked the concept. She suggested Prince Charles for the book. We later met the High Commissioner and he suggested Prince Charles and the British Council, saying that the British Council's global CEO personality would be pretty fitting for the book".
The book called "Reimagining Pakistan" will have15 articles that would be on Pakistan and nearly 45 that will be international. The target for the project is to collect all articles by next year, and launch it as soon as possible. Azfar believes it could be better than other versions of the book in other countries as he is targeting personalities like Prince Charles which is unparalleled. To that we say good luck and we hope to read this book soon.
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