Average people, they give you observations.
Smart people, they give you insights.
What's you're company called?
-SmartHR
So Hi Muhammad, thanks for talking to me today.
Now we've known each other for a really long time.
And I think you're a really amazing person.
And I mean you speak many different languages, you've worked for powerhouse corporates in
the past, and you've done some really successful startups.
But now you're you know the head of the e-business unit for Al Tayer, and you're the CEO of Tajawal.ae,
so this is all a really exciting time.
So tell me, when you were younger, did you think you'd end up where you are today, was
that your plan?
It's difficult to speak of a plan.
My first plan that I had was at the age of 5.
I wanted to be the guy collecting garbage.
What i'm doing now is what i'm passionate about.
I think this is what counts.
The example of the garbage collector is exactly what I mean.
When you're passionate about it, it's what I tell my kids today.
If you're passionate about anything, just do it, and try to be the best at doing it.
And going back to the bit about corporate powerhouses, and the one that always kind
of sticks in my mind is McKinsey.
So when I met you, you had, I believe had just left McKinsey to join a startup, and
I've always wondered what kind of drove you to leave such a prestigious organization.
I guess the question is two-fold.
Why did you leave such a prestigious organization to go into a startup, and also what tools
and things do you use from your McKinsey days to drive your business today?
I think the question you should ask is why did I join McKinsey in the first place, leaving
the startup world.
And the second question is why did I return to the startup world.
The answers to both of the questions are quite similar.
So I created my first official startup at the age of, I think, 24.
I did that for quite some time, and then at the age of 30 I decided to join something
more...formal, and McKinsey was an amazing opportunity for me.
I figured that there's no one surrounding me in the environment that I was in, that
would be able to develop me professionally.
That's why I joined McKinsey in the first place.
I would probably not have joined, a what you call "corporate."
McKinsey was a compromise between, a world-class institution that has world-class processes
and approaches to things, and still gives you the flexibility that you need if you have
a personality like me, which is an entrepreneurial personality.
So you get, one of the standard sentences that I kept hearing was "Create your own McKinsey."
Which basically says, you are an entrepreneur within a structure.
The good thing was I had a lot people that outsmarted me by a factor of 10, surrounding
me all the time.
At least they thought so. ;)
It gave me a lot of opportunities to learn and grow.
The minimum opportunity to grow, is to be patient.
Patience is something that entrepreneurs never have, but it taught me to be patient.
Why did I leave McKinsey?
I left McKinsey for pretty much the same reasons.
When you learn the way McKinsey works from the ground-up, then you do that for 4,5,6 years,
The progression then becomes... There's two ways of doing it.
You become a counselor to senior people
Which I enjoy actually, being the person for trust for someone very senior
responsible for 10 million dollars in budget.
But you have limitations when it comes to really shaping execution.
You don't do it yourself, you just advise them.
I found that, i'd have much more impact if I did it myself.
In a smaller setting, if I did it myself, i'd have better impact.
The other track is, you become sort of a sales person.
You will basically need to acquire projects.
There's nothing that bores me more, than selling...stuff.
So my learning curve, at that stage, I knew how to analyze, I knew how to structure, I knew how to manage clients.
I think I reached a plateau of ground-breaking learning and doing exciting stuff.
One of the things that you said to me, awhile ago
is how you always hire people around you that are smarter than you.
when you do surround yourself with smart people, and I know its one of your key criteria when you hire,
is that someone's smart. Define a little bit for us what you define as smart,
and what other qualities do you look for here at Tajawal when you hire?
First of all, i'm not the smartest everywhere, and i'm very well aware of that.
I think this makes me sort of smart.
And I think the people that I hire are exactly like that. They are super smart at certain things,
But they should know their limitations.
I think where i'm slightly better than the average, I would say is,
finding the right mix of people.
I find the people that function well together if I put them in one room and enable them.
And usually, I do this by sticking far away from them so they can do this sort of thing as much as they can.
If you ask for the "Magic Sauce," this is it at the end of the day.
Try to allow people to do what they were hired for, no more no less. When you hire them,
Don't compromise on 2 things, first thing is the values that these people bring along.
They need to be compatible with your system of values that you want for your culture.
Because they will be the ones to build this culture on your behalf.
And the second thing is, try to hire people that are analytically sound.
Average people, they give you observations.
Smart people give you insights.
What's your company called?
SmartHR
Insight is what you're looking for in order to grow.
I can tell you, "Yea we looked at last months numbers and we're 10% up or down."
SO WHAT?
What I know to know is, "we looked at last months numbers and we increased by 10% BECAUSE
we've managed to scale the following 2, 3 things, and we did that by doing blah blah blah."
This is the stuff that helps me continue to grow a greatly sustaining business.
The people that we try to find are people who push the bar, people who have insight, people that fit the culture.
When you have fun, you show performance, and when you show performance, you have fun.
It goes hand-by-hand.
You mentioned culture, and I read kind of the "5 Pillars" of the (Tajawal) strategy,
within the company, which is really really interesting.
and I wanted to asked you about the 5 pillars, and if you apply the same values of culture
and if they sync in your personal life?
You can't have two personas.
I think...it's painful to do so.
As a human being, unless you're super evil,
you can't manage both things.
If you want to foster team-work,
you can't be a dictator outside of work in your private life.
Yes there is a certain degree of overlap between private values and business values.
cause at the end of the day, if you look at it, lets say people sleep on average 6 hours a night,
that gives you 18 hours, which half of the time/more of the time you're at work,
and the rest you're at home, right?
You need to be somewhat consistent in the values system, otherwise it doesn't work.
That kind of leads me into my next question, because when we met you were just recently married.
And that was what? 2011?
Now you've got 4 beautiful children, so tells us a bit about work-life balance and how you prioritize.
"Work-life balance" was one of the most used buzzwords of my McKinsey life.
At the end of the day, I think it all boils down to what you decide for yourself.
So for me for example, it's essential that I see my kids at the beginning of the day and spend quality time with the family.
And at the end of the day before they go to bed, I want them to have a fair share of my time.
I like actually waking them up, and I like bringing them to bed. These are two things that I find essential.
And then after that, my second part of the day, my second shift starts.
It might go until midnight, it might go until 2 am, at the end of the day it doesn't matter cause you take energy from being with your family.
I just read an article that you were recently quoted in, in Arabian Business,
where you stated that you felt you needed to be data drive in order to kind of, achieve success.
Can you explain a little bit more about that?
It means that as a business person, or an entrepreneur
it's good to have gut-feeling.
Gut-feeling helps you in certain situations that are very very limited.
95% of the cases you probably need data to take the proper decision.
And you need to be hungry for data.
Data drive means you need to have sufficient data to take decisions.
So a simple example would be when you talk about marketing money,
Lets say I spent $10 on advertising on a platform like google.
And I spent $50 advertising on a platform like Facebook.
The two prominent examples.
The $10 on Google, gets you a customer.
The $50 on Facebook, gets you a customer.
What would you do?
You'd probably say it's wise to spend on Google.
Because the customer that I acquired on Google is cheaper.
Data will tell you that no, the customer on Facebook was inspired by the picture on the ad on Facebook
He bought the first time, it was expensive, and he gave you a margin of $20.
So you recovered $20 of the $50.
And then he bought 5 times after that over the course of 12 months.
Short-sighted data doesn't help.
Sophisticated data analytics helps if you take the right decision based off that.
You've done quite a few startups now,
Obviously being an entrepreneur you start different things and there are failures along the way.
And I think a lot of people are afraid of failture.
What is the lesson that you've learned through things that haven't worked out,
and what people can learn from that?
I think the most important lesson, is you need to be persistent.
Don't give up too early.
But at the same time be rational and emotionless about, say "if this doesn't work out I have to stop."
My best example to be honest is, and I never imagined I would say that
well my best example would be Ronnie from Souq.com
So Ronnie did Souq.com for 12 years.
And Ronnie, at the end of the day, exited to Amazon.
Within these two years, there were probably more downs than ups for Souq.
Everybody else would have left.
But Ronnie stayed there, and he continued and continued and continued, and made it sort of a success at the end of the day.
Success is not only monetary success.
For me, success, is if I have developed 5-10 people
that become better professionals than they were before working for me. That for me is better success than millions of dollars.
The biggest failures for me, are the same thing.
When you hire the wrong people, and you put them on a good team, and they somehow disrupt the team.
This, for me, is a bad failure.
The first thing to learn is persistence.
The next thing to learn is... I can't stress enought
the important of entrepreneurial/CEO attention to acquiring talents.
There's nothing more important that getting the right people,
and developing the right people in your organization.
If you don't do that, you will fail.
The third thing,
that I would like to highlight for entrepreneurs is
make sure you have the right investors.
with the right personalities, with the right firepower,
with the right structure as well
When you structure a company with a good plan, with a good idea with good people
in a wrong way,
The financial setup of the company and the shell/setup is wrong,
you have NO chance to be successful.
I always say, good investors want to make you rich and successful,
before they think about their own portfolio.
In closing,
there's a lot of budding entrepreneurs right now probably watching this,
that are conflicted about,
do they go with this wild idea they have, this passion they have to start their own business,
or do they go into the corporate world? What would you say to those people?
What are you passionate about?
That's my only answer.
If you're passionate about doing stuff that you want to try out,
try it out, what do you have to lose?
What do you have to lose?
Half a year?
After half a year you know if the idea works in general or not.
Let's say one year.
You lose one year. Just imagine its as if you took a backpack around the globe for a year.
It's the same thing.
Now, if you're not passionate about corporates, then just leave.
And taking the entrepreneurial plunge doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do it alone.
It doesn't mean that you need to fundraise, it doesn't mean you need have to this ground-breaking startup,
it also doesn't mean that you join a startup that has an incubator.
It can mean that you go to an investor and you look at startups and if you like one you jump
and you go and become one of the founders of the startups that they invested in.
There's many approaches to living your dream of being much more shapely.
If you want to really create something that's sustainable, that affects peoples lives,
You can do that in many many ways.
If you take me as an example,
All my startups before were funded by external money.
By typical venture capitalists.
Or they were funded until they funded themselves, which is what usually happens.
This thing that i'm doing now, is basically a startup launched by corporate.
So there are different ways of doing this.
You can do it alone, you can do it with VC, you can do it with angel money.
You can do it within an organization, outside an organizations, etc...
Just follow your passion and everything else will fall into place.
Well thank you very much that was great insight.
And I really appreciate it!
-My pleasure. -Thank you! -Anytime!
For more infomation >> 【Banished】ゆっくり開拓村 Season2 Part12【ゆっくり実況】 - Duration: 12:58. 
For more infomation >> Ekattor tv News today 29 january 2018 Bangladesh Latest News Today News Update bd news all bangla - Duration: 18:08. 
For more infomation >> Bangla Waz New 2018 || দোয়া কবুলের প্রধান দুটি শর্ত || শায়খ মতিউর রহমান মাদানী - Duration: 4:17. 
For more infomation >> Смешные анекдоты из Одессы. Анекдот про женщин! (29.01.2018) - Duration: 0:29. 
For more infomation >> 自宅から400㎞離れた場所で行方不明になった飼い犬。帰って来ることができたのか？【感動する話】 - Duration: 3:20. 
For more infomation >> 050 過去に未練 タイムマシンを作る デロリアン デアゴスティーニ BTTF Eaglemoss イーグルモス 運転席 - Duration: 7:40. 
For more infomation >> 엄마팀vs아빠팀 세기의 요리대결이 시작됐다! 상대팀에게 최악의 재료를 골라줘라!ㅣ토깽이네상상놀이터RabbitPlay - Duration: 12:36. 
For more infomation >> HeartCatch Pretty Cure ! 2010-2011 02 Vostfr (Pub) (@PrettyTrad) - Duration: 0:31. 
For more infomation >> Как быстро и бесплатно скачать видео с youtube - Duration: 1:30. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét