Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast where we speak with business owners and entrepreneurs from around the world and from all walks of life in the hope that something you hear will leave your business a little richer. We are your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One Branding, supporting entrepreneurs as they launch their own business or products. We love doing it, we're good at it, and it's important to us that every new business launches well, with a sound strategy and brand that gives them the greatest chance of success, and we don't want to see any entrepreneur quit. If you love this show, please help us out and subscribe on whichever platform you're listening or watching on now, and you'll be notified of the next great episode.
Today, we're talking to Aziz Musa, the founder of Cush Digital, where they say every strategy, every campaign, and every interaction is crafted with one goal in mind, that is, to create a profound impact. Aziz has had experiences in business and in life that most of us would never have ever thought about and we hope to learn more about those today. For example, 30 years of sanctions in Sudan, North Africa, and despite economic instability and political conflict, Aziz built a successful agency and scaled it. Now, that's resilience. His firm has also written a white paper on the 10 Islamic marketing principles that every business should know. I'm intrigued. So lean in, turn up the volume, and help us welcome Aziz Musa to the Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast. Aziz, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you, Vicki. Thank you, Laura. It's great to be here.
Yeah, we're really excited for this conversation, but I love to start at the beginning. So much of who we are now is shaped by our childhood experiences, so what can you tell us about yours, to help us understand your journey to where you are now.
So I grew up in a small village in Lancashire, which is North West of England and that environment shaped me a lot, and of course my parents. My father was a doctor, my mother was a housewife and so I spent a lot of time with both of them. To this day, I still think that the importance of a mother being able to spend time with her children is really important, same with a father as well. So those two things shaped me a lot. Being in a small village, everybody knows everything. You learn very quickly that lying doesn't get you anywhere, because ultimately your next door neighbour knows and then your mom knows. It also trains you around the importance of community. To this day, I can't stand big cities. Even our house in Dubai is out in the sticks, I can't deal with the intensity of big city and when I'm in Egypt, we're in Aswan Egypt, which is the south part of Egypt. So I think that's something that's impacted me but probably most profoundly from my childhood is my father's work ethic. My dad was a doctor, most children, we got an allowance, we were fortunate enough to get an allowance but it wasn't free—that allowance was earned. So you had tasks, not daily chores like normal chores, no you had to go and clean the garden or wash the car or whatever it was and we were always encouraged to find our own ways of making our own money. And I actually started my first business when I was 11 years old, and a lot of that comes from my dad's insistence on pushing yourself. If I ever wanted something that was expensive he'd always say, Well, you pay for half of it and I'll do the other half but you’ve got to find that first half first. So I think that had a profound impact on me too.
Tell us about the business at 11, I'm intrigued.
In the UK there's this place called Macro which is like a Cash & Carry, so we were a big family, six children, mum and dad and we used to go to the Cash & Carry every month and so one time we were walking around the Cash & Carry and I saw these sweets, a box of penny sweets, like one cent sweets and there was 500 in a box and it cost 4 pounds. And I said to my dad, ‘Can you get me that?’, and he said ‘You're never going to eat all those’, I said ‘I don't want to eat them, I want to sell them’. So he bought me two boxes of sweets. He actually said at the time, ‘I'll buy them but if you're gonna sell them you have to pay me back’. I was like okay, so he bought me two boxes of sweets and I got home, and I found these little baggies and I put 10 pence worth of sweets into a bag and I lumped them all into my school bag and went to school and I started selling these sweets at 20 pence. Okay, so I'd sell a 10 pence bag of sweets for 20 pence, and really quickly I ended up coming home with my pockets jingling with change and a few days later I gave my dad his money back and said, ‘We need to go back’. And we went back and we bought lots more and I came back, and that carried on for about three weeks, until the headmaster of the school called my dad and said, ‘You need to come in, we need to have an urgent meeting with you about your son’. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ And he came to school and I was sitting in the meeting and the headmaster sternly said to my dad, ‘Do you know why we've called you in?’ And my dad was like, ‘Nope, not really, what's going on?’ And he said, “Your son has been selling sweets in school, and now the tuckshop has gone out of business.” My dad was like, ‘Okay, so what do you want me to do?’ he said ‘Well stop him from selling sweets.’ All right. So we got out and Dad said, “Yeah, okay, you’re going to have to stop doing that.” So I learned about business, I also learned about the power of monopolies at the same time.
Hello competition! This is a Richard Branson story, if I've ever heard one. British Airways knocking out the early days of Virgin, that was you in the schoolyard, wow, I love that story.
So tell us, how did you get from there to what you're doing now, because your story is packed with stories of resilience, and I'm really interested in what you've done to build this agency, you now have.
Sure. I studied business, and I was born for business. I'm blessed in that way and a lot of entrepreneurs that I meet come from various backgrounds and because they didn't study business, they think that's some sort of disadvantage, but it really isn't. Staying in your lane, and knowing what you're great at is one thing, but skills are learnable, very learnable, and I think that's an important message as well. And I did my MBA at Warwick Business School, which is a Top 10 Business School, and as a function of my age, when I graduated, digital businesses were the ones that were growing and I joined a business called lastminute.com, if you've ever heard of it, as that was growing and that was my early part of my career. If I fast forward to maybe 10 years ago, I became the youngest public company CEO of a public company in the UK called Forbidden Technologies, I was 32 at the time. Actually I was the only Sudanese public company CEO in all of Europe, so it's something that to this day, I’m kind of proud of. And that was an incredible challenge, because all of a sudden I had to raise money, which I've done in the past, but raising money with institutional banks and institutions is a totally different ballgame, and being beholden to shareholders was a real challenge, a really intense challenge. I took over because of my background, and I was relatively well known at the time for being the growth CEO, so I could take over companies and grow them. And this wasn't a new company, they’d been around for 20 years, but had really struggled with growth.
So I set out the strategy, and then the first element of the structure was to go and raise 8 million pounds sterling and I started that process, it's a sequence that you have to go through. And then at the end of the process I was flying to Las Vegas for a trade show. I got on the plane, flew to Vegas, got to the trade show, checked into the hotel, and it was two in the morning when my wife called me and said, my cousin - who was 50 years old and close, more like my brother we’d spent so much time together, we'd grown up together - had passed away suddenly in the hills of Wales. I was like, ‘Oh, my God’. So I called Virgin Atlantic, said I need to go home, when's the next flight? They said seven o'clock in the morning. So I told the team, ‘I'm really sorry I've got to go, here's what's going on.’ They were all great, got on a plane, got back to the UK, and drove up to Wales to identify the body and start the process. I was going to bury him back in Sudan with his mother, where my auntie lived. And as I was in Wales, I got a phone call from our broker who said, ‘Listen, your 8 million round has failed, we can do 1 million, that's the best we can get.’
Now, I had a plan B of course, you have to have those other options. So I had a plan B, and the plan B was emotionally horrific. So there and then I had to pack my things up. I said, ‘Right I'm going back to London for two days, I'm going to come back, we'll sort the body out and I'll take it back to Sudan.’ So I went back to London and I sat in an office and I took 50% of the workforce one by one; I did it myself, I wouldn't let anyone else do it, and I had to make their roles redundant. And having made their roles redundant, which I'm sure you've been through yourself, it's an emotional roller coaster. And it doesn't matter as a CEO, you have no choice but to be strong, you have no option but to be strong, but that in itself, comes across as heartless. And I can tell you, it was anything but heartless, it was pure pain for me as well, but having to do that scores of times, and then once that was done, and I'd set plan B in motion, back to Wales, sorted the body out, flew to Sudan, buried him, came back and carried on.
Now as I think back to that time, which was incredibly difficult, and I remember the chairman of the board at the time saying, I don't know anyone who could have done that. And I think back, that comes down to resilience, and a large part of the resilience at that moment in time was related to the fact that I had another plan. I wasn't totally set on this one path, I had another plan, I just had to execute it. And it was entirely within my gift, it was just incredibly painful to do.
A few years later, I left being a public company CEO, mostly because of two things. Firstly, the pressure was relentless, it was really relentless. And I'd done it for a while and I'd grown the company significantly, and I felt like I'd done my bit and the more important part was that working in the city, I kind of felt like I wasn't having an impact on people. I'm a person of faith, and I believe that like God has given all of us gifts and opportunities and those gifts and opportunities are judged on how we use them. And I really felt like I hadn't done anything significantly positive. So that's when me and my wife decided, let's just do it, we packed up, we went to Sudan in Africa, which is where I'm originally from, although I'd only ever been on holiday, and we set up a social enterprise. That's all it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be a social enterprise - my aim was to eventually break even, no more or less - I was going to train people on digital marketing, because the country had been through sanctions for 30 years, they didn't have any access to digital until that time, and the vehicle for doing that was a digital marketing agency, we would have some clients, but really, all I ever wanted to do was to break even and be able to pay people reasonable salaries.
And through that process we ended up becoming the largest digital marketing agency in the region, clients around the globe, from Australia to Cambodia and Singapore, to the US. We grew to 70 plus people, I trained over 4000 people in digital marketing and hundreds of startups were created. And I think there's a really profound point for me, when you help someone with a startup in London, or in France, or in the US, really you're helping them build out their business for a continuation of their life and their lifestyle. When you do that in Sudan, in a third world country, you help people feed their families, quite literally bring food to their mother, father and siblings - that had a really profound impact on me. And then you may or may not know, on the 15th of April this year a war broke out in Sudan, in Khartoum, right in front of our office, right in front of our house as well, we were in the same building, and then the next chapter of our business started.
Wow, keep going, tell us more about what's happened since then? I mean, a war breaking out - I can't even imagine, and probably most of the people listening here can never imagine something like that. So tell us what happened next.
Well, I couldn't have ever imagined that either. I think that war isn't something that I would wish on anyone, especially with what's going on in the world right now and you have Twitter warriors who talk so brazenly about annihilating people and on any side in any war, and you just know for a fact that they've never seen, heard, or smelled war, because if they had, they would never wish that on anybody. So as a business, we had a plan B, because I always do. And our plan B was really, I remember actually we finalised it in January of this year, we'd sat down and we were discussing what happens if there’s political turmoil. We never actually contemplated there would be a war but political turmoil in Sudan, because that was quite regular. So we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll set up in a second office’ and the obvious place was Dubai, and in the middle of the discussion somebody said, ‘Well, hold on what happens if the airport closes?’ And we're like, ‘Oh yeah, that's a fair point. Okay, let's set up in Aswan in Egypt’, right, because we can get there by road, it's about 15 hours by road, it's doable, we have a contingency plan. And then we set out the list of clients that we'd keep and how we would communicate with them, and all the staff that we’d take and all of these things, we'd set it all up, and then the 15th of April was Ramadan. So in Ramadan, for any of your listeners who don't know what Ramadan is, essentially its when Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset, and Ramadan, your day turns to night and night turns to day, so you sleep most of the morning, and I was woken up at 9:17, I remember exactly because I looked at my phone, by anti-aircraft fire. Now it was really obviously anti-aircraft fire, I'd never heard it before but it just was, I don't know how to describe it, it just was really obviously anti-aircraft fire, you could feel it. Have you ever maybe in your youth, you went to a club and you stood in front of a speaker and the speaker vibrates your body like that, that's the feeling, it's the feeling of being vibrated physically. And I went up onto the roof of our building, which was the largest building in our neighbourhood, looked out and there it was unfolding in front of us, two generals, two armies, fighting. The first fight had happened at the airport, so the airport was closed, and people dying there and then in front of us. And so for the first few days, we were doing everything we could to listen to what was happening, listen to our friends and family and people we knew in the army and things like that. And the general consensus at the time for the first two days was that this was an attempted coup and it’ll last two or three days. I remember on the third night sitting on the roof and seeing a whole bunch of trucks leaving our area and I thought ‘Finally, this is a surrender’, and I counted them, there were 73 trucks, there were 15 soldiers on each truck and so it was more than 1000 of these rebel soldiers were leaving our neighbourhood and I thought, finally they're going to surrender. And then as the sun rose, I could see that there were 1000s more in their place, and it suddenly all at the same moment clicked, and I was like, this isn't a quick war. These people are significantly more in volume than we had imagined. We need to get out of Khartoum, the capital and if we don't it'll be a real struggle. We need to get out of Sudan because if we don't get out across the border quickly, the border will become a refugee camp, everything will be scarce. From day one electricity and water had been cut, but I don't know, I can't describe it, it all came together at that moment. And so I went downstairs to my wife, I said, ‘Okay, we're leaving, pack.’ I think what was surprising is how much resistance I had at that moment. I then called her parents, and then I started calling my team. And however much planning you do, there are always things that you forget, right? So I started calling the team and saying, ‘Right, we've got a bus, we're leaving Khartoum, pack your things, and let's go’, what did I forget? Well I forgot that in Sudan women don't travel alone. They will travel with their parents or their siblings and our company was 70% women, we can't travel. So I spent days talking to their parents saying, ‘Listen, this is an opportunity for them to be safe, I look after them, it's on me, just let them go.’ And thankfully, we were able to get a good bunch of them out. So, on the day on Thursday that we were going to be leaving Khartoum, we crossed over the bridge to take our maid back to her house, and it was the first time we'd seen the army. And there was a building bombed out behind them, and then we took the maid to the bus stop and a bus came, thankfully and it was just this horrible, rancid smell, and she said to me, ‘What is that? What is that smell?’ I said, ‘Just get on the bus, don't worry about it’. And the smell was from a pile of rotting corpses which was like 10 metres away. And that smell is something that will never leave you. And so we did our rounds, we were able to collect everybody and we set off, we managed to get out of Khartoum pretty easily.
As soon as we got on the main desert road though, we were stopped by the rebels, and the car that was next to us was shot. We heard the clack clack of a kalashnikov, and my wife was driving at the time and I was like, oh my god is that us? and she was like, No, it's not. And the car next to us, they'd shot the radiator and they'd shot at it directly. And then they stopped us, and they put the kalashnikov into my face like that and said, Okay, so what's your rank? My instinct was to laugh because if you've ever seen me, there's no way that I am in the army or have ever seen anything like combat. And so I did, I laughed, and they were like, ‘This isn't a laughing matter.’ I was like, Okay. I mean, it is a bit funny, though, right? Anyway, they let us go. And it took two days, and we got to the border. When we got to the border into Egypt, the morning we arrived, there were four cars and one bus. And we arrived early before it even opened, and we started the process and the process took so long, we actually slept on the floor, outside in the border area. And I remember one of the lieutenants coming over from the Egyptian army and talking to us, and they were so good, they were so nice. And I sat down with him, and I said, "Why is this taking so long?" They said, “Well, we've never had this many people come across the border at the same time.” And I just said to him, “You have no idea what's coming behind me.” And two days later, 150 buses were stacked up at that same border. So we made it across the border into Egypt with a good chunk of our team, and we were able to set up really quickly. We had everything really that we needed, we were able to stay sort of on top of everything and keep all of our clients who were all really understanding and fantastic and the story was able to continue and actually from then we've been growing great guns.
With that level of personal resilience, and then level of what I would have to consider trauma, and this all happened in the very year that we are in now, this wasn’t 10 years ago, how does one get through those kinds of things? Tell us about you, what kind of person do you need to be to survive that?
I think the thing that has helped me most is that, probably since my mid 20s, I recognise the importance of psychology and therapy. I had no specific medical issues, mental health issues to speak of, but I think because I've always been driven, at some point in my career I realised that knowledge is only one element of the path to success. A rather large element is being able to understand and control your emotions, and make decisions in times of difficulty, and I struggled with that a lot, I was very hot headed, I was very spontaneous, almost impetuous. And I think I recognised that relatively early; I had a great boss who pointed out to me and said, “You're doing a great job, you can carry on like this but if you want to grow, I suggest you go and speak to somebody”. And so I did, I always thought, ‘Okay, so I can get to 98% of my capability, but unlocking that last 2% is inside here, inside my brain somewhere, and I need to unpick that.’ And so I spent a lot of time with various therapists talking about different things, really understanding myself and my own reactions to things.
Resilience is partly a mindset and partly experience.
Having gone through difficult times in the past, having the ability to be able to say, “Okay, I've been through something and I can go through this is”, is really helpful.
But there really wasn't a comparison to what happened in April. It happened, we had a plan, I knew what I wanted to do, and I didn't really have any choice except to execute it and lots of people, including my parents, my wife's parents really didn't want to travel. And I'm fortunate that I am blessed with the ability to convince people. So I did exactly that, I stood up and I convinced them, almost forced them to get everything packed. We are leaving, there is no discussion and I will take full responsibility in the end but we're doing this and we're doing it tomorrow. It was a real challenge. I'm gonna say something which will sound a bit strange, I think. In hindsight, I have benefited a lot from that period of time. Because when you go through that, everything else kind of pales into insignificance, all the small little things about what did he say? What did she say? What are they thinking? All that nonsense just disappears. It's so irrelevant, and you have the ability to laser focus.
When we got to Aswan, the first person that we hired was a therapist. We hired a therapist, and that person still works with us and works with everyone in the team, because they've all been through an incredible trauma.
And I imagine your faith played a big part in it too.
Absolutely, I think that faith, regardless of which faith, gives you a sense of higher meaning. Everything has purpose, there is a reason for everything. And the acceptance of that really helped, really helped me and I think it helped the people around me. But in the end, my worries were all selfish worries, they were worries about what would happen to my kids, what would happen to my wife? They're all worries around me, not around why is this happening? Why is it happening to me? It was all about the consequences of a bomb landing on our building and things like that, they were the things that were to an extent occupying my mind, but I fought really hard against those thoughts, to try and stay as focused as possible on what I wanted to achieve. So my faith helped me an incredible amount. Yeah, for sure.
I can only imagine. So tell us, speaking of faith, tell us about your 10 Islamic Marketing Principles that we mentioned earlier. Can you give us a little insight into that?
Sure, you can download it for free on our website Cush.Digital, a little plug there, thank you. And maybe I'll just give a couple of them. When we started researching Islamic Marketing Principles, what we expected to find were really restrictive covenants, really restrictive things from a particularly digital marketing perspective. What we actually found is that Islamic Marketing is actually just good marketing. Just do good marketing and then you are in fact doing Islamic marketing. So let me give you a couple of examples.
Let's talk about pricing. Be clear on pricing, be honest about your prices. Now, how does that translate into the digital marketing world? In the digital marketing world, you'll absolutely see adverts for 60% off, and then when you get to the landing page, that's if you buy an annual licence. Okay, well, just be honest about that. There is a principle in Islam around when you're trading, to be honest and fair with the pricing, don't monopolise, don't monopolise industries, be fair, around those. And then probably the most important one for me is around truth. So, we, as marketers, we operate in the world of relative truth, we do not operate in absolute truth, and the majority of us don't operate in lies. And I always use the example of Head & Shoulders shampoo. If you look at a marketing campaign for Head & Shoulders, they'll say, “Reduce your dandruff within seven days”, okay. And that is relatively true, it is not the absolute truth, but it is relatively true. The absolute truth is that if you use Head & Shoulders for seven to 10 days consecutively, you have a 95% chance of seeing a reduction in your dandruff, but if you stop using Head & Shoulders, you also have a 95% chance of that dandruff coming back. That's the absolute truth, but it's a really crap campaign. So what we do in marketing is we work in the world of relative truth. So in terms of Islamic marketing, what that means is, be relatively true, but make it absolutely clear that the total truth is available. So your marketing campaign can say, “Use Head & Shoulders to reduce your dandruff” but the packet has to say all of the details of what that really means. Then, of course on the other side of it, you can't just lie and say Head & Shoulders cures cancer, you can't do that. So I think that the truth, relative truth dynamic is really important within Islamic marketing.
Maybe I'll just choose one more then people can choose the rest - around privacy, particularly as it relates to digital marketing. So privacy is a really important part of trade in Islam, and for those who don't know much about Islam, that kind of laws of Islam come from the Quran, the holy book, but also from the sayings of the Prophet, they're called the Hadith. And so privacy is a really important element, as one of the examples, if you ever go to somebody's house, you must knock on the door, and you're allowed to knock three times and if they don't answer, you must leave, you mustn't force your invasion into their privacy. And so how can that relate to the world of digital marketing? Well, email marketing is a great example of this. So many companies just spam people, they'll scrape websites or they'll use companies that scrape websites, they'll buy bulk emails, and they'll go to MailChimp and send a million emails, and maybe five of them will become customers in the end. And that's just a massive invasion of someone's privacy. So in Islamic marketing, what we would say is, promote your product, promote your advert, but make it clear that people have the opportunity to sign up. Even on your website, I see it on your website, too, you have a pop up that says, “Would you like to get our newsletter?” and allow people to opt into that experience, and then when they opt in, you're going to have a much stronger, much more effective dialogue with them. Now isn't that just good marketing?
That's really being a good person.
Exactly, right. And therein lies really what Islamic marketing is. And we wrote that white paper for some of our clients who work in Sharia finance and things like that. So it was helpful for them as well, but also for people who have no relationship whatsoever to Islamic marketing or Sharia, because that term Sharia has got such stigma associated with it, but in the real world, in our world, it just means be a good person, just be good. That's it.
I think if we can just get the message out to everybody to just be a good person, and if that was our standard, each individual, I'm very big on personal responsibility, so I think it's a similar message. If we could take responsibility, if I can take responsibility, for me being a good person, and you can do the same then we're already better off.
Absolutely, completely agree.
So Aziz, our firm specialises and focuses mostly on small business owners or solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, ready to launch their business. You have had so much experience in launching and building businesses to scale as you've described, to some extent, what advice would you have for someone in that situation before they launch? Perhaps it'll be a two pronged thing. Maybe one is what would be the biggest mistake you see people making before they launch? And then a piece of advice you'd give them.
Okay. I think the biggest mistake that I see people making before they launch is this concept that they have to have perfection before they launch. And I see a lot of people focusing on all the wrong things. This happened a lot, actually, whilst I was mentoring in the UK, but also in Sudan, as well. And you would find companies or founders, spending 1000s of pounds/dollars on a logo or on the company name. You just don't need to focus on that right now. In the history of time, nobody has ever bought a product because of the logo or because of the company's name. They only ever engaged with businesses because of the quality of the experience and then fulfilling their needs.
And I always use the example of Apple. Apple's logo, can you see that? I mean, that's got to be one of the worst logos in history, right? It's a half eaten Apple for a Tech Company, and it makes absolutely no sense, and yet, when we see the Apple logo, it represents quality, it represents excellence, it represents innovation, it represents premium, it has all of these representations associated to the brand, to the logo. Now they are not intrinsic qualities of a half eaten apple. What they are, are intrinsic qualities of the company that is Apple, and therefore, Apple's history and Apple's actions become reflected within the logo experience. They are not the experience in and of itself, and so focusing on the wrong thing is one of those things that I find really frustrating actually, but really, really often it happens.
What's the right thing to focus on? The right thing to focus on is your customer, right? Focus on what it is that you're delivering, be it B2B, B2C, it doesn't matter if it's a product or its service, you focus on your customers' reaction to whatever it is that you're offering, and you learn constantly. It’s constant testing and learning and accepting it and don't be arrogant about it. You may think that you've got the perfect answer, but guess what? The perfect answer doesn't always win. You've got to make sure your customers know that you've got the perfect answer. Right? So you relentlessly focus on what your customers are saying, and the brand will come from that. The brand experience will come from that, but it all starts with the customer. I would say that's probably the biggest thing that I see most often.
Thank you. We are all on the same train with that one. My biggest bugbear is when people order giveaways with their logo on it before they've even launched and 9 out of 10 times they're going to be reordering that stuff and it breaks my heart. That's really why it bothers me, it breaks my heart to see that level of excitement and passion go into something that's gonna get redone. Wasn't it Steve Jobs who said “Your brand, is what people say about you when you're not in the room”.
Yeah, absolutely right. Whenever I’ve done training in the past, I always try to get people to introspect on brands. So I'll show a brand logo, and I'll ask them to describe the emotions they have associated with that logo, and the end of that process is people realise that the logos are in fact, just designs, and what they are reflecting in their feelings towards that logo, are their views of the company, not the views of the brand. Steve Jobs also said, “I don't listen to customers, because customers don't know what they like”. And he is technically completely correct, but a lot of entrepreneurs repeat that back to me and say, “No, I know what we want, look, Steve Jobs said this.” I'm like, but you're not Steve Jobs, and I'm not Steve Jobs. Neither of us have that innate ability to understand, that zeitgeist, we just don't have that ability. He is like one in a billion. Now, unless Steve Jobs happens to be your partner, or you are that one in a billion, you're going to have to listen to customers.
Yeah, and I think people don't really realise how much businesses evolve too and I love looking at logos. Of course, I'm a brand designer so of course, it's my favourite thing, and I've studied them and I do think it's fascinating. You look at Starbucks, their logo has nothing to do with coffee. When you look at McDonald's, it's an arch. What has that got to do with hamburgers? So, absolutely it's a really good message, but it is the emotional association that people have when they see those logos, and those logos become iconic. Starbucks no longer says Starbucks on the label of a coffee cup. It's just the icon, because they don't need to, it's so recognisable, but that builds over years, decades. So when you're starting out, don't put your emphasis on the design, on the brand. There's a lot of psychology behind it, we could talk about colour psychology, and how it makes people feel and there's definitely parts of that. So, I do recommend talking to a designer, but your first thing is to get the product right. Whether it's a service or an actual thing you're selling, a widget you're selling, get that right, work on that, spend the time figuring out, listening to your customers, then you're gonna get your messaging right, you're gonna get your brand look and feel right, it's probably going to evolve over time and that's a good thing too, to suit what you're doing as you change. So all these things are really important, but certainly focus on the right things first, that's awesome advice. We love it. Thank you so much. And I do want to share, we always have a little chat before we get on video here, doing our podcast and at the beginning of it you mentioned about you believe failure is a choice. I want to hear more about that, and why you believe that because we love to talk about failure because we do think it's an important thing to talk about in business. We all have failures, and Two Four One, our mission is to make sure no entrepreneurs ever quit. So you cannot let failures take you out, but I want to hear your thoughts on failure.
Yeah, absolutely. Failure is a choice, whether it be quitting or failing at any task. You only fail if you stop, the moment you quit, that's when you failed. Everything else is just a process, so more often than not, when I've had people who have come to me and they're really struggling and they're thinking about just quitting and giving up. I say, “ Just don't quit today, quit tomorrow, just wait till tomorrow, let's see what tomorrow brings, just one more day.” And you'd be surprised how often one more day and everything else just opens up. Listen, I found in my experience, success only comes on the precipice of failure. Like genuine success only comes right at that moment of failure, that's when it happens. We've been talking about Apple, Apple's the greatest example of that, three months of cash in their bank account, they were about to go bankrupt, and then they became Apple. So you don't know where success really is. It's only a journey, it's only a process. So quitting is definitely a choice. When it comes to failure, I think we, as a society, particularly as those who were brought up in the West, or Western societies, we have a really strong and innate stigma against failure, and I've thought about this a lot, I think it comes from school. I think in school what happens is, you have a test and there is a mark, and that mark out of 10 or out of 100 determines your value and if you've got four out of 10, you have failed. Regardless of the fact that you've got four correct, you have failed and that becomes drilled into us to the extent that it actually becomes part of our daily classes in school. So you're in a class, and the teacher says, What is five plus five? And you raise your hand and say it's 10 Miss, and the teacher's response is to go, Okay, and what is five plus nine? And the next child raises his hand, and he says, it's 13. The consequence of getting that answer wrong is that your teacher then just comes down on you, ‘Of course, it's not 13, it's 14, how can you possibly think that it's 13?’ Okay, so what does the child learn? They have learned that the reward for success is nothing, but the consequence of failure is extremely harsh.
So what is the best response to any future question? Do nothing. Say nothing. Now, if you've got an eight year old child and that is how they are brought up, when they get up to our age, to business age, how that translates is their inability to make decisions and their detestation of failure. Now, how that translates is twofold. In corporate environments, you will find people who can sell their failures incredibly well, to the extent that they change the company's strategy or direction based on their own failures because they are so personally unwilling to accept that something has failed, and in an entrepreneurial environment it looks like people who won't make decisions, who are afraid of making a decision.
Failure is a mandatory step towards success. Nobody launched a successful business on day one, it's never happened, and it never will. The only variable is how quickly and how efficiently are you willing to fail? All right, so then it becomes a choice, you can choose to fail quickly and learn.
So what I always say to people, when I'm talking to, mentoring is, a good failure looks like this, you decide that you're going to do an action, whatever it is - an email campaign or setting up or whatever it is - you choose the most efficient, cost effective way of executing that action, you pre-define what success looks like, you execute the action, you'll fail, but there will be some glimmers of success in there, you'll need to understand that from the data, you learn, then you do it again, and again, and again. And you keep doing that, and the more of those cycles, you go through, every single one of those failures is a step towards success. Now, how that translates from a leaders perspective, is my job as a leader is to create an environment where failure is a mandatory form of success, in fact, where failure is a mandatory form of everybody's job spec, people are expected to fail and it is celebrated, and it is a safe environment where you will never be chastised for trying and failing. In fact, you'll be celebrated for trying and failing. Yeah, you will be chastised for not trying. And so this dynamic and this perception of what failure is, is so pervasive, and I find it a lot with people who are perfectionists who come maybe from a science background or things like that, you know the concept of having a failure in their business is so alien to them. And yet, nothing in life becomes successful without failure.
I'm curious to know how do you celebrate your failures in your business? That sounds like fun.
We have a board called the experimentation board, and it's a whiteboard, because I still like manual stuff, even though we've got a digital agency. So someone's actually responsible for the board, but you are required to put up at least two experiments every week that you're going to be trying. And in our team meetings, you are required to tell everybody what happened and regardless of what happened, everyone gets a round of applause for it.
It's beautiful and that would help people be more creative and be more free with their thoughts and their opportunities and what they might want to stretch and try. What's your take on comfort zones, fear and comfort zones?
Firstly, there are some people who are just so comfortable in their space that entrepreneurialism just isn't for them. Unless they can really work through that issue, it's just not for them, because it's a painful road, it hurts. It's emotionally draining, you got to learn a lot of stuff that you had no idea about. So for some people, okay, if you're not willing to put in that effort in yourself, then that's okay, there are lots of McJobs available, just take them a McJob. Your comfort zone is how you define it. If you're comfortable doing a single thing, if that's your lane, and you don't want to get out of your lane, that's fine. Nothing wrong with that, but if you choose to do something else, well, the first step is to explore the edges of your existing lane. So if you happen to be in corporate branding, you've built up five years of experience as a junior in your company and you're thinking, okay, so what should I do next? How should I expand? Well the next step is to maybe look into PR, or to look into SEO, or to look into an adjacent vertical. I always think - you’ve probably had this yourself when you get new clients - you get new clients that are startups and from that first conversation you can generally tell if they're going to be successful or not, generally. And I think the other thing that sets those who are obviously going to be successful apart, is that they are open to new thoughts, they don't have fixed ideas, they're willing to accept other thoughts. Not necessarily agree, but to accept and to ponder and to think, that's a trait I think that's really important. When I did my MBA, I had six modules that every MBA in the top 100 has to do, and then you get to choose six more, and I chose the ones that I hated that I was the worst at, corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions and all sorts of stuff that I was just awful at. And I very deliberately chose those ones because they're the ones that I was going to learn the most in. There's no point in me doing an extra marketing strategy module when I’d done that for my whole career. And I think that willingness to be able to push yourself, let me bring it back to like a really physical example, boxing is something that I took up three years ago, I took up boxing three years ago for health reasons, really. And there are moments when you are training, where the pain is so intense that your body starts to shake, but most people never get to that point because the mind gives up way quicker than the body, and that's true in business too. That moment, you're like, “Ah, I can't deal with this anymore, I need to quit”. Most often, there's not a physical reality that's forcing that. That's just your mind, being ready to quit before your body. So just one more step, one more day. one more push up, one more shot, one more lap, just one more and that I think when you get into that process of pushing yourself, that's how you push yourself out of your own comfort zones.
I think it's the navy seals that say when you feel like you're absolutely at your limit, you're only like 60% of capability, because your brain’s whole job is to protect your body and give it some reserves in case the next threat comes - like if you're out running away from the lion, you got to save some for the next line that's coming once that one's gone, so there's that innate protection there and I think resilience comes from being able to know where that line is knowing just how much further you can go. And also, thinking a little bit important when to pull back, when to rest, when to get the help like the therapy we were talking about earlier. Coaching is another amazing thing for entrepreneurs because I think it's a difficult journey. Like you said, it's often a very lonely journey, because we're often doing it on our own. Our friends and family don't understand, they're saying go take the safe job, go get the McJob, by the way that's hilarious, McJob, there are plenty of those. That is ‘safe’, I put it in quotes, because I don't believe any job is actually safe. It all involves some sort of risk. That's exactly what we're talking about today is how do we push through and do the risk. Tell us one thing, what do you like best about being an entrepreneur? I can feel your passion coming through today, this has been an absolute masterclass in it. So what's that one thing that keeps you going, keeps you up at night, excited to keep going? What do you love most?
The choice to do good. If you work for a company, you don't get to choose to do good, your company either does good or it does not do good. As an entrepreneur, you have a choice. You can choose to do good, you can choose to do the right thing, you can choose to employ people and train them and make their lives better. That is a freedom that is afforded only to entrepreneurs. Not even CEOs of companies have that choice. They come in and they are directed by the history of the company or by the investors, as I found out in my own past. But when you set up by yourself, you got a choice you can choose to do good.
Let me ask one question about your future, the future of your businesses, what's the big goal? What's the dream for the next? I don't know what the timeframe will be: two years, five years, 10 years, as it relates to doing good, making an impact, can you share?
As a digital marketing agency, being based now in Egypt has huge advantages, because we've built this like a Foundation and we have a training program. So essentially, what we are trying to do is only hire graduates, okay, we put them through this really super intensive six month training program before they even touch a client, and so that affords us a lot of opportunities. Because it allows us to help people in Egypt and in Sudan as well, open up opportunities outside of the country, because they operate at an international level. So that growth will continue. My aim, if I'm honest, is that I know myself, and I know that I work best in companies of under 100 people. And by the way, there's an anthropologist called Robert Dunbar who talks about the Dunbar number if you've ever come across that 115 people is the maximum size of any community of gibbons, I think it was. So I know my limit, and I won't enjoy it beyond 100 people, and 100 people means x number of clients, means x revenue, and so at that point, I'll probably exit that as a business to continue to do something else. But ultimately, what I get to do, I don't know, I came from a corporate world, really corporate, like investment bankers and all of the pain associated with fundraising and all of that, and it was so important but really meaningless at an individual level it is soul destroying. And so having been through that, I guess my only aim is to never have to go back.
So you started a Social Enterprise, so I'm guessing that there's always going to be an element of Social Enterprise in your future businesses?
Yeah, I think so. I'm not a greedy person. I remember, it wasn't long ago, six months ago, one of our clients is based in Dubai, and we do this event for them every six months, and one of my clients was at this event. And he came to where we were talking and we were talking about invoices because they were late in paying invoices. And they said, “Oh, yeah, okay, don't worry, I'll make sure that they pay on time. We wouldn't want your house in Marbella to be delayed.” And it was joking, of course. But of course that comes from a stereotype that agency founders and owners typically are building their house in Spain, in the UK that's like a stereotype that exists. And I didn't say it but in my mind, I said if you knew where your money went, you'd be so proud. At that period of time his money was going to evacuating people from Sudan from a war zone into Egypt, and now it’s going into training youth to give them better opportunities. And I didn't say it, because we don't promote that we're a social enterprise, we are a digital marketing agency. If you like our service, you'll work with us. And if you don't like our service, you'll fire us. And that's really important, you should never work with us because you want to do good. If you want to do good, go and help out at a soup kitchen. You work with us because we're good at what we do and as a consequence we end up getting clients and growing clients and growing as a business, but not because we are some sort of charity, that's very important to me, because I am at heart a capitalist. I'm a capitalist who believes that capitalism has gone astray, and capitalism at its core should be good for its founders and investors and the people working within the system. It should be good for both - the successful survive, those who offer the best service and the best product, they survive, and those that don't, they die away, and that is human nature, since time immemorial. So I never want anyone to work with us for any other reason than that we are good at what we do, and in that way I'm training people to have international futures if they want it.
Incredible personal standards, I really enjoy your unique view of things and I'm really enjoying hearing perspectives that aren't often shared by business people and entrepreneurs. So thank you, thank you for that. Now, we've talked at length about personal resilience, but of course we are called Resilient Entrepreneurs and we always end with this question. So the question is, how do we become resilient? What does it take?
To become resilient, you must put yourself in uncomfortable positions as often as possible. That's it, and that's what I say to my people, I always say, “Your career can be directly correlated in its success to the number of difficult conversations that you are willing to have. If you are consistently putting yourself in difficult positions, resilience is a natural consequence of that.”
Well, this was not a difficult conversation. This was an incredible conversation. This was a full on masterclass on entrepreneurship, full of so much advice, sage advice, experience, challenges, resilience, all of it. It's been beautiful. I appreciate you so much for joining us today. I know our audience does too because honestly, you took us on a roller coaster of emotions too. I'm glad I was on mute because I was in tears earlier with some of your stories, and I appreciate you, I appreciate your mission, I appreciate the good that you do, and the good that you're sharing and the ability to allow others to invite the same into their business. I invite everyone to read your 10 Islamic Principles in Marketing. I think it's for life as well. I think the more we can learn about other cultures and other religions and other people and their experiences, the better and richer we are in our lives. So thank you so much for everything you've shared today. I've so appreciated it and wish you all the best in the future, and actually really hope we get another chance to talk again. So please stay in touch. We'll link your stuff in the show notes and all that good stuff for anyone else who wants to explore further and definitely to read your principles. So thank you so much, Aziz. Thank you a million times.
Thank you. I really enjoyed it. It's been great. Thanks so much.
