On building your own company – interview with Shafi Chowdhury

In this episode, we’ll cover an amazing story by one of the best programmers and mentors I ever worked with – Shafi Chowdhury (www.shaficonsultancy.com).

We’ll explore how it changed from being a freelance programmer only to building his company on the side. He had a great vision in mind, that drove him forward.

You’ll also hear about his approach to teaching and mentoring – or in general helping people do their job better. His abundance mindset inspires me a lot. Shafi explains, why and how he made his own job redundant in his own company.

Retention is a major cost driver and disrupts some companies a lot. You’ll learn how he manages to have nearly no turn-over in his company and how is approach to recruiting and training new employees fits in to this.

Further, we’ll cover how and why Shafi and his team is regularly presenting at different conferences. We’ll especially go deeper on this presentation at the PSI conference in 2017 about an amazing tool to analyse and visualize data at the same time. His approach to delivering all this innovation is very unique.

Finally, you’ll learn a lot about the leadership attitude, that helped him grow his business fast into a medium sized CRO with a very stable client base.

You can find out more about his company here.

About Shafi Chowdhury

I have over 20 years of experience as a statistical programmer in the Pharma industry. I worked for Pharma companies and CROs across Europe in many different therapeutic areas and in all phases of clinical trials before setting up my own consultancy firm. I believe knowledge should be shared and therefore I am a regular presenter at PhUSE conferences and regularly attend many other conferences including PSI conferences for Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry. I also provide bespoke training and have a website to allow users to learn just the module they need at that time.

I specialise in reviewing processes and developing standards, tools, templates and macros to improve the expertise of individuals and efficiency of processes. As an independent consultant with all the proven experience behind me, I offer unbiased expert opinions which can be used by management to make their decisions. My aim is always to drive up Quality by Design.

Specialties:

• Writing SAS programs to check, modify, analyse and report any kind of data.
• Developing client specific template programs and generic macros.
• Developing bespoke training programs to produce well rounded programmers within weeks.