Influential Entrepreneurs

Mike Saunders: Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Mohamed Ahmed, who’s the author of The Inside-Out Entrepreneur. Mo, welcome to the program.

Mohamed Ahmed: Hi Mike, thank you very much for having me.

Mike Saunders: I am interested in learning all about your book and how you serve business owners and entrepreneurs, but get us started first with a little bit of your story and background and how did you decide to work with entrepreneurs?

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. I’m a thinking guy. So I started as an engineer and then I worked as a product manager and then I decided at a certain point to become an entrepreneur myself. I had a really exciting journey, but I had lots of low moments. I think many entrepreneurs are probably experiencing that.

Midway I asked myself, does it really have to be this way? Because it wasn’t really an easy journey. Yes, I grew a lot, but it also had a toll on me. When I actually talked with other entrepreneurs, I realized almost everyone is going through that.

The journey definitely has its own challenges when it comes to the business side. But what is happening inside us is really a lot. That requires continuous maintenance, requires being conscious about what is going on inside you so that you are able to grow as a person, as an entrepreneur, as a businessman or woman.

That’s the main motivation for me writing that book after finishing the whole journey. I realized that there is some sort of conditioning any entrepreneur needs to go through before they start their journey. And even if they’re midway, they have to keep maintaining themselves.

Think of it like mountain climbing – any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, has to do some sort of conditioning period and have a conditioning program before they start their journey climbing to the summit. It’s the same thing when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs need to make sure that they’re ready mentally, emotionally, and that their family is also ready. Everything around them is likely to work in their favor. There are going to be always difficulties and challenges, but you want to make sure that you have all the preparations that would make you ready to seize opportunities. When you get, quote-unquote, lucky, you’re ready to jump on the opportunity and make the best use of it.

Mike Saunders: There are lots of stories around that, I’m sure. I know that you work with so many entrepreneurs and I love your approach that you’re talking about because it’s the inside out. The “out” would be here’s what to do about launching and scaling and this tactic and this item, this software to grow your business and scale your business. What led you to focus on the mental aspects of entrepreneurship to begin with?

Mohamed Ahmed: That’s really important. So there are two things that I personally want everyone to be aware of. There is the resiliency part and there is the robustness part. When you think of resiliency, if I borrow the definition from engineering, if you have a resilient structure, this means that you have a strong structure that is strong enough that it will resist external forces trying to impact it.

Like building a bridge – when it gets hit by a hurricane or the elements are really harsh on the structure, the structure is not going to collapse and fall down because of that pressure. That’s a resilient structure.

Now, if you map this back to our minds, this is how you want an entrepreneur to be thinking of themselves and also to build this kind of resiliency. Every day you’re going to face unusual events or something that is not expected. How do you make sure that this does not take your mindset out of balance, and instead of having a growth mindset, you start thinking in a limited mindset and not able to really bring things together?

Given all of that, it’s also inevitable that there are going to be events that are big enough that might impact our mindset and drift us into a state that we do not want. And this is the role of mental robustness. Again, if I use the engineering analogy here, a robust structure is a structure that when it gets deformed because there’s a tremendous force being applied to it, it can go back to its original form.

Think of it like a rubber band – when you stretch it and release it, it goes back to its original form. The same thing applies if you train yourself as an entrepreneur to have an optimistic mindset, a growth mindset, and you’re always challenging yourself. You’re going to have difficult times where your mindset is not going to be where you want it to be. The question is, have you prepared yourself well enough so that you can come back from those setbacks fairly quickly or not? This is really important.

Maybe I’ll share a quick story from my own experience. When I started my first startup, we had a credit from Amazon Web Services or AWS, a hundred thousand dollar credit. We thought that this was going to keep us running for more than a year.

Three or four months after launching the company, while still working on the demo of the product, I got an email just before having my first product demonstration to one of our customers. That email from AWS told us, “You owe us $60,000.” So we had consumed all $100,000, and in addition to that, owed $60,000. And we had only $70,000 in the bank.

The first thing that came to my mind was that we’re going to go bankrupt and the company is going to shut down. It took me four weeks to recover from that. This is when I did not really have the proper robustness and resiliency. Recovery means I started to go back and talk to AWS and negotiate with them and figure out a payment plan. That took me four weeks. So this is just one snapshot of an entrepreneur who’s not resilient enough.

Now, fast forward three years, going through lots of experiences, my company was about to be acquired. The company that was supposed to acquire us backed off two hours before signing the LOI for reasons outside of our hands and outside of their hands.

What happened is I looked at the situation and less than 24 hours later, I took the LOI that was not signed yet and used it to shop around with other companies. Less than one week after that company backed off, I was sitting with four CEOs interested in acquiring our company.

Compare these two stories. In the first situation, I did not have the proper resiliency and perspective about the events happening around me. That’s why it took me a long time to recover, and I thought it was going to be a disaster that would destroy my company.

In the other event, even though it was much more serious in terms of impact on the business and everyone that works with me, I was able to recover within 24 hours, and we got lucky and sold the company.

That’s the value. This is what would make a difference between someone who conditioned themselves and became resilient enough, or has that resilient mindset, and someone who is just leaving it to chance. They just focus on the marketing and sales and how to land the first customer and second customer and so on.

At the end of the day, if you ignore the inside factors, you’re going to eventually lose your way and probably quit if you’re a first-time entrepreneur. Even if you don’t quit, if you get thrown for a loop, that two to four to six week timeframe of being in that mental fog could impede you from moving forward or noticing a great opportunity.

Mike Saunders: So how do you help entrepreneurs build that mental resilience?

Mohamed Ahmed: I usually take them through a conditioning framework, which I explain in detail in the book. I work with them looking at different events from a different perspective. I usually ask them how they feel and I walk them through the five whys framework. “Why do you feel this way?” And they give me an answer and I ask, “Why is that? Do you think it’s a logical answer?”

We keep digging into that until we get down deep into how they perceive events and how they perceive themselves and everything around them. Then we try to fix and correct that.

Over time, as they build that muscle, any setback becomes an opportunity for them to improve, an opportunity for them to move forward. If they fail to achieve a certain goal, this means they have different ways to do it.

This requires me to really get into almost all the details of how they run their business and even sometimes how they juggle between their personal life and their business. Going through all of these helps them to take a look at themselves and change their perspective about their mindset and the business and how they should position that business in their life.

At the end of the day, a lot of entrepreneurs confuse their identity with their business. If their businesses are facing issues or problems or failing, they think that they’re going to fail in life, and that adds lots of pressure.

We usually work with them to clarify that and make sure that they’re not falling victim to the typical misconceptions that we read about in the media. We also give them a picture of what it could look like even if their business is poised to shut down.

Mike Saunders: It’s really interesting, your approach, because it’s a very cerebral approach. Like you talk about that mindset, that resilience, it reminds me of don’t make a knee-jerk reaction to anything. If you heard some news that made you think the sky is falling or business is going under, and you made decisions based on that, and then you found out the rest of the story, which might not be accurate to begin with – the rest of the story might be, it’s not that bad. Or maybe you could reinforce your approach or your mindset or get some advice from some peers or counselors. All of a sudden now it’s not as bad as it may have seemed.

What do you do to work with your clients to help them once they’ve articulated this? To be able to say, this conditioning framework, like you mentioned, here’s what we need to go through. When we hear this piece of news, the first step is, the second step is…

Mohamed Ahmed: You mentioned a couple of important things. You mentioned how they respond and how they perceive different things. I like what you mentioned, the word “response,” because most entrepreneurs react. And there’s a big difference between reacting and responding.

Reacting is you just try to push away whatever you feel is going to cause you issues in your business or personal life. Responding means that you’re ruminating about the event first. You’re thinking about it. And you have some sort of a framework.

What I usually do, I don’t just take the framework and apply it in an abstract way. I actually work with the entrepreneurs throughout their external journey. I still help them in their fundraising. I still help them in landing their first set of customers.

But as we develop those, we take a different approach on how they think about events. When they get customer rejection, how they should think about it. When they get a rejection from a VC or they’ve been trying for three months, how they should think about it.

I’m a big believer in building relationships. If you don’t know about people, then you don’t know about business. Business is all about building relations with others, whether this is a VC or a customer.

We usually hear that VCs are investing in the entrepreneur. The question here is: why would they invest in you if they don’t know you? They’re investing in you as an entrepreneur and as a human. The same thing when it comes to working with customers – customers first work with you because they trust you and they trust that you’re going to get them the best service.

How do you do that? How do you build a relationship with people even though people are going to sometimes reject some of your thoughts or maybe reject your company or solution? You still need to build those relationships, and you never know. The first time you talk with them, you may get a no. Then after you build a relationship, you may actually get a much bigger business than you initially anticipated.

Mike Saunders: I think here’s one thing that you probably have seen in your research – you can self-motivate yourself by noticing and reviewing your own positive results. When you see that framework and you take those steps and then you see what it did for you in this certain circumstance, when that comes up again in life and business (because it will), when you can reflect back on that and go, “Before I did it this way and a good result came,” now it becomes easier and easier to do it because you’re noticing and remembering what you did previously.

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly. And that’s the muscle that you want to build at the end of the day.

Mike Saunders: So when you work with clients that have put this into practice, what are some of the results that they are seeing from this approach?

Mohamed Ahmed: Many things. First of all, they’re moving much faster than before and they’re learning much faster than before because they do not spend a lot of time thinking about why they got rejected and reflecting this on themselves.

The first result that I see is that they’re now able to move from one experiment to another. The startup world, especially in the early stage, is all about iterating through experiments. You’re trying different sets of customers, different sets of features for your product, different approaches to do the marketing and messaging for your product.

That’s why the most important asset, as I tell many entrepreneurs, is your speed. Your mind actually could be the biggest hurdle in your journey to becoming fast enough. Because every time you face an unexpected event or a rejection, you start thinking about it and maybe look inward and ruminate about it too much.

So that’s the number one advantage that they get. And then as a result of that, they reach their business results much faster and they learn way more than anyone else.

This is also the second advantage any startup company would have. If I would compare a startup to an enterprise, the only advantage that they have – the small team compared to an enterprise – is not the money, is not the people, it’s not even the knowledge, but speed and the ability to learn very quickly.

If you’re able to unlock that from within, it’s going to make a huge difference for your business. And not only for you as an entrepreneur or the CEO or a founder of the company, this is going to be a culture for your company. So everyone else in your company will be moving even faster than you initially anticipated without you trying to push them, because they also start looking at business and experimentation and trials and learning the same way that you look at it.

So you see that small investment in your mindset will make a huge difference in the projections not only of you, but also of your company.

Mike Saunders: I love it. Well, I tell you, it feels like the analogy of if you want to chop down a tree, take the first hour sharpening the axe and then start getting to work because it’ll be more effective. So if you can work on that mindset and that resiliency, now all of the other things that you’re going to do in business will be much more effective.

So Mo, great chatting with you today. If someone is interested in learning more and picking up a copy of your book and connecting with you, what is the best way that they can do that?

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. They can learn more about the book and what I call the behind the scenes for the book. I’m explaining why I wrote each chapter and the story behind it. There’s also a link on our website to the Amazon store where you can buy the book either through Kindle or the printed version. And our website is https://stg-boundlessfounder-rpd-3buu.uw2.rapydapps.cloud.

Mike Saunders: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you today.

Mohamed Ahmed: Well, thank you very much again, Mike, for having me.

Mike Saunders: You’ve been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today’s show or listen to past episodes, visit www.influentialentrepreneursradio.com.