[Music] welcome back new viewers and in this segment of our program we are going to have an interesting interview with mr abdul makhdi he is an executive business coach who uh will tell us more about the key questions that their business owners should ask themselves as eddie and 2020 morning good morning and thanks for having me good morning mr abdul always a pleasure to have you with us to start with what is the first question that a business owner should ask himself as he is assessing the year 2019 as it is wrapping up and what should be his question for what he should be doing in 2020. yeah i think that would be are you playing to play or playing to win because in business like some businesses do exist for a while and have been around for a while and they are not thinking about how they are approaching the problem how they approaching the products how they are selling the products how they are delivering the products and accordingly they would have a lot of other opportunities that you’re not looking at so the big question by the end of the year which actually comes naturally because that’s the time of the year in which people are like closing their accounting records and looking at the business performance so it naturally comes in that there’s a lot of questions and a lot of activities goes around assisting the previous year in terms of how well we performed and looking at what should we doing next year from our perspective what we think about once we really look at it from a strategic standpoint is you might actually be performing very well but in in the wrong market or this product might be like an old product there are new products in the same industry or you might actually be better be competing in a different industry so these are all big questions that people need to start asking themselves one of the big challenges that owners usually do not have like the time and also sometimes not like the setup and the intellectual capacity and the knowledge of pursuing such activities so i think like organizing events and activities for them in which they can get together and like produce something in a short period of time that’s one of the most important things for them to do during times like this by the end of the year so mr abdul what are the strategies that business owners need to change in the coming year yeah i think like when it comes to strategy because the strategy seems like a fancy word and like there’s a lot of like thinking a lot of like guessing that goes around a strategy is like simply answering a number of questions so if you define like which industry and which products are you offering in the market to which customer and how exactly are you offering it what is your competitive advantage what is your pricing and how your organization is serving that and how are you building sustainable profitable advantage out of that probably if you build that you arrived at what a strategy is yes i think it’s um it comes into analyzing each of these questions and looking at how do i answer this as a business owner so if i’m able to look at let’s get started with the industry and the products that we offer if we look at let’s say that we’re in the tourism industry so the tourism industry have been around for a very long time like it’s egypt so it had been around like um but we can actually look as a tourism company where we’re selling tourism products expecting people to arrive at our gates in downtown cairo and this might be a very kind of old way of approaching like direct traffic but now we have the internet so a lot of people actually come to egypt and they have booked already everything so they are not looking for anything to be booked while they are there so does this mean that we need to have our offering in our marketing being done online that’s a very simple question an example for how changing the way that we work could actually lead to better outcomes yes and that goes to every other aspect that we talked about mr abdul allow me to to ask here as a live co as a business coach what advice do you give here the business owner as how he should be reassessing what he is doing he is uh is having to reassess the product that he is producing um at the time he should be doing some renovation here to cope with the the the new developments the new technologies how years you should be handling the product that is providing yeah i think the first thing is taking a step back because like during the year and mostly owners they are also owners who are operating the business so once they are involved in the business they are working in the business so they are like in touch with the operation and how different employees interact and how our customers interact so like you need to take a step back to be able to look at the business from a distance and that’s something that’s needed you have reassessment for them exactly exactly to do reassessments so yeah it’s even one of the things that we do is we take them to like out of the country out of the whole city so sometimes we go to the countryside we go to other like retreats around like coastal cities so this is very necessary for them to disconnect with the business and to be in a new environment so one of the biggest challenges is actually disconnecting that’s the first step is that you have to disconnect with what’s happening and look at it from an assessment standpoint with very simple points and ideas other than going through a lot of materials to to study so having this time and space in order for you to afford to do that that’s one point and also to be able to produce something out of it that that’s quite challenging so the first advice is to disconnect indeed so mr abdul how does the business operator know that he’s targeting the right customers and how can we define the segments and position the product and the business is uh in the market yeah i think like products it starts with the industry but if we like um like industry is going to be like too much for us to be able to analyze to look at how the industry is performing to look at like how the industry dynamics for that the biggest winning companies within this industry like to cluster that and understand the offering in the market share and then we get into the products because like understanding what kind of product at what phase is a product that we’re offering is very very important so we understand it as emerging products like if you look at all that like for example technology in egypt you can look this as like emerging offering like people trying to get you to do everything through the internet so you can say that there is a level of growth that goes into that but it takes its time like it went well with transportation so it’s kind of emerging so you see these emerging offering and there are like growth phases like products in the growth phase you can say that in transportation for example like technologies in the growth phase so that offering is in a growth phase so we look at the products that’s it’s not people not a lot of people are utilizing it and then the product that there’s a lot of people going to be utilizing that within the next months and years and then there are other old products that have been around for a very long time there is a high competition in these products and accordingly there is a low profit margin so you have to understand where your offering lie exactly in terms of like this circle is this something that said that’s old and there’s like little profit margin but it’s it’s uh it’s sustainable and you expect how much money you’re gonna make or this is something at the gross growth phase like the best area to operate is in the growth phase if you understand that this is a product there’s a lot of growth going there you need to be there because that’s where the money is and that’s where the growth is so if you’re able to operate out of this growth phase that’s going to be vital and the next question that you need to to ask yourself is how do i actually sell this product because you understand that there are like there are different products that that can sell for like two pounds and the other for 20 pounds so it’s my product should sell for two or twenty and based on based on what because also that’s a different messaging and different customer and different channels to to decide so understanding like how do i position my product in the market is also very vital and also takes a lot of understanding and analysis to what’s being offered and that competitiveness within a product i might figure out that i actually would better go for a niche like a differentiated like a high cost product and that and accordingly i need to invest in the development according accordingly so there is there is some and usually the working strategy they say that there is part rigor part is a lot of intellectual work and analysis and part is about creativity so it’s about coming up with new ideas and innovations so like balancing both of knowing the data and knowing what are the possibilities so mr reabdo how do innovation and flexibility a play at all in all of this and is strategy something you can change in the future or event while executing yeah that’s an excellent question and i think it’s actually a big question like why we’re looking at strategy by the end of the year and why we could actually have been looking at a strategy along the way but it’s always it’s always about milestones so if we say that we’re going to be looking at our strategy at each quarter that’s going to be effective for us to judge that i think some of the big stories is that there is uh there is a company that was selling like an accounting software for individuals and they were like they were getting a lot of inquiries from their customers which actually meant that they were not using this accounting software for individuals but rather they are using it for companies when they looked at it they saw that majority of their users actually are small business owners so they built another tool that specifically made for small small business owners and he made six amounts the business they were making out of their tool and that happened through their openness and flexibility to discover what the client wants what the customers want and being able to adjust the offering based on that so there’s like strategy is never guaranteed so this is also strategy is an experiment so you come up with ideas and basically you experiment with that you have a strong understanding that this is more likely to work so it’s always called the optimal strategy it’s like the strategy that’s most likely to work but you execute that and you learn from the response in the market and you adjust your strategy so working your strategy is something you have you have to be doing on a ongoing basis and flexibility plays a major role in that yes to what extent innovation and flexibility is play are playing an important role in all of that in uh choosing the the right uh business and in continuing to do so and to develop and to have innovative ideas not to to die in the in the business or not to have innovative ideas so you fade out yeah exactly i think i think the first step as we said is it’s about the process because we’re talking about someone who had been in the business for a long period of time so when they think about their businesses thinking about like gigging getting like 7 30 a.m in the morning and then just going to work and then like interacting in a very specific way so for them to get out of that and to get into a creative process or semi-creative process it’s quite a challenge so that’s why in order for them to be able to get this stage you need to disconnect them by saying that we are taking it going for a retreat so we’re getting out of town so we’re getting into a countryside we’re getting to a coastal city so for them this trip actually has like a psychological effect in terms of brainstorming exactly i’m gonna be i’m gonna be away from my office and then i’m gonna be like thinking of new ideas and also having this as a guided session in terms of you have someone who really tell you now we’re gonna be doing that and you need to think about that so it’s it’s like evolving in like a conversation like because usually when we talk about like um like a strategy initiative with consultants we expect to produce like 30 pages documents that really saying different aspects analyzing different aspects but if you have a single piece of paper and then you’re playing with variables and you’re building different scenarios yourself and you’re able to judge accordingly that’s like like that’s an environment in which you can come up with a lot of innovative ideas and you can have a lot of flexibility in choosing with them while we work with entrepreneurs we usually advise them to produce three different scenarios so you assess your this year’s strategy and then you produce three different strategies and then you choose it’s your job then to choose which strategy would you like to pursue exactly so can you tell us a simple step-by-step formula our audience they can go through uh to develop a possible strategy for their business definitely i think like there’s a canvas that’s already designed that actually should be used in designing these strategies it’s actually created by like two two of the biggest names in a strategy a.g lafley who was like the ceo of png for 10 years and who transformed the company and the dean of one of the businesses schools in canada so it’s uh it’s um like it’s a very very kind of known i think you can find it in google and work through it it starts by defining what’s our winning aspiration how do we define that we have won and also there’s a lot of tricks that’s that’s there in terms of defining ones that are winning aspirations so one of the biggest pitfalls is that people say that i would like to double my sales next year and this he’s saying like doubling our sales is going to be something like positive and there’s an element of looking at your goal based on the industry so understanding that like if i’m selling like 6 000 units and the market is worse is like 50 000 so by then and i have three competitors that mean that i actually have two percent market share so looking at your winning expiration based on the mark in the total market share is very effective for us to make sure that we’re actually making the best use of our assets and our our time also while running the business so what is our winning aspiration where do we play so where exactly are going to be selling that where the geography which kind of product categories how do we win what is our competitive advantage like how do we kind of offer the products and then what are the internal capabilities that we have so what kind of employees do we need to have what kind of professionals do we have within the company and then what are the management system what are the the system of reward and management that we need to put in place in order for us to be able to manage all this process so it’s just a single piece of paper if you go through it answer it like why also understanding like that the defining factors of each kind of question but then you can actually communicate this strategy in three minutes so it’s always an effective approach for you to develop that even as a business owner or someone who works very closely with the business owner who can actually have that and sit with the owner for 30 minutes and have a conversation about it so sir to what extent does the wellness of the business depend on its employees experience within the company years in business yeah definitely if you look at it from a strategic perspective we say that if business is going through a lot of shifts and a lot of pivots and a lot of changes that mean that employees need to change and shift with what’s happening in the business and actually not all employees do have the capabilities to shift and change like and also there are a lot of like psychological aspects like positivity positive attitude etc that plays a major role in doing all these kind of shifts and change management so when we look at it in terms of defining the the hard side in terms of the technical skills and also the personality the personal skills of these employees is very very vital for us to be able to kind of develop this strategy because if we take the owner away from the business and we work with them on developing a strategy and they go back to their employees it’s gonna be impossible for them to operate that because like employees do have a different kind of mindset so by then that is like the next step once you come up with a strategy like a good approach is that you involve as many of your staff as possible for them to understand that’s what we we’re going through so engaging employees whether at the first session or the second session the challenge for them to understand what’s happening but actually get them to be more supportive of the initiative because they understand what’s going on they are not threatened by the changes taking place and also it becomes that if someone is not it’s not okay for them to be part of that change but then it’s might be a good choice for both the owner and the employees to kind of to break that partnership so finally i’d like to thank you mr abdul maghdi executive and business coach thank you for being with us today thanks for having me thank you very much thank you and by the viewers we come to the end of today’s edition of breakfast show i’m shining either and i was joined today by my colleague thank you and they see you tomorrow with a new

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