We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nima Asgari a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nima, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I run a small consulting firm called Asgari Enterprise, where I engage in creating reports and helping business owners execute their ideas and needs.

For Olympus, I had a client in the hotel industry who hired me to come up with a creative business idea for a particular building location. After conducting research and a market analysis, I came up with five business ideas that the area could use and thrive in — a gaming lounge was at the top of that list.

Not only did the market data point toward it, but I had also been fortunate enough to visit a variety of places around the world. That exposure allowed me to see what works and what doesn’t, and being able to bring new, unorthodox experiences to my city and watching them grow and thrive gives me the greatest sense of satisfaction and happiness.

My ideas are generally higher-risk, higher-reward for investors, and my clients typically come from established industries such as real estate, hospitality, and insurance.

After about a year and a half, unfortunately, the client who had originally hired me decided not to move forward with the project. That’s when I decided to step up, take ownership, and bring my vision to reality.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As an immigrant family and being the eldest son, I had no choice but to step up and help my family with anything related to the new language. I remember reading IRS documents when I was nine, hating every single second of it, and getting yelled at for not being able to translate everything properly. Looking back, those days were my biggest blessings, and I am forever grateful because they gave me an upper hand when it came to adulthood. I was doing things I already had familiarity with ten years earlier.

Aside from that, another fond memory is attending Persian parties with my family. I remember talking to my dad’s friends, who were all established doctors, engineers, and contractors that in some capacity got involved with Real Estate. Over time, I guess you could say I picked up on the language and the knowledge. By the time I was nineteen, I knew what most people my age didn’t when it came to Real Estate knowledge.

I’ve always been a visionary. Growing up, I wasn’t much of a creative person. I used to shut down my creativity because I couldn’t draw. That was until I realized that creativity can come in many different forms. Then I combined the two. Got into real estate first and learned most I could within 2 years and then launched Asgari Enterprise. Now, I help people live their best selves by taking their ideas and making them reality in as much or as little as they want me involved with it.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have had to unlearn a lot. As a matter of fact, unlearning has been one of the hardest parts of the journey. Being young and having to go against beliefs that have been in your family for years is a courageous and not-so-fun task. Unlearning the ways you thought money worked, how the economy functions, and what parts of our education were good or bad has been an ongoing process — and it will continue for the rest of my life. But breaking those cycles and learning new, true ways of moving forward is something I’ve come to genuinely enjoy.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I was supposed to be a dentist. I went through school with every intention of becoming one, only to realize in my graduating year that I would not make a good dentist. I knew I needed to change my career path if I did not believe I would be great at something I would be doing for the rest of my life. That realization was one of the hardest things I have ever had to face, not just because of the external pressure from my immediate family, but also from my extended family and friends.

Feeling defeated but determined, I decided to bet on myself and start from nothing in real estate. I had no financial backing, no family background in the field, and no prior knowledge, only a willingness and drive to make it work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://olympusgaminglounge.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/niimmaa.a/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.asgari/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nima-asgari/

Image Credits

Olympus Gaming Lounge