An agile mind

Linda Luu has a compelling back story to share – born in Vietnam, then a refugee in Hong Kong, she grew up in the English port town of Felixstowe, before university, qualification with ACCA and, now, life as an entrepreneur in Dubai.

That said, she spends little time dwelling on the past. ‘I don’t really sit and reflect on that side of things because what has happened has happened. And because there are things to be done,’ she says.

And there is plenty on Luu’s agenda. At 45, after an earlier career in insurance and accountancy, she is about to launch her latest entrepreneurial project on the world from her home in Dubai.

She is in the final stages of releasing LANA, an app that will allow small businesses to manage their business administration and comply with local accounting standards.

The big one

It is not her first business venture. A fashion label and a CFO service are also on Luu’s CV, but LANA is the big one, she hopes, and the one that appeals to her key motivation: solving a problem by addressing its root causes. She’s confident it will do well.

‘Statistically, I’m more likely to succeed,’ she explains. ‘People who start their own business in their 40s generally have greater success.’

Luu arrived in Dubai in 2010, taking up a role as senior vice president for finance with insurance broker Lockton (MENA). The move followed 10 years in the City of London, first as an accounts manager at Market Insurance Brokers, and then as financial controller for Paragon International Insurance Brokers, on the back of an accountancy degree from University of Portsmouth and, from 2013, her ACCA qualification.

Luu has always lived by numbers and learned the value of accounting very young. She was just eight when she arrived in the UK, following six years in a Hong Kong refugee camp. She learned English at school, and it wasn’t long before she was working the counter in her parents’ takeaway restaurant, using mental arithmetic to tot up bills, and memorising a map of her new hometown to plan delivery routes in her head. And all this while still at school.

Academic mindset

Her parents came to rely on her behind the scenes too.

‘Being good with numbers,’ she says. ‘I was the natural choice for working on the counter, helping take orders, doing the receipts. I was the most academic among my siblings and was always tasked with the responsibility for responding to any official letter or filling in mortgage forms, writing to the bank or handling any sort of bureaucratic situation. I was the family company secretary,’ she quips.

From that experience, she became aware of the importance of understanding your numbers: where the sales are coming from, how much profit you’re making. ‘Having that knowledge can help transform a business,’ she says.

But the takeaway amounted to more than just sums. Working with her parents was a formative experience that placed Luu on the path to running her own business.

‘Because of our relationship, they would never turn to me and say, “You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” That instilled a lot of confidence in me, in my decision-making process, in my observations and in the way I handle situations.’

It wasn’t only her parents who influenced her outlook. Luu comes from a family of entrepreneurs where many relatives had their own business. ‘Because of the freedom I was given as a young person, there’s always been this innate desire within me to branch out and do something on my own.’

Even Luu’s latest venture has seen her tackling problems in her own way. After leaving her previous venture she worked as a freelance accountant while consulting with a career coach to work out her next move. After much discussion she came up with the idea of LANA, an ‘acctech’ tool for mobile devices that can complete accounts for small businesses.

However, to get there she needed to develop the software. Unable to pay a developer to do it, she embarked on a three-month ‘no-code’ app development course. Now, 12 months later, she has built the app herself and has a handful of customers already using it in beta. When we speak, she is in the final stages of having the software approved for app stores and by the local tax authorities. ‘Our goal is for LANA to be the first software fit for corporation tax filing,’ she says.

‘Accountants themselves should be moving accounting software to the next level,’ she declares. ‘We shouldn’t leave it to other people to pioneer.’

Building confidence

The intention is for the app to instil confidence in small businesses, so they can understand their own financials and ensure they are tax-compliant.

‘It’s empowering them to be confident with the numbers and feel they’re professional,’ she says, ‘because a lot of the time, when you’re a small business owner, freelancer or consultant, you feel like you don’t know your numbers.’

The numbers are indeed crucial – for Luu as much as her prospective customers – but there is also something else at play in the app. With its target market of the small, often family-owned businesses that exist in such profusion throughout the world, and named after Luu’s two-and-a-half-year-old niece, LANA embodies the family focus that resonates so powerfully in the Middle East, Asia and much of the rest of the world – not to mention Luu’s own history.

She points out that the LANA a name can also be read as an acronym for key business objectives: learning, automation, number-focus and agility. ‘It kind of summarises me and what I’ve been doing throughout my career,’ she says.