welcome back and it’s time for our first segment here on breakfast show and today we will be talking about youth and entrepreneurship and means of helping them in starting a new business in terms of labor marketing as well as the various improvements that could be added to their business and economic empowerment and joining us right now in the studio to shed more light on that topic is mr abdulrahman maggie is a writer as well as an entrepreneur expert welcome with us and good morning

good morning it’s a pleasure to be here good morning now let’s start by defining uh what is entrepreneurship because so many people don’t really understand the definition how would you define it to us yeah entrepreneurship is defined as the practice and the skill set needed for people who want to start and grow their own businesses so the word entrepreneur it comes from the French and it actually into two uh segments which are the ones who start enterprises or the ones who start companies yes and um like even like one of the things that we did we tried to figure out in the Arabic culture an Arabic word that corresponds to entrepreneurship and we couldn’t get any close to that but uh i mean like there are some words that expresses being self-reliant and dependent and the ability to build things in your own so entrepreneurship is the practice of building businesses

okay mr abdulrahman now in terms of our youth how can we help them sort of business especially that usually they have a low budget

yeah i think the good thing is that startup entrepreneurs usually start with a very low budget and i think the good thing also that we can look at most of the successive stories that’s very popular around the world globally and also in Egypt because like in the recent year we started having some local success stories as well if you look at the Microsoft the apple all these companies we know that they start in the garage so the good thing about entrepreneurship is that you can start from anywhere and it becomes a matter of the skill sets and the ability to build move step by step to be able to build and scale the business so for Egyptian youth the good news is and now we have the internet now we have like changes in the structure of how business is being conducted now we have more openness from the bigger business historic with the smaller businesses and now we have like smaller opportunities exist exists in uh in the market which entrepreneurs can take advantage of of course it’s not an easy process there is lots of steps and lots of challenges along the way but we can say that the opportunity exists for those who can get themselves involved with the network because if we talk about it step by step if i get the idea or i have the passion or i have the dream to start my own business first thing i need to do is that i need to hang out with the people who are starting their businesses so if i have to find if i’m an egyptian youth and i want to start my own business i have to find where are the people who are starting their businesses hang out yes and you can find lots of events lots of clubs or you can join other youth for starting your own businesses online of course yes online and offline there’s lots of events taking places there’s lots of hubs that’s starting that’s called startups and like if you use uh even like google you can figure out some of these hubs that exists in in Cairo and also in other governorates around Egypt so if you hang out with the right group of people already starting their own businesses you will be involved with the events the right events that will equip you with the skills with the network and then you have to get the idea once you have a solid idea that actually touches your own passion by then you can really start taking the first step uh searching for your co-founders the guys or the girls that I’m gonna start the business with i kind of start assessing the financials i can start looking at building my marketing plan and my business plan probably i would need funding i would like to hire a couple of people get my first office scale get my first client and keep moving until i able to expand a business and the good thing is that if you look at the past five years there are at least four egyptian companies that were able to raise funds from outside egypt in more than one million dollars so egyptian youth who started businesses in the past five years they were able to get external funding of the amount of i mean external funding like international funding from major investment companies in the uk in europe and even in the u.s these egyptian entrepreneurs they just they were just like me and you and they uh they started up the exact same way that i just told you hanging out with the right crowd uh like being open to learn new skills engage with the right crowd work an idea be flexible to pivot and change the direction and by carrying all these steps and enjoying the process eventually we’ll be able to build and scale a great company

okay perhaps what distinguishes startups from other types of business is that you can cut down the number of staff and you can actually start up on your own and i have seen personally so many people who started just on their own and they started their online business and that was what distinguished them from from other types of business for example i’ve seen people working in the field of jewelry making jewelry and marketing their jewelry uh online so uh how do you see the what characterizes uh entrepreneurship from other types of business

I like to define is entrepreneurship i like to say that entrepreneurship is is a quite a generic word for people who want to start their businesses but there are different types of businesses okay there’s a lifestyle business and there’s a startup business so a lifestyle business is something that depends on my own lifestyle if I’m a jewelry designer for example and i think that um i used to work at a specific shop and I want to start my own business and the way I think about this and by the end of the day what distinguishes a lifestyle business from a startup business is how I think about it I might have the attitude is that i want to just build this as my own business so other than giving my time for employment I’m going to work in this business and keep it a small business to a lot of extent have my own job and this is going to be my lifestyle business on the other hand startup business is something that i design for growth so start usually have innovation lots of innovation and have massive potential so in the lifestyle business I’m gonna design like five pieces and sell it per month and I’m gonna make x amount of money and that’s how I think about it for the next five years for a startup business i would like to write down the process of designing the jewelry and i want to organize the production line of the jewelry and i want to scale this globally i want to sell all around the world and i have no ceiling to the amount that I would like to to sell so these are some of the decisions that entrepreneurs have to take early on would i like would i like to go for a lifestyle business or what would i like to do for a startup business um actually both can be started in a low budget uh but startups would require more effort would require more knowledge and also require external capital because eventually even if i start with two employees and i proved the concept so i built a product for example a technology product a product where people can purchase um like anything online for example and by then i started with with two people two employees and i arrived at the area that there is demand that i have to scale and i have delivery to handle so then i need external funding so startups requires external funding it needs lots of other different types of support so startups is high growth and this might not be suitable for everybody because it’s quite challenging a lifestyle business on the other hand and like one of the things that i see and actually lots of ladies for that is that especially ladies they get into the lifestyle business and they do excellent and some of them actually scale this and make it much more bigger businesses so um a lifetime even more convenient for women who have children who are working on other jobs for example unions especially i mean stay-at-home moms yes or usually are not employed we usually start lots of them in Egypt right now they are starting lifestyle businesses and they’re even even to shift and to scale these businesses like and also um ladies are also starting startup businesses there are some like some of the best startups in Egypt are actually started and led uh by ladies as well so it’s like a decision that you have to take when i go for a lifestyle or go for a startup um and actually i can shift i can start as a lifestyle lifestyle and then i shift at the right moment into this is a startup I’m going to open up I’m going to hire people and by then i decide to get myself out of the process and just oversee and design the process and make sure we’re able to grow tremendously now in terms of the startup business these they need as you said external finance and although recently like during this month there were a lot of inter and advertisement from certain national banks that encouraging the use come and do your own startup business and we’ll finance you but still do you feel that the banks in Egypt especially the interest rate is really helping the youth in terms of taking a loan and starting their own business because usually the interest rate is quite high well like i know about the initiatives of lowering the interest rate to five percent which is an interesting initiative but i think that that would go for more established businesses because the banking sector do have requirements and these requirements are not fit for someone who’s just starting a business so you need like they’re going to be requested at least three years of fully furnished accounting which is not gonna be available for a company that’s just starting out so there are some complexities that comes into that like dealing with banks and also banks are risk sensitive um so it just makes the startup the early stage businesses are not very favorable choice for them to get involved with but the good thing is that this startup in industry actually there’s especially in the us there’s which is something also that’s arriving in Egypt like quite slowly but it’s it is starting to evolve with time there is a finance industry that works in a startups there is a venture capital this is an industry that’s specialized in hunting the ideas that would have a potential for growth that things like Facebook things like all these small businesses that have the potential to grow these investors would be able to kind of invest a hundred thousand US dollars today and probably in six months this hundred thousand would become a one million dollars or 10 million dollars and in some cases can like get a 1000 x if the company is successful and growing properly so probably if we want to look at this strategically we would look at the possibility of finding the right investment vehicles for this startup stage because it requires a different mentality a different risk appetite and around the world the tools that entrepreneurs can use to develop and grow their businesses have been emerging and the biggest trend right now which I think is suitable to the Egyptian mentality is the crowd funding which is basically that you can submit your idea and you can allow other people to invest in your business so I think this is an excellent opportunity for Egyptians because lots of Egyptians would have a small amount of capital we usually put it in the banks or the invest in real estate if we tell them that there are existing startups that needs cash to scale and these actually are highly qualified individuals running these startups and they have been doing this for three five years and right now they need five hundred thousand Egyptian pounds and the potential for them in two years to reach this amount and you can actually each contribute like 20,000 pounds or 100,000 pounds and you own an equity in this company so like potentially a tool like that would allow entrepreneurs in Egypt and would give them access to something that would like help them source the the right capital for their companies and also with given an alternative investment opportunities to those with a small amount of capital would like to invest so I think when it comes to the banking sector maybe if we think about it differently of empowering the emerging vehicles for investing in startups and small businesses this might be a good option because I’m not sure how the banking sector would get into investing in startups even like this didn’t happen in the U.S. this didn’t happen like in a lot of other countries around the world the banks are still very risk sensitive so you usually do not engage in a very early stage of start-ups

okay how do you see entrepreneurship when it comes to affecting the egyptian economy ?

well i think to be honest i think that’s how like where the egyptian economy should be going and it should be going way more stronger because if you look at egypt like you have like a youthful huge youth population these youth population they are mostly graduating from university universities they are highly skilled uh they are very ambitious they are very well connected with the rest of the world in social media and they are very good at using technologies they they speak foreign languages so they become a very very important and strategic asset that can actually build businesses to sell products and services all around the world so right now there are the business models that allows building businesses that works on the internet or even like that uses the internet as a marketing channel for the products and services so i think if we look at the egyptian economy and if we look at the youth and the potential that start-ups would happen and actually around the region we have examples of countries that was able to create what they call the startup nation is that like the whole university all those graduating they are actually starting businesses so they are not the graduation projects for example becomes an actual business and we have some successful stories of egyptians who actually took their graduation project into becoming an actual business so i think if we want if you want to think about the egyptian economy strategically given also the huge youth population that we have we say that it becomes a startup nation let’s go for a startup nation model we want to empower these young people we would like to give them access to the knowledge to the tools to the network and we would like to evolve lots of startups that would be able to kind of um contribute to advancing egypt itself and also be able to sell and create economic value for the global economy and all around the world now what about the challenges facing young entrepreneurs in egypt well there are plenty of that and i would say that uh challenges are different from the step in which the business is is emerging um so there are like one challenge that has to do with the experience and knowledge is that to a lot of extent the idea of starting your own business and a scalable business it’s not something that’s uh that’s very popular i mean like we have the understanding of the classic business model of starting a shop starting like a small business in a in a cookie-cutter way that’s something that you really know how it works but it’s trying an innovative business with the potential to fail um i think we there’s a lot of learning when it comes to understanding the tools and the attitude about going into that there are some cultural problems also to be honest like given what we talked about is that we’re not used to this type of business so when someone really say that i’m innovative and i’m starting a new business to do something we’re ever heard about so usually there’s attitude okay okay good luck but there is uh to a lot of extent lack of belief people are not going to put their their money into these businesses so like um like understanding that innovation or something with potential this is also leaves quite a cultural challenge as we move forward we could find uh probably a challenge when it comes to the funding is that if i built a business and i need um to bump in more capital right now to scale the business i think that the options are very very limited at the current point in time so lots of lots of these startups they have to offer services rely on their cash flow to finance their expansion which is a very exhausting process and lots of worthy startups and worthy companies that could scale otherwise with external capital it has to provide services that’s not in the core to be able to attract the capital so all these are challenges and i think it becomes a matter of maturing and and here become comes the endurance part i think there are some very very interesting stories for the ones who were able to make it of how they actually went through downsizing like some of the success stories that exists right now some of them went into 70 downsizing so if they had a team of 20 they ended up just they lost most of their team and they ended up like small group and most likely they had like delays and uh and their salaries and lots of lots of challenges um but they went through that so they learned how to go through that another part is the flexibility of pivoting okay i was intending to do that but all right let’s say that this didn’t work so now like i say that this is uh we have the stigma around failure but so for me to convince that this didn’t work probably it might seem like i’m saying that i was not uh i was not smart enough at the beginning so like but to me for me to have the courage to say that this didn’t work it’s time to visit and also to communicate this to the team around me and to even the parents everyone who’s looking at the startup to do this pivot also this becomes quite like a sharp change um so all these are challenges but it comes down to the tense and endurance of the entrepreneurs are starting to process okay since we are running out of time i have just one final question for you if you would like to answer it briefly you touched on a very important issue which is funding perhaps this is an essential issue when it comes to entrepreneurship how would young entrepreneurs convince investors with their ideas oh um the good thing is that i’m writing a book about that i’m writing a small book about that and um like i think it comes down to a core belief in what they are doing understanding of what investors are looking for because you have to look at it from an investor standpoint an investor would like to put right now ten thousand pounds in one year it’s gonna be a hundred thousand so an investor someone who puts ten thousand and it gets ten percent of the company after a year the ten percent of the company right now equals hundred thousand so that’s what he’s thinking about that one challenge is that entrepreneurs usually get there with the attitude is that this is my i’m passionate about i’m gonna talk to you about myself and my ideas and what you’re doing you have to think about it from the perspective of investors is that i’m going to give you a stake in this company and this company to have the potential to grow and in order for them to be able to communicate that there are some hard scales and there are some soft skills the hard skills comes into understanding the potential for scale the potential for growth and being able to calculate and and kind of um do this properly and on the other hand he has to communicate this and have the charisma to convince the investors that i am the qualified entrepreneur to tap into this market opportunity and to scale this company so i think with the balance of the hard skills and the softer skills if i’m convincing right convincing you right now with the facts and figures and you see that i’m qualified enough most likely you’re going to put money on the table so a balance between both of that that’s that’s usually what gets entrepreneurs to respond to formula of success

yeah okay mr abdulrahman meghdi water an entrepreneur uh entrepreneur and expert uh thank you very much for shedding light on this very important topic and coming today thank you very much

thank you well indeed thank you

Also published on Medium.