My Friend Mubeen
Before Dubai I had never heard of BNI — the world's largest referral networking organization, 355,000+ members meeting before dawn to pass real business to one another. There I met Mr. Mubeen Javed, president of BNI Glory. Over coffee he shared a problem that stuck with me: a UK client refurbishing used electronics bought by the container-load, with no affordable way to track inventory cost, COGS, and profit. I promised a solution. His reply: 'You design it, and I'll help market it.'
My friend, Mr. Mubeen Javed, is the President of a BNI chapter — BNI Glory — in the North Dubai area.
Frankly speaking, I had never heard of BNI before I came to Dubai. In my previous experience, the best-known and most widely used networking platform for business people and professionals was LinkedIn. People connect on LinkedIn, share business insights, and build relationships — mostly online.
What BNI actually is
BNI is different.
It is the world's largest and most successful referral networking organization. Unlike LinkedIn, it focuses on building offline business relationships and helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Today, it has more than 355,000 members and over 11,800 local chapters around the world.
Chapters meet regularly — often early in the morning — to share business updates, present their services, and pass qualified referrals to one another.
A Wednesday that started before 7 a.m.
I was invited as a visitor to attend one of the weekly BNI meetings, and that's where I first met Mubeen.
It was a Wednesday morning, and we arrived at a hotel before 7:00 a.m. for the meeting. The session lasted about two hours and was chaired by Mr. Mubeen, together with several other members supporting him.
Around twenty members and a few visitors introduced themselves, shared business ideas, and promoted not only themselves but also one another, as a way to better understand each other's businesses.
I watched how Mr. Mubeen led the meeting in a very inspiring and encouraging way. He is full of energy, and I truly believe he embodies the chapter's motto:
"Givers Gain."
Coffee, and a problem worth solving
Mr. Mubeen and I decided to catch up over coffee later that week.
We spent a pleasant afternoon talking about life, how he came to Dubai from Pakistan about fourteen years ago, and how he built his own company here. His company, Aquarius Corporate Services LLC, provides bookkeeping and outsourced CFO services to its clients.
During our conversation, he shared some of the real pain points that both he and his clients face. One story, in particular, caught my attention.
One of his clients in the UK runs a business refurbishing used electronics. The company purchases used electronics in bulk — arriving in shipping containers and sold by weight — sorts through them, identifies the items worth refurbishing, refurbishes those products, and sells the remaining materials as scrap for recycling.
The challenge is that, as a small business, the owner cannot justify investing in an expensive ERP system — not only because of the software cost itself, but also because of the management overhead required to operate it effectively. As a result, it becomes extremely difficult to accurately calculate inventory costs, COGS, and ultimately the company's profit and loss.
Why this isn't just one company's problem
I found this to be a fascinating problem.
More importantly, I don't think this challenge is unique to the electronics refurbishment industry. I believe many small businesses with unconventional inventory workflows are facing exactly the same issue.
I promised Mr. Mubeen that I would find a solution.
And his reply made me smile:
"You design it, and I'll help market it."
Stay tuned.
The hardest accounting problems don't live in big companies with big ERPs. They live in small businesses whose messy, real-world inventory no off-the-shelf system was ever built for.
If your inventory doesn't fit neatly into an ERP — bought by weight, sorted by hand, sold in pieces — how do you really know what each item costs you?
The best product ideas rarely arrive as feature requests. They arrive as someone else's very real, very stubborn problem — and a friend who says, 'you design it, and I'll help market it.'
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