Rana Nawas: (00:00)

Hello ladies and gentlemen. My guest on today’s show is the founder and CEO of the first grocery commerce platform in the Middle East, BulkWhiz. As a working mom, Amira Rashad felt like there were not enough hours in the day and grocery shopping was the last way she wanted to spend her precious time. So she built this online platform to order your groceries in bulk. Prior to starting BulkWhiz, Amira had 25 years experience in leadership, strategy, operations, and marketing across a variety of sectors. Having worked at Yahoo, Pepsico and Booz Allen. Most recently, she was the head of brand for Facebook Middle East North Africa. Amira is a graduate of Harvard Business School and sits on the board of TechWadi in Silicon Valley. We discussed Amira’s diverse experiences in the corporate world and how they prepared her for entrepreneurship. She busted a myth about the average age of entrepreneurs. We talked about why Amira decided to leave a cool, stable corporate job to create BulkWhiz and the hurdles she faced in doing so. We got her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and an explanation of the phrase “the moment of truth.” We discussed various challenges women face in the workplace and the expectations placed on all of us. Finally, we touched on Amira’s creative writing and what makes her happy. So let’s get into it. Amira, it’s so great to have you on When Women Win. Thank you so much for taking the time.

 

Amira Rashad: (01:36)

Absolute pleasure to be here.

 

Rana Nawas: (01:38)

So you are a skydiving instructor?

 

Amira Rashad: (01:40)

I am. I actually became one purely by chance. As a student in the UK, I wanted to make some money on the side. So I got a job working at a cafeteria at an air force base in North Yorkshire where students went to learn how to skydive. Thing is the weather in North Yorkshire isn’t exactly very conducive for first time skydivers. So a lot of people ended up waiting quite a while and that gave me the opportunity to A) get to know the people, get to know the instructors, but also gave me some time to actually learn how to pack shoots. Learned that a bit. Watched a lot of the courses that were being taught, learned quite a bit. Took the course myself and, you know, the next thing I knew I was being trained to be an instructor and I am one today.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:25)

That’s insane. You went to make some money in the cafeteria and walked out a skydiving instructor.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:30)

Absolutely, yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:31)

All right. Let’s talk about BulkWhiz.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:35)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:35)

Why did you start it?

 

Amira Rashad: (02:36)

So I actually started BulkWhiz because of two pain points, one on the personal side and one on the professional side. So on the personal side, very simply, I am a mom. I basically bear the responsibility of grocery shopping for my home, for my family and I just woke up one day thinking, why am I doing the exact same thing that my mom had done and her mom had done? Really, there hasn’t been a lot of progress on that front. You still have to drive to the store, you still have to, you know, fight for a parking spot. You still have to, you know, stand in those lines and what have you and you know, in 2016/17, whenever it is that we started thinking about this, there really a lot of technology out there that I was sure was going to enable us to do this in an easier, more convenient manner. So I just thought, you know what, let’s do something about it. I’m sick and tired of wasting my weekends in grocery shopping lines. So that’s on the professional, sorry on the personal side. On the professional side, I was working, I’ve been in sort of a consumer marketing type of a role more or less for more than 30 years and I have yet to speak to any professional who is able to show you a solid line between dollar in from a marketing perspective and dollar out in terms of returns for brand or a company. Everything is kind of quote on quote extrapolated. You assume, you run research, you hope, and so on. So that purchase funnel, so to speak, from awareness to actual purchase or sale for a brand or a company is to say the least vague. So again, in this day and age with ecommerce, there are a lot of technologies out there that could very, very easily connect those two dots and just speaking with some of the professionals that I worked with and still am working with, there’s a thirst. There is a massive thirst for connecting that solid line and showing companies who spend marketing dollars that solid line and that ROI, which is the promise of ecommerce, really.

 

Rana Nawas: (04:38)

I didn’t realize it was so difficult to determine impact of your marketing dollars. I thought the marketing departments of the big companies had this down.

 

Amira Rashad: (04:45)

Absolutely not, ask anybody. I mean, there’s a famous saying and I’m not quite sure exactly who said it, was some advertising guru. I’m not sure if it was Ogilvy who said “I know that 50% of my marketing dollars are being wasted, I just don’t know which 50%.”

 

Rana Nawas: (04:59)

Oh, my God.

 

Amira Rashad: (05:00)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (05:02)

That’s crazy. All right. So what challenges have you faced in building this business? It solves two pain points for you? What were the new pain points, let’s say?

 

Amira Rashad: (05:11)

So the first step was actually convincing myself and sort of getting the blessings internally from my family that this is something I wanted to do because this is quite the journey. You kind of have a vague idea of what it’s like to start a business but it, you know, it ends up being really all consuming so to speak you. If you’re passionate about it, it’s a, in my case it was a third child and I had to really make sure that my family was aligned and that I was ready to take that plunge and once that was kind of achieved, the biggest challenge was convincing people of the concept. Convincing investors of the fact that not only that the opportunity existed, but that I was the one to actually make it happen. I was lucky enough to have had, you know, 25 years of experience under my belt. So I had that to kind of bank on but just being able to operate from scratch was actually something I have to prove to them because most of my career has been, had been spent in large corporations.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:18)

Big budgets.

 

Amira Rashad: (06:18)

Exactly. Big budgets, big resources. What have you. I actually had one of my investors sit me down early on and say, Amina, the Amira who works for facebook or for Yahoo could pick up the phone and speak to whoever she wants to speak to, but the Amira who was sitting with one employee and, and really nothing else is unlikely to get our phone calls answered. Are you comfortable with that? Can you actually operate? And I said, absolutely. When you’re passionate, when you know where this is going, when you have the vision, I’m more than happy to kind of build it brick by brick.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:52)

Sorry, Amira. You mentioned investors already. You’re only one or two years old, right? So when did you bring the investors in?

 

Amira Rashad: (06:59)

Before we even started.

 

Rana Nawas: (07:00)

Oh.

 

Amira Rashad: (07:01)

So actually before I quit my job we pitched the concept, did, you know, put together a top line business plan and the concept itself was not difficult to describe. Everybody has had an experience with grocery shopping. The real challenge was convincing people that technology can actually solve the problem and that you could actually develop technology in this part of the world. That was the part that the real Aha for most people. Really? Why don’t you just buy something and plug and play and you know, why, why develope from scratch? I’m sure there’s a solution out there and the answer is no, there isn’t and to actually have the gall to say there isn’t one, we’re building it, watch us, took a lot of guts and sleepless nights and, but you know, one or two angels believed and the way we did it was we raised money over three to four small consecutive rounds which allowed us to actually show the results of what we intended to do in short spurts. So whenever we went back to the well, so to speak, we had something to show for it.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:07)

You don’t have a technical background and this is really a tech company.

 

Amira Rashad: (08:12)

It is.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:12)

So how did you bring the right resources on?

 

Amira Rashad: (08:15)

I actually believe that every company is a tech company at this stage. Really anything and everything that we do or going to do is going to be addressed through technology. It’s just having a person with a business mindset who sees the real pain point and sees exactly where the technology fits or how it can help and at that point, you need a technical partner who can actually help with how that’s going to work. But where and why is the decision or is an assessment that is made by the businessperson upfront. So I got all the way up to the how part and at that point I had to have a technical cofounder, which I do right now. So my cofounder Yousef, our CTO has a master’s degree in machine learning and data science. He’s our guru and he’s the one who’s overseeing the tech buildup.

 

Rana Nawas: (09:10)

Yep. Sorry, I jumped in. I want to get back to the challenges you faced in building up, so please go on.

 

Amira Rashad: (09:16)

Yeah. So I guess I was luckier than most in terms of alining investors behind this venture, but there are a lot of skeptics throughout the journey. I mean, I had people say to my face, Amira, your husband is somewhat successful. He’s a banker, you know, do you really need to do this? Is this like a pet project for you? And, you know, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how insulted I was. They were not taking me seriously simply because any woman who, you know, starts a project necessarily has to be, you know, thinking of it as a pet project or not. That question would not have been asked had been a male founder, so to speak. There were also situations where you would walk into supplier meetings, you know, this tiny little startup. I would walk in either with a cofounder or an employee or what have you and the conversation would immediately be directed at the male colleague in the room, irrespective of who else was there and they would be genuinely surprised that I am the CEO. Now obviously, one has to, you know, very clearly bring value to the table and not be offended by all of this, especially since in many cases we were talking to very senior people at very large companies wanting them to actually do business with us while we were just this tiny little startup. So it was this interesting dance upfront, so to speak.

 

Rana Nawas: (10:41)

Well, you come from the corporate world you mentioned earlier and it seems to me that you had a really `cool job as the head of brand of Facebook for Middle East and North Africa. Why would you leave that? That was a big decision, no?

 

Amira Rashad: (10:53)

It was a very big decision. So facebook is a fantastic company to work for. I genuinely enjoyed every minute and more importantly, I learned something new every minute, which is saying a lot actually for the stage of my career, right? The thing is though, facebook was so successful, still is. It doesn’t really need Amira, right? So Amira will be successful at Facebook, but she’s not going to make a dent. She’s not going to be someone who actually changes the course of Facebook’s success. In fact, Facebook is such a well oiled machine that, you know, I think it’s very difficult for any one person to actually make a difference, so to speak. While at BulkWhiz I was building my own thing. I got to shape a culture. I get to, you know, employ people and train them. I get to show people new things and new ways of doing things. It was just my way of trying to create something different and be creative in my own way, I guess, and that’s why I’m passionate about it.

 

Rana Nawas: (11:54)

And we just talked about Facebook, but your corporate career spans, you know, tech, management, consulting, finance, FMCG, and advertising. I would like to come back to a point you made earlier about the gender issue. Across all these industries, where did you feel there was the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:13)

Consulting, I would have to say.

 

Rana Nawas: (12:16)

Oh, that’s interesting because people think tech and actually my bias is that that’s actually not true. So I’m curious, why would you say consulting had the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:26)

I think nowhere is there, have I seen a focus on the actual individual or the employee as much as consulting because the saying is “your assets walk out the door every day.” That you really have no other assets and consulting except the individuals. So there’s a great deal of care and interest that is taken by the firms to make sure that the environment is conducive, that you have the right people walking through the door every day, you know, their needs are being met and so I don’t know that I’ve had conversations about my career and interest anywhere more than in consulting. Actually, it’s interesting because consulting happened to be in my career at a time where I was starting a family and you know how consultants are. They’re on the road for four out of five days a week and the general thinking was that this was going to be extremely challenging and I made a point of actually taking this head on in the sense that I was not going to shy away from starting a family. I was not going to delay it. I was actually going to do it then and I was going to, you know, almost test the firm on what they were planning to do to support me and they were extremely supportive and I’ll give you a couple of examples if we have the time.

 

Rana Nawas: (13:39)

Please.

 

Amira Rashad: (13:39)

So basically I was pregnant with our first son about a year into my consulting career. I was just an associate and I made it a point to actually go through all the travel that I needed to do up until the seventh month. I traveled regularly. There was absolutely no issues whatsoever and then from that point onwards, I planned or I worked with my mentors and the partner who was sort of guiding my career to plan for a period pre and post my maternity leave in terms of ensuring that I was getting not just the leftover projects, but the actual projects I wanted to work on and they were all grounded in Manhattan where I was living at the time. So I was working in the communications media and technology group of the firm. They actually lined up a number of projects, all of which were in New York City, various challenges, different types of work and I didn’t feel for a moment that my career was being sidelined or I was just being accommodated or what have you. I was really seriously working very hard but I didn’t have to travel. During the time that I was actually in the office, there were two stints in those two years where I actually was on internal company projects. So working, for example to build an advisory board for the firm and what have you. I noticed that it was actually the first assignment was building the advisory board and I noticed that there was no, I was nursing at the time, there was no nursing room in the office. We’re smack in the middle of Manhattan on Park Avenue and there was nowhere for me to go, so all I did was I walked into the partner’s office and said, you have two choices. I either spend the day here and you provide a nursing room or I go home. It’s as simple as that and within a week they had retrofitted a setup and there was a nursing room in the office, you know. So in many ways I think the consulting environment, in my experience, the incentive to make sure that, you know, it’s gender friendly.

 

Rana Nawas: (15:38)

Yeah. Well I have two thoughts on consulting. One is the pay is also fixed by rank, so consultants, senior consultant associate. So actually I think there’s very little pay gap, gender pay gap. The normal one that you find in firms, you won’t find that because it’s fixed if you’re an analyst associate, etc. So that’s one sort of pro, again, for consulting. The flip side is a lot of the consultancies are really struggling to retain women at senior levels and they’re calling me, you know, I’m working with some of them now to figure out why their women aren’t making it to partner and so I wonder, you know, you had a great experience. So why did you leave?

 

Amira Rashad: (16:18)

So I actually left because I started, it was my first venture into entrepreneurial world. I started my own consulting firm and I focused on partnerships, you know, basically marrying a bigger companies with smaller, more innovative companies to launch new lines and so on. So I just found my own kind of niche and I decided to do that. You’re right. I actually didn’t stay in a large consulting firm environment long enough to kind of hit any ceiling, but at my level it was, I felt very fortunate.

 

Rana Nawas: (16:52)

Great. So let’s go back to the question about your corporate career spanning all these different industries. In which industry did you feel the least gender parity? I’m curious.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:04)

I think it was in consumer products. So I started very early on with a consumer products company in this region. I was the only female executive in the entire region. I was very junior, but I was the only one. So there was a lot of, let’s just say, you know how it is in a professional environment there’s a need to bond. There’s a need to be one of

 

Rana Nawas: (17:27)

One of the guys, you need to network.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:30)

Exactly and in many ways than one that kind of shaped my professional development because I decided to mimic what I saw as successful behavior or behavior that lead to success, which was predominantly male. I developed a very loud, aggressive approach and that got me to be heard and it’s still in many ways still stays with me. I’ve realized as you know, as I moved to different environments and so on, that there are so many different things that women can bring to the table, so many different ways that they could actually express themselves and be recognized and so on that I’m still learning right now. Learning both to implement myself but also to recognize and appreciate in others, so, you know, that that soft voice at the back of the room might really be the most valuable one and as the leader in the room or the manager in the room or what have you, you really need to be cognizant of what everybody brings to the table. I didn’t start out that way and it took a lot of development for me to get to that point.

 

Rana Nawas: (18:33)

What specific challenges have you seen that women face in getting to leadership positions?

 

Amira Rashad: (18:42)

I actually think that, and I don’t want to generalize, but courtesy bias is a very big one. Women really care about not upsetting people or being liked or coming across as being positive, comforting, happy, friendly, whatever it is and in many cases, I think we curtail our own opportunities without anybody actually getting in the way, so to speak. So just learning that what you’re bringing to the, knowing our own self worth. Knowing that you’re bringing value to the table. Nobody’s doing you a favor and that you will learn to A) identify the value you’re bringing but also having, being very comfortable having others, selling it to others basically. Because in many cases people who succeed or move sort of up the ladder so to speak, are very comfortable selling the value that they bring to the table. Now obviously, there are quote on quote imposters who don’t have the value and yet they sell, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people being very comfortable knowing their worth and knowing what they bring to the table and not being shy about actually letting others know that.

 

Rana Nawas: (19:46)

Yeah and Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgason in their book “How Women Rise: The 12 Habits Holding Women Back in the Workplace” this is one of them. That the lack of self promoting your value, definitely. Alright. We’ve talked about the women. You know, know your worth and promote it so that the people who matter know. What about at a corporate level? Because, I mean, my personal theory is that we keep putting the burden on the woman. When, you know, I mean this poor women. Lean in, get a mentor, get a sponsor, know your worth, self promote. All of this, but I feel like, and I’d love your opinion on this, my own view is that the corporate world is designed in a way that should a woman stand up, she’ll be penalized for it.

 

Amira Rashad: (20:32)

I actually think that because, like I said earlier, success is designed and identified primarily through a male developed yardstick. It is almost as if women are set up to fail because, like I said, if you know, if you don’t have that aggressive approach or if you don’t have that loud voice or or whatever it is, you’re immediately deemed lesser than. I think we’ve also, corporate cultures have been in general have been conditioned or developed to focus on the male needs, so to speak. So the fact that he doesn’t have to go home and work on homework. He does not have to, you know, accommodate picking the kids up from school and so on. So it has almost become a liability to have a life because somebody else was doing it on his behalf. So when someone actually becomes, comes out as real. Comes out as I actually have a life, that is not seen as something that is conducive of success, so to speak. So I think the sooner that corporate cultures are kind of tailored to see human beings in a 360 view. The fact that we all have other lives, whatever it is. Doesn’t have to be kids. It could be parents, it could be whatever. It could be the sport that you want to play, whatever it is, a healthy well rounded individual does other things and the sooner the culture A) identifies that as being healthy and B) accommodates for it, the more we’re going to have other success stories or other scenarios from the old male scenario be appreciated, women being the primary case.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:28)

Alright, let’s move back to entrepreneurship if we could. What advice do you have for people who want to set up their own business?

 

Amira Rashad: (22:35)

Take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:37)

No matter what.

 

Amira Rashad: (22:38)

Just take the plunge. You will never know. You will never know what it’s like nor how deep that pool is, nor how cold it is or whatever it is. Just take the plunge. Fail fast if you have to fail and understand the learnings if you’re going to succeed. Just do it. There is no other way around it.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:59)

And is it the same advice you’d give to a 25 year old that you’d give to a 45 year old?

 

Amira Rashad: (23:04)

Yes, it would be. It just depends on what kind of plunge it is. I’m not necessarily thinking that a 40 year old is any more or less prepared. Arguably he or she have more experience but it might be the wrong kind of experience. Right? So just assess what you’re bringing to the table. Identify the problem. Match those two things and take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (23:27)

Alright. You take the plunge. You’re working your butt off. It’s not working out. How do you know when to stop? Because there’s all these mixed messages on social media. Just keep going. The struggle is great. You know, all of this. When do you know that, you know, you’ve got to stop now. It’s just not gonna work out.

 

Amira Rashad: (23:46)

There’s a very famous fast moving consumer goods company, I’m not gonna mention the name, they have this term that they use called the “moment of truth.” The moment of truth is essentially when a consumer interacts with their product on the shelf or at the home or what have you, everything, everything in a startup is conditional upon one thing and that is the need for your product and your ability to meet it. So be it a consumer, be it a business or whatever it is. If you can identify that fit, how you sold it, when you sold it, with whom and for how much is all something you can work on, you can pivot around whatever it is, but if you’re unable to create that basic need fit then I think you should quit, right? If it’s not there, you can be too early or you could be too late. But if the need isn’t there, then, you know, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:48)

So you were 25 years in corporate before you started your business, right?

 

Amira Rashad: (24:53)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:54)

So entrepreneurs don’t have to be fresh grads.

 

Amira Rashad: (24:59)

Not at all, actually that’s a myth. I think there were very recently several pieces of research have shown that the most successful entrepreneurs in sheer numbers, the ones who have had the biggest exits and so on, are on average in their forties because it, here’s the thing. It isn’t just a matter of work experience. As an entrepreneur, you’re really doing a couple of things A you’re identifying a problem and you’re trying to rally resources to address that problem or that need A) you’re talking to investors, you’re trying to convince them. So there’s a lot of communication skills there. There’s a lot of ability to persuade and so on but then once that happens, every other interaction you’re having is about convincing someone to do something. You’re an evangelist, essentially. Lead employees, be it suppliers, customers, whatever it is, right? So you learn a lot of that along the way in whatever experience you’ve had. Be the successful experiences or failed experiences, the likelihood that you’ve gone through this and you’re able to convince others to join you or see your vision is somewhat higher if you’re older but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t younger entrepreneurs who are very good at it.

 

Rana Nawas: (26:18)

It sounds like the corporate world really prepared you for entrepreneurship. You mentioned earlier the communication skills and your influencing skills. What else did you learn from the corporate world that applies?

 

Amira Rashad: (26:30)

Oh, a lot of the just the scaffoldIng aspects of building a business. So the processes, the skill sets of planning, learning how to manage people and resources, financials. So I mean, you name it. There’s just every aspect of running a business comes in handy when you’re running your own, obviously. What the corporate world does not prepare you for though is the risk taking aspect of this. Essentially you’re at the driver’s seat 24/7 and you can’t afford to nod at any moment, which is definitely not the case in the corporate world.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:07)

Now you got an MBA at harvard. Why did you decide to go for an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:12)

The MBA, by the way, was my second masters degree. I had, I was lucky enough to actually be the recipient of a Japanese scholarship from the UK foreign office to study in Manchester, a master of science in marketing.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:27)

Is that when you did your skydiving?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:32)

Yes, that is when I did my skydiving. That prepared me to be a solid marketer. Gave me a very strong platform to build a career in marketing, which I did, but I very quickly realized that I really enjoy sort of the general management aspect of things. So I need a very, I needed to go somewhere to learn about all of the other aspects of management, be it finance based strategy, be it people management, what have you. But I had already been working for five, six years and the last thing I wanted to do was go and sit in a lecture hall, just didn’t have the bandwidth for that and harvard just happened to have the exact program that I was looking for. You don’t, you’re not actually taught anything in a harvard class, a harvard MBA class. You do all of your learning outside of the class, what you do in the class is you actually discuss real life company problems. You know, the professor would walk in and he would say something like, how did these guys make money or where they go wrong or why did this guy end up in jail or whatever it is and they are real issues that you have to grapple with and there is no clean cut, nice answer, just like there isn’t in life. So I learned quite a bit from the actual content itself. That was a huge draw. The other huge draw is actually the people sitting next to you in class. So, just sitting next to me in class was a brain surgeon who literally as a job took bullets out of the heads of little children in east LA who are being shot and she was in that classroom because she wanted to use her medical expertise to get into biotech. Sitting on the other side of me in that class was an air force pilot who, when I told him I grew up in Kuwait, he said, yeah, I used to fly over Kuwait everyday during the gulf war and here’s what I did. You just, you get a completely different perspective on life and you get, when you’re discussing business problems, you get a 360 perspective on be it from a business perspective, from a science perspective, a government perspective, what have you and that was just invaluable to me.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:38)

So you’d do it again if you had the choice.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:41)

In a flash. In fact, I was back at campus very recently discussing our own BulkWhiz case.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:48)

I saw, congratulations. I think they’ve written a case about it.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:51)

They have, yes. About a female entrepreneur in the Middle East negotiating to start her startup with various stakeholders.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:59)

Oh wow. I’ll have to put a link to that in our show notes.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:02)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:02)

Great. Would you advise everyone to get an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:05)

No, absolutely not. It really depends on what you’re looking for. In my case, I wanted that kind of rounded experience. I also had an ulterior motive. I wanted to leave the region. I was, most of my career was in the Middle East up until that point and I needed a platform from which to launch a different career path in North America and that’s exactly what it helped me do.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:26)

Well, if you could go back in time, what is one thing you would do differently, Amira?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:31)

Oh, there are a lot of things.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:33)

Oh, wow. Normally I get people who say nothing, I don’t do regret.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:40)

I know. I mean, I don’t dwell over it but I’m very cognizant of what I would’ve done better because how else am I going to get better, right? So one thing I would have definitely done differently is removed the fake barriers or partitions between my personal professional lives. I, like I said, I was conditioned to think of my professional life as being, you know, in this silo and my personal life is being in a different world altogether and to separate them because, if God forbid they, you know, were mixed in any way I would suffer. I would either be perceived as unprofessional in the professional setting or I would be perceived as, you know, the workaholic in the personal side of things. I’ve realized that these two things have so many things in common and that creating these false partitions hurts me. It makes me more stressed and prevents the flow of learnings between those two environments. So that is one of the biggest things that I’ve learned. What is a question you wish people would ask you more often?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:49)

I wish people would ask me what makes me happy because, you know, trying to guess it was a waste of time. Just ask.

 

Rana Nawas: (31:56)

I love that. What does make you happy?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:58)

Helping people. Seeing the smile on people’s faces because you actually did something differently. That’s probably the biggest thing that makes me happy.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:06)

Wonderful. Now you’ve run your business. You have two kids. How do you switch off when you feel overwhelmed?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:13)

A couple of different ways. One is I go get a massage. Two is I read, I love reading and it’s mostly, you’d be surprised, just complete fiction. I escaped through fiction.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:25)

Okay, well then the obvious question is, what’s your favorite book?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:29)

I read a book recently called the “History of Love.” There is no “the” it’s “History of Love” and the book has absolutely nothing to do with love at all. It is actually a pretty interesting book reflecting about the story of world war two survivors as they move, as they immigrate to the US and you realize down the road, I’m not going to burn it for you, but you realize that what you’re reading isn’t really what you think you’re reading and the connections between people and how they develop. There was a lot of thought that was put in developing the characters and getting you to go through that journey with them. I write myself as well, so I really appreciated sort of the skill in that was involved in that.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:16)

Oh wow. Do you have a book that you’re writing?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:19)

No, no, no. I’m not writing a book.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:21)

Creative writing hobby.

 

Amira Rashad: (33:23)

Yeah, I just enjoy it.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:24)

Lovely. Alright and if you had a billboard and you could put a message on it the whole world would see, what would it say?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:33)

The classic biblical saying. I’m not sure if I’m saying it correctly or not but basically “do unto others as you would have others do to you” basically. So just if everybody thought for a second how they treat others and just reflected on how they would be treated themselves, life would be so much easier. We spend a lot of time trying to bridge that gap. The double standards, Iguess.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:03)

Yeah. I love that. Thank you, Amira. Where can listeners find you?

 

Amira Rashad: (34:07)

So I am on instagram @amira_s_rashad. I am also on twitter @amira123.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:19)

Thank you so much. This has been such a diverse and interesting chat. I really appreciate it.

 

Amira Rashad: (34:24)

Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:28)

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I’d love to hear from you so please head over to WhenWomenWinPodcast.com to give feedback. While you’re there, you can find all episodes and show notes and sign up for our monthly newsletter. Wherever you’re listening right now, do remember to hit the subscribe button to be notified of future episodes and please write a review when you can to let others know what to expect. Thanks and have a great day.

 

 Rana Nawas: (00:00)

Hello ladies and gentlemen. My guest on today’s show is the founder and CEO of the first grocery commerce platform in the Middle East, BulkWhiz. As a working mom, Amira Rashad felt like there were not enough hours in the day and grocery shopping was the last way she wanted to spend her precious time. So she built this online platform to order your groceries in bulk. Prior to starting BulkWhiz, Amira had 25 years experience in leadership, strategy, operations, and marketing across a variety of sectors. Having worked at Yahoo, Pepsico and Booz Allen. Most recently, she was the head of brand for Facebook Middle East North Africa. Amira is a graduate of Harvard Business School and sits on the board of TechWadi in Silicon Valley. We discussed Amira’s diverse experiences in the corporate world and how they prepared her for entrepreneurship. She busted a myth about the average age of entrepreneurs. We talked about why Amira decided to leave a cool, stable corporate job to create BulkWhiz and the hurdles she faced in doing so. We got her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and an explanation of the phrase “the moment of truth.” We discussed various challenges women face in the workplace and the expectations placed on all of us. Finally, we touched on Amira’s creative writing and what makes her happy. So let’s get into it. Amira, it’s so great to have you on When Women Win. Thank you so much for taking the time.

 

Amira Rashad: (01:36)

Absolute pleasure to be here.

 

Rana Nawas: (01:38)

So you are a skydiving instructor?

 

Amira Rashad: (01:40)

I am. I actually became one purely by chance. As a student in the UK, I wanted to make some money on the side. So I got a job working at a cafeteria at an air force base in North Yorkshire where students went to learn how to skydive. Thing is the weather in North Yorkshire isn’t exactly very conducive for first time skydivers. So a lot of people ended up waiting quite a while and that gave me the opportunity to A) get to know the people, get to know the instructors, but also gave me some time to actually learn how to pack shoots. Learned that a bit. Watched a lot of the courses that were being taught, learned quite a bit. Took the course myself and, you know, the next thing I knew I was being trained to be an instructor and I am one today.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:25)

That’s insane. You went to make some money in the cafeteria and walked out a skydiving instructor.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:30)

Absolutely, yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:31)

All right. Let’s talk about BulkWhiz.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:35)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:35)

Why did you start it?

 

Amira Rashad: (02:36)

So I actually started BulkWhiz because of two pain points, one on the personal side and one on the professional side. So on the personal side, very simply, I am a mom. I basically bear the responsibility of grocery shopping for my home, for my family and I just woke up one day thinking, why am I doing the exact same thing that my mom had done and her mom had done? Really, there hasn’t been a lot of progress on that front. You still have to drive to the store, you still have to, you know, fight for a parking spot. You still have to, you know, stand in those lines and what have you and you know, in 2016/17, whenever it is that we started thinking about this, there really a lot of technology out there that I was sure was going to enable us to do this in an easier, more convenient manner. So I just thought, you know what, let’s do something about it. I’m sick and tired of wasting my weekends in grocery shopping lines. So that’s on the professional, sorry on the personal side. On the professional side, I was working, I’ve been in sort of a consumer marketing type of a role more or less for more than 30 years and I have yet to speak to any professional who is able to show you a solid line between dollar in from a marketing perspective and dollar out in terms of returns for brand or a company. Everything is kind of quote on quote extrapolated. You assume, you run research, you hope, and so on. So that purchase funnel, so to speak, from awareness to actual purchase or sale for a brand or a company is to say the least vague. So again, in this day and age with ecommerce, there are a lot of technologies out there that could very, very easily connect those two dots and just speaking with some of the professionals that I worked with and still am working with, there’s a thirst. There is a massive thirst for connecting that solid line and showing companies who spend marketing dollars that solid line and that ROI, which is the promise of ecommerce, really.

 

Rana Nawas: (04:38)

I didn’t realize it was so difficult to determine impact of your marketing dollars. I thought the marketing departments of the big companies had this down.

 

Amira Rashad: (04:45)

Absolutely not, ask anybody. I mean, there’s a famous saying and I’m not quite sure exactly who said it, was some advertising guru. I’m not sure if it was Ogilvy who said “I know that 50% of my marketing dollars are being wasted, I just don’t know which 50%.”

 

Rana Nawas: (04:59)

Oh, my God.

 

Amira Rashad: (05:00)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (05:02)

That’s crazy. All right. So what challenges have you faced in building this business? It solves two pain points for you? What were the new pain points, let’s say?

 

Amira Rashad: (05:11)

So the first step was actually convincing myself and sort of getting the blessings internally from my family that this is something I wanted to do because this is quite the journey. You kind of have a vague idea of what it’s like to start a business but it, you know, it ends up being really all consuming so to speak you. If you’re passionate about it, it’s a, in my case it was a third child and I had to really make sure that my family was aligned and that I was ready to take that plunge and once that was kind of achieved, the biggest challenge was convincing people of the concept. Convincing investors of the fact that not only that the opportunity existed, but that I was the one to actually make it happen. I was lucky enough to have had, you know, 25 years of experience under my belt. So I had that to kind of bank on but just being able to operate from scratch was actually something I have to prove to them because most of my career has been, had been spent in large corporations.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:18)

Big budgets.

 

Amira Rashad: (06:18)

Exactly. Big budgets, big resources. What have you. I actually had one of my investors sit me down early on and say, Amina, the Amira who works for facebook or for Yahoo could pick up the phone and speak to whoever she wants to speak to, but the Amira who was sitting with one employee and, and really nothing else is unlikely to get our phone calls answered. Are you comfortable with that? Can you actually operate? And I said, absolutely. When you’re passionate, when you know where this is going, when you have the vision, I’m more than happy to kind of build it brick by brick.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:52)

Sorry, Amira. You mentioned investors already. You’re only one or two years old, right? So when did you bring the investors in?

 

Amira Rashad: (06:59)

Before we even started.

 

Rana Nawas: (07:00)

Oh.

 

Amira Rashad: (07:01)

So actually before I quit my job we pitched the concept, did, you know, put together a top line business plan and the concept itself was not difficult to describe. Everybody has had an experience with grocery shopping. The real challenge was convincing people that technology can actually solve the problem and that you could actually develop technology in this part of the world. That was the part that the real Aha for most people. Really? Why don’t you just buy something and plug and play and you know, why, why develope from scratch? I’m sure there’s a solution out there and the answer is no, there isn’t and to actually have the gall to say there isn’t one, we’re building it, watch us, took a lot of guts and sleepless nights and, but you know, one or two angels believed and the way we did it was we raised money over three to four small consecutive rounds which allowed us to actually show the results of what we intended to do in short spurts. So whenever we went back to the well, so to speak, we had something to show for it.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:07)

You don’t have a technical background and this is really a tech company.

 

Amira Rashad: (08:12)

It is.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:12)

So how did you bring the right resources on?

 

Amira Rashad: (08:15)

I actually believe that every company is a tech company at this stage. Really anything and everything that we do or going to do is going to be addressed through technology. It’s just having a person with a business mindset who sees the real pain point and sees exactly where the technology fits or how it can help and at that point, you need a technical partner who can actually help with how that’s going to work. But where and why is the decision or is an assessment that is made by the businessperson upfront. So I got all the way up to the how part and at that point I had to have a technical cofounder, which I do right now. So my cofounder Yousef, our CTO has a master’s degree in machine learning and data science. He’s our guru and he’s the one who’s overseeing the tech buildup.

 

Rana Nawas: (09:10)

Yep. Sorry, I jumped in. I want to get back to the challenges you faced in building up, so please go on.

 

Amira Rashad: (09:16)

Yeah. So I guess I was luckier than most in terms of alining investors behind this venture, but there are a lot of skeptics throughout the journey. I mean, I had people say to my face, Amira, your husband is somewhat successful. He’s a banker, you know, do you really need to do this? Is this like a pet project for you? And, you know, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how insulted I was. They were not taking me seriously simply because any woman who, you know, starts a project necessarily has to be, you know, thinking of it as a pet project or not. That question would not have been asked had been a male founder, so to speak. There were also situations where you would walk into supplier meetings, you know, this tiny little startup. I would walk in either with a cofounder or an employee or what have you and the conversation would immediately be directed at the male colleague in the room, irrespective of who else was there and they would be genuinely surprised that I am the CEO. Now obviously, one has to, you know, very clearly bring value to the table and not be offended by all of this, especially since in many cases we were talking to very senior people at very large companies wanting them to actually do business with us while we were just this tiny little startup. So it was this interesting dance upfront, so to speak.

 

Rana Nawas: (10:41)

Well, you come from the corporate world you mentioned earlier and it seems to me that you had a really `cool job as the head of brand of Facebook for Middle East and North Africa. Why would you leave that? That was a big decision, no?

 

Amira Rashad: (10:53)

It was a very big decision. So facebook is a fantastic company to work for. I genuinely enjoyed every minute and more importantly, I learned something new every minute, which is saying a lot actually for the stage of my career, right? The thing is though, facebook was so successful, still is. It doesn’t really need Amira, right? So Amira will be successful at Facebook, but she’s not going to make a dent. She’s not going to be someone who actually changes the course of Facebook’s success. In fact, Facebook is such a well oiled machine that, you know, I think it’s very difficult for any one person to actually make a difference, so to speak. While at BulkWhiz I was building my own thing. I got to shape a culture. I get to, you know, employ people and train them. I get to show people new things and new ways of doing things. It was just my way of trying to create something different and be creative in my own way, I guess, and that’s why I’m passionate about it.

 

Rana Nawas: (11:54)

And we just talked about Facebook, but your corporate career spans, you know, tech, management, consulting, finance, FMCG, and advertising. I would like to come back to a point you made earlier about the gender issue. Across all these industries, where did you feel there was the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:13)

Consulting, I would have to say.

 

Rana Nawas: (12:16)

Oh, that’s interesting because people think tech and actually my bias is that that’s actually not true. So I’m curious, why would you say consulting had the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:26)

I think nowhere is there, have I seen a focus on the actual individual or the employee as much as consulting because the saying is “your assets walk out the door every day.” That you really have no other assets and consulting except the individuals. So there’s a great deal of care and interest that is taken by the firms to make sure that the environment is conducive, that you have the right people walking through the door every day, you know, their needs are being met and so I don’t know that I’ve had conversations about my career and interest anywhere more than in consulting. Actually, it’s interesting because consulting happened to be in my career at a time where I was starting a family and you know how consultants are. They’re on the road for four out of five days a week and the general thinking was that this was going to be extremely challenging and I made a point of actually taking this head on in the sense that I was not going to shy away from starting a family. I was not going to delay it. I was actually going to do it then and I was going to, you know, almost test the firm on what they were planning to do to support me and they were extremely supportive and I’ll give you a couple of examples if we have the time.

 

Rana Nawas: (13:39)

Please.

 

Amira Rashad: (13:39)

So basically I was pregnant with our first son about a year into my consulting career. I was just an associate and I made it a point to actually go through all the travel that I needed to do up until the seventh month. I traveled regularly. There was absolutely no issues whatsoever and then from that point onwards, I planned or I worked with my mentors and the partner who was sort of guiding my career to plan for a period pre and post my maternity leave in terms of ensuring that I was getting not just the leftover projects, but the actual projects I wanted to work on and they were all grounded in Manhattan where I was living at the time. So I was working in the communications media and technology group of the firm. They actually lined up a number of projects, all of which were in New York City, various challenges, different types of work and I didn’t feel for a moment that my career was being sidelined or I was just being accommodated or what have you. I was really seriously working very hard but I didn’t have to travel. During the time that I was actually in the office, there were two stints in those two years where I actually was on internal company projects. So working, for example to build an advisory board for the firm and what have you. I noticed that it was actually the first assignment was building the advisory board and I noticed that there was no, I was nursing at the time, there was no nursing room in the office. We’re smack in the middle of Manhattan on Park Avenue and there was nowhere for me to go, so all I did was I walked into the partner’s office and said, you have two choices. I either spend the day here and you provide a nursing room or I go home. It’s as simple as that and within a week they had retrofitted a setup and there was a nursing room in the office, you know. So in many ways I think the consulting environment, in my experience, the incentive to make sure that, you know, it’s gender friendly.

 

Rana Nawas: (15:38)

Yeah. Well I have two thoughts on consulting. One is the pay is also fixed by rank, so consultants, senior consultant associate. So actually I think there’s very little pay gap, gender pay gap. The normal one that you find in firms, you won’t find that because it’s fixed if you’re an analyst associate, etc. So that’s one sort of pro, again, for consulting. The flip side is a lot of the consultancies are really struggling to retain women at senior levels and they’re calling me, you know, I’m working with some of them now to figure out why their women aren’t making it to partner and so I wonder, you know, you had a great experience. So why did you leave?

 

Amira Rashad: (16:18)

So I actually left because I started, it was my first venture into entrepreneurial world. I started my own consulting firm and I focused on partnerships, you know, basically marrying a bigger companies with smaller, more innovative companies to launch new lines and so on. So I just found my own kind of niche and I decided to do that. You’re right. I actually didn’t stay in a large consulting firm environment long enough to kind of hit any ceiling, but at my level it was, I felt very fortunate.

 

Rana Nawas: (16:52)

Great. So let’s go back to the question about your corporate career spanning all these different industries. In which industry did you feel the least gender parity? I’m curious.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:04)

I think it was in consumer products. So I started very early on with a consumer products company in this region. I was the only female executive in the entire region. I was very junior, but I was the only one. So there was a lot of, let’s just say, you know how it is in a professional environment there’s a need to bond. There’s a need to be one of

 

Rana Nawas: (17:27)

One of the guys, you need to network.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:30)

Exactly and in many ways than one that kind of shaped my professional development because I decided to mimic what I saw as successful behavior or behavior that lead to success, which was predominantly male. I developed a very loud, aggressive approach and that got me to be heard and it’s still in many ways still stays with me. I’ve realized as you know, as I moved to different environments and so on, that there are so many different things that women can bring to the table, so many different ways that they could actually express themselves and be recognized and so on that I’m still learning right now. Learning both to implement myself but also to recognize and appreciate in others, so, you know, that that soft voice at the back of the room might really be the most valuable one and as the leader in the room or the manager in the room or what have you, you really need to be cognizant of what everybody brings to the table. I didn’t start out that way and it took a lot of development for me to get to that point.

 

Rana Nawas: (18:33)

What specific challenges have you seen that women face in getting to leadership positions?

 

Amira Rashad: (18:42)

I actually think that, and I don’t want to generalize, but courtesy bias is a very big one. Women really care about not upsetting people or being liked or coming across as being positive, comforting, happy, friendly, whatever it is and in many cases, I think we curtail our own opportunities without anybody actually getting in the way, so to speak. So just learning that what you’re bringing to the, knowing our own self worth. Knowing that you’re bringing value to the table. Nobody’s doing you a favor and that you will learn to A) identify the value you’re bringing but also having, being very comfortable having others, selling it to others basically. Because in many cases people who succeed or move sort of up the ladder so to speak, are very comfortable selling the value that they bring to the table. Now obviously, there are quote on quote imposters who don’t have the value and yet they sell, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people being very comfortable knowing their worth and knowing what they bring to the table and not being shy about actually letting others know that.

 

Rana Nawas: (19:46)

Yeah and Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgason in their book “How Women Rise: The 12 Habits Holding Women Back in the Workplace” this is one of them. That the lack of self promoting your value, definitely. Alright. We’ve talked about the women. You know, know your worth and promote it so that the people who matter know. What about at a corporate level? Because, I mean, my personal theory is that we keep putting the burden on the woman. When, you know, I mean this poor women. Lean in, get a mentor, get a sponsor, know your worth, self promote. All of this, but I feel like, and I’d love your opinion on this, my own view is that the corporate world is designed in a way that should a woman stand up, she’ll be penalized for it.

 

Amira Rashad: (20:32)

I actually think that because, like I said earlier, success is designed and identified primarily through a male developed yardstick. It is almost as if women are set up to fail because, like I said, if you know, if you don’t have that aggressive approach or if you don’t have that loud voice or or whatever it is, you’re immediately deemed lesser than. I think we’ve also, corporate cultures have been in general have been conditioned or developed to focus on the male needs, so to speak. So the fact that he doesn’t have to go home and work on homework. He does not have to, you know, accommodate picking the kids up from school and so on. So it has almost become a liability to have a life because somebody else was doing it on his behalf. So when someone actually becomes, comes out as real. Comes out as I actually have a life, that is not seen as something that is conducive of success, so to speak. So I think the sooner that corporate cultures are kind of tailored to see human beings in a 360 view. The fact that we all have other lives, whatever it is. Doesn’t have to be kids. It could be parents, it could be whatever. It could be the sport that you want to play, whatever it is, a healthy well rounded individual does other things and the sooner the culture A) identifies that as being healthy and B) accommodates for it, the more we’re going to have other success stories or other scenarios from the old male scenario be appreciated, women being the primary case.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:28)

Alright, let’s move back to entrepreneurship if we could. What advice do you have for people who want to set up their own business?

 

Amira Rashad: (22:35)

Take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:37)

No matter what.

 

Amira Rashad: (22:38)

Just take the plunge. You will never know. You will never know what it’s like nor how deep that pool is, nor how cold it is or whatever it is. Just take the plunge. Fail fast if you have to fail and understand the learnings if you’re going to succeed. Just do it. There is no other way around it.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:59)

And is it the same advice you’d give to a 25 year old that you’d give to a 45 year old?

 

Amira Rashad: (23:04)

Yes, it would be. It just depends on what kind of plunge it is. I’m not necessarily thinking that a 40 year old is any more or less prepared. Arguably he or she have more experience but it might be the wrong kind of experience. Right? So just assess what you’re bringing to the table. Identify the problem. Match those two things and take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (23:27)

Alright. You take the plunge. You’re working your butt off. It’s not working out. How do you know when to stop? Because there’s all these mixed messages on social media. Just keep going. The struggle is great. You know, all of this. When do you know that, you know, you’ve got to stop now. It’s just not gonna work out.

 

Amira Rashad: (23:46)

There’s a very famous fast moving consumer goods company, I’m not gonna mention the name, they have this term that they use called the “moment of truth.” The moment of truth is essentially when a consumer interacts with their product on the shelf or at the home or what have you, everything, everything in a startup is conditional upon one thing and that is the need for your product and your ability to meet it. So be it a consumer, be it a business or whatever it is. If you can identify that fit, how you sold it, when you sold it, with whom and for how much is all something you can work on, you can pivot around whatever it is, but if you’re unable to create that basic need fit then I think you should quit, right? If it’s not there, you can be too early or you could be too late. But if the need isn’t there, then, you know, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:48)

So you were 25 years in corporate before you started your business, right?

 

Amira Rashad: (24:53)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:54)

So entrepreneurs don’t have to be fresh grads.

 

Amira Rashad: (24:59)

Not at all, actually that’s a myth. I think there were very recently several pieces of research have shown that the most successful entrepreneurs in sheer numbers, the ones who have had the biggest exits and so on, are on average in their forties because it, here’s the thing. It isn’t just a matter of work experience. As an entrepreneur, you’re really doing a couple of things A you’re identifying a problem and you’re trying to rally resources to address that problem or that need A) you’re talking to investors, you’re trying to convince them. So there’s a lot of communication skills there. There’s a lot of ability to persuade and so on but then once that happens, every other interaction you’re having is about convincing someone to do something. You’re an evangelist, essentially. Lead employees, be it suppliers, customers, whatever it is, right? So you learn a lot of that along the way in whatever experience you’ve had. Be the successful experiences or failed experiences, the likelihood that you’ve gone through this and you’re able to convince others to join you or see your vision is somewhat higher if you’re older but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t younger entrepreneurs who are very good at it.

 

Rana Nawas: (26:18)

It sounds like the corporate world really prepared you for entrepreneurship. You mentioned earlier the communication skills and your influencing skills. What else did you learn from the corporate world that applies?

 

Amira Rashad: (26:30)

Oh, a lot of the just the scaffoldIng aspects of building a business. So the processes, the skill sets of planning, learning how to manage people and resources, financials. So I mean, you name it. There’s just every aspect of running a business comes in handy when you’re running your own, obviously. What the corporate world does not prepare you for though is the risk taking aspect of this. Essentially you’re at the driver’s seat 24/7 and you can’t afford to nod at any moment, which is definitely not the case in the corporate world.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:07)

Now you got an MBA at harvard. Why did you decide to go for an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:12)

The MBA, by the way, was my second masters degree. I had, I was lucky enough to actually be the recipient of a Japanese scholarship from the UK foreign office to study in Manchester, a master of science in marketing.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:27)

Is that when you did your skydiving?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:32)

Yes, that is when I did my skydiving. That prepared me to be a solid marketer. Gave me a very strong platform to build a career in marketing, which I did, but I very quickly realized that I really enjoy sort of the general management aspect of things. So I need a very, I needed to go somewhere to learn about all of the other aspects of management, be it finance based strategy, be it people management, what have you. But I had already been working for five, six years and the last thing I wanted to do was go and sit in a lecture hall, just didn’t have the bandwidth for that and harvard just happened to have the exact program that I was looking for. You don’t, you’re not actually taught anything in a harvard class, a harvard MBA class. You do all of your learning outside of the class, what you do in the class is you actually discuss real life company problems. You know, the professor would walk in and he would say something like, how did these guys make money or where they go wrong or why did this guy end up in jail or whatever it is and they are real issues that you have to grapple with and there is no clean cut, nice answer, just like there isn’t in life. So I learned quite a bit from the actual content itself. That was a huge draw. The other huge draw is actually the people sitting next to you in class. So, just sitting next to me in class was a brain surgeon who literally as a job took bullets out of the heads of little children in east LA who are being shot and she was in that classroom because she wanted to use her medical expertise to get into biotech. Sitting on the other side of me in that class was an air force pilot who, when I told him I grew up in Kuwait, he said, yeah, I used to fly over Kuwait everyday during the gulf war and here’s what I did. You just, you get a completely different perspective on life and you get, when you’re discussing business problems, you get a 360 perspective on be it from a business perspective, from a science perspective, a government perspective, what have you and that was just invaluable to me.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:38)

So you’d do it again if you had the choice.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:41)

In a flash. In fact, I was back at campus very recently discussing our own BulkWhiz case.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:48)

I saw, congratulations. I think they’ve written a case about it.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:51)

They have, yes. About a female entrepreneur in the Middle East negotiating to start her startup with various stakeholders.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:59)

Oh wow. I’ll have to put a link to that in our show notes.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:02)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:02)

Great. Would you advise everyone to get an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:05)

No, absolutely not. It really depends on what you’re looking for. In my case, I wanted that kind of rounded experience. I also had an ulterior motive. I wanted to leave the region. I was, most of my career was in the Middle East up until that point and I needed a platform from which to launch a different career path in North America and that’s exactly what it helped me do.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:26)

Well, if you could go back in time, what is one thing you would do differently, Amira?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:31)

Oh, there are a lot of things.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:33)

Oh, wow. Normally I get people who say nothing, I don’t do regret.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:40)

I know. I mean, I don’t dwell over it but I’m very cognizant of what I would’ve done better because how else am I going to get better, right? So one thing I would have definitely done differently is removed the fake barriers or partitions between my personal professional lives. I, like I said, I was conditioned to think of my professional life as being, you know, in this silo and my personal life is being in a different world altogether and to separate them because, if God forbid they, you know, were mixed in any way I would suffer. I would either be perceived as unprofessional in the professional setting or I would be perceived as, you know, the workaholic in the personal side of things. I’ve realized that these two things have so many things in common and that creating these false partitions hurts me. It makes me more stressed and prevents the flow of learnings between those two environments. So that is one of the biggest things that I’ve learned. What is a question you wish people would ask you more often?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:49)

I wish people would ask me what makes me happy because, you know, trying to guess it was a waste of time. Just ask.

 

Rana Nawas: (31:56)

I love that. What does make you happy?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:58)

Helping people. Seeing the smile on people’s faces because you actually did something differently. That’s probably the biggest thing that makes me happy.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:06)

Wonderful. Now you’ve run your business. You have two kids. How do you switch off when you feel overwhelmed?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:13)

A couple of different ways. One is I go get a massage. Two is I read, I love reading and it’s mostly, you’d be surprised, just complete fiction. I escaped through fiction.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:25)

Okay, well then the obvious question is, what’s your favorite book?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:29)

I read a book recently called the “History of Love.” There is no “the” it’s “History of Love” and the book has absolutely nothing to do with love at all. It is actually a pretty interesting book reflecting about the story of world war two survivors as they move, as they immigrate to the US and you realize down the road, I’m not going to burn it for you, but you realize that what you’re reading isn’t really what you think you’re reading and the connections between people and how they develop. There was a lot of thought that was put in developing the characters and getting you to go through that journey with them. I write myself as well, so I really appreciated sort of the skill in that was involved in that.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:16)

Oh wow. Do you have a book that you’re writing?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:19)

No, no, no. I’m not writing a book.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:21)

Creative writing hobby.

 

Amira Rashad: (33:23)

Yeah, I just enjoy it.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:24)

Lovely. Alright and if you had a billboard and you could put a message on it the whole world would see, what would it say?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:33)

The classic biblical saying. I’m not sure if I’m saying it correctly or not but basically “do unto others as you would have others do to you” basically. So just if everybody thought for a second how they treat others and just reflected on how they would be treated themselves, life would be so much easier. We spend a lot of time trying to bridge that gap. The double standards, Iguess.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:03)

Yeah. I love that. Thank you, Amira. Where can listeners find you?

 

Amira Rashad: (34:07)

So I am on instagram @amira_s_rashad. I am also on twitter @amira123.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:19)

Thank you so much. This has been such a diverse and interesting chat. I really appreciate it.

 Rana Nawas: (00:00)

Hello ladies and gentlemen. My guest on today’s show is the founder and CEO of the first grocery commerce platform in the Middle East, BulkWhiz. As a working mom, Amira Rashad felt like there were not enough hours in the day and grocery shopping was the last way she wanted to spend her precious time. So she built this online platform to order your groceries in bulk. Prior to starting BulkWhiz, Amira had 25 years experience in leadership, strategy, operations, and marketing across a variety of sectors. Having worked at Yahoo, Pepsico and Booz Allen. Most recently, she was the head of brand for Facebook Middle East North Africa. Amira is a graduate of Harvard Business School and sits on the board of TechWadi in Silicon Valley. We discussed Amira’s diverse experiences in the corporate world and how they prepared her for entrepreneurship. She busted a myth about the average age of entrepreneurs. We talked about why Amira decided to leave a cool, stable corporate job to create BulkWhiz and the hurdles she faced in doing so. We got her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and an explanation of the phrase “the moment of truth.” We discussed various challenges women face in the workplace and the expectations placed on all of us. Finally, we touched on Amira’s creative writing and what makes her happy. So let’s get into it. Amira, it’s so great to have you on When Women Win. Thank you so much for taking the time.

 

Amira Rashad: (01:36)

Absolute pleasure to be here.

 

Rana Nawas: (01:38)

So you are a skydiving instructor?

 

Amira Rashad: (01:40)

I am. I actually became one purely by chance. As a student in the UK, I wanted to make some money on the side. So I got a job working at a cafeteria at an air force base in North Yorkshire where students went to learn how to skydive. Thing is the weather in North Yorkshire isn’t exactly very conducive for first time skydivers. So a lot of people ended up waiting quite a while and that gave me the opportunity to A) get to know the people, get to know the instructors, but also gave me some time to actually learn how to pack shoots. Learned that a bit. Watched a lot of the courses that were being taught, learned quite a bit. Took the course myself and, you know, the next thing I knew I was being trained to be an instructor and I am one today.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:25)

That’s insane. You went to make some money in the cafeteria and walked out a skydiving instructor.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:30)

Absolutely, yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:31)

All right. Let’s talk about BulkWhiz.

 

Amira Rashad: (02:35)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (02:35)

Why did you start it?

 

Amira Rashad: (02:36)

So I actually started BulkWhiz because of two pain points, one on the personal side and one on the professional side. So on the personal side, very simply, I am a mom. I basically bear the responsibility of grocery shopping for my home, for my family and I just woke up one day thinking, why am I doing the exact same thing that my mom had done and her mom had done? Really, there hasn’t been a lot of progress on that front. You still have to drive to the store, you still have to, you know, fight for a parking spot. You still have to, you know, stand in those lines and what have you and you know, in 2016/17, whenever it is that we started thinking about this, there really a lot of technology out there that I was sure was going to enable us to do this in an easier, more convenient manner. So I just thought, you know what, let’s do something about it. I’m sick and tired of wasting my weekends in grocery shopping lines. So that’s on the professional, sorry on the personal side. On the professional side, I was working, I’ve been in sort of a consumer marketing type of a role more or less for more than 30 years and I have yet to speak to any professional who is able to show you a solid line between dollar in from a marketing perspective and dollar out in terms of returns for brand or a company. Everything is kind of quote on quote extrapolated. You assume, you run research, you hope, and so on. So that purchase funnel, so to speak, from awareness to actual purchase or sale for a brand or a company is to say the least vague. So again, in this day and age with ecommerce, there are a lot of technologies out there that could very, very easily connect those two dots and just speaking with some of the professionals that I worked with and still am working with, there’s a thirst. There is a massive thirst for connecting that solid line and showing companies who spend marketing dollars that solid line and that ROI, which is the promise of ecommerce, really.

 

Rana Nawas: (04:38)

I didn’t realize it was so difficult to determine impact of your marketing dollars. I thought the marketing departments of the big companies had this down.

 

Amira Rashad: (04:45)

Absolutely not, ask anybody. I mean, there’s a famous saying and I’m not quite sure exactly who said it, was some advertising guru. I’m not sure if it was Ogilvy who said “I know that 50% of my marketing dollars are being wasted, I just don’t know which 50%.”

 

Rana Nawas: (04:59)

Oh, my God.

 

Amira Rashad: (05:00)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (05:02)

That’s crazy. All right. So what challenges have you faced in building this business? It solves two pain points for you? What were the new pain points, let’s say?

 

Amira Rashad: (05:11)

So the first step was actually convincing myself and sort of getting the blessings internally from my family that this is something I wanted to do because this is quite the journey. You kind of have a vague idea of what it’s like to start a business but it, you know, it ends up being really all consuming so to speak you. If you’re passionate about it, it’s a, in my case it was a third child and I had to really make sure that my family was aligned and that I was ready to take that plunge and once that was kind of achieved, the biggest challenge was convincing people of the concept. Convincing investors of the fact that not only that the opportunity existed, but that I was the one to actually make it happen. I was lucky enough to have had, you know, 25 years of experience under my belt. So I had that to kind of bank on but just being able to operate from scratch was actually something I have to prove to them because most of my career has been, had been spent in large corporations.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:18)

Big budgets.

 

Amira Rashad: (06:18)

Exactly. Big budgets, big resources. What have you. I actually had one of my investors sit me down early on and say, Amina, the Amira who works for facebook or for Yahoo could pick up the phone and speak to whoever she wants to speak to, but the Amira who was sitting with one employee and, and really nothing else is unlikely to get our phone calls answered. Are you comfortable with that? Can you actually operate? And I said, absolutely. When you’re passionate, when you know where this is going, when you have the vision, I’m more than happy to kind of build it brick by brick.

 

Rana Nawas: (06:52)

Sorry, Amira. You mentioned investors already. You’re only one or two years old, right? So when did you bring the investors in?

 

Amira Rashad: (06:59)

Before we even started.

 

Rana Nawas: (07:00)

Oh.

 

Amira Rashad: (07:01)

So actually before I quit my job we pitched the concept, did, you know, put together a top line business plan and the concept itself was not difficult to describe. Everybody has had an experience with grocery shopping. The real challenge was convincing people that technology can actually solve the problem and that you could actually develop technology in this part of the world. That was the part that the real Aha for most people. Really? Why don’t you just buy something and plug and play and you know, why, why develope from scratch? I’m sure there’s a solution out there and the answer is no, there isn’t and to actually have the gall to say there isn’t one, we’re building it, watch us, took a lot of guts and sleepless nights and, but you know, one or two angels believed and the way we did it was we raised money over three to four small consecutive rounds which allowed us to actually show the results of what we intended to do in short spurts. So whenever we went back to the well, so to speak, we had something to show for it.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:07)

You don’t have a technical background and this is really a tech company.

 

Amira Rashad: (08:12)

It is.

 

Rana Nawas: (08:12)

So how did you bring the right resources on?

 

Amira Rashad: (08:15)

I actually believe that every company is a tech company at this stage. Really anything and everything that we do or going to do is going to be addressed through technology. It’s just having a person with a business mindset who sees the real pain point and sees exactly where the technology fits or how it can help and at that point, you need a technical partner who can actually help with how that’s going to work. But where and why is the decision or is an assessment that is made by the businessperson upfront. So I got all the way up to the how part and at that point I had to have a technical cofounder, which I do right now. So my cofounder Yousef, our CTO has a master’s degree in machine learning and data science. He’s our guru and he’s the one who’s overseeing the tech buildup.

 

Rana Nawas: (09:10)

Yep. Sorry, I jumped in. I want to get back to the challenges you faced in building up, so please go on.

 

Amira Rashad: (09:16)

Yeah. So I guess I was luckier than most in terms of alining investors behind this venture, but there are a lot of skeptics throughout the journey. I mean, I had people say to my face, Amira, your husband is somewhat successful. He’s a banker, you know, do you really need to do this? Is this like a pet project for you? And, you know, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how insulted I was. They were not taking me seriously simply because any woman who, you know, starts a project necessarily has to be, you know, thinking of it as a pet project or not. That question would not have been asked had been a male founder, so to speak. There were also situations where you would walk into supplier meetings, you know, this tiny little startup. I would walk in either with a cofounder or an employee or what have you and the conversation would immediately be directed at the male colleague in the room, irrespective of who else was there and they would be genuinely surprised that I am the CEO. Now obviously, one has to, you know, very clearly bring value to the table and not be offended by all of this, especially since in many cases we were talking to very senior people at very large companies wanting them to actually do business with us while we were just this tiny little startup. So it was this interesting dance upfront, so to speak.

 

Rana Nawas: (10:41)

Well, you come from the corporate world you mentioned earlier and it seems to me that you had a really `cool job as the head of brand of Facebook for Middle East and North Africa. Why would you leave that? That was a big decision, no?

 

Amira Rashad: (10:53)

It was a very big decision. So facebook is a fantastic company to work for. I genuinely enjoyed every minute and more importantly, I learned something new every minute, which is saying a lot actually for the stage of my career, right? The thing is though, facebook was so successful, still is. It doesn’t really need Amira, right? So Amira will be successful at Facebook, but she’s not going to make a dent. She’s not going to be someone who actually changes the course of Facebook’s success. In fact, Facebook is such a well oiled machine that, you know, I think it’s very difficult for any one person to actually make a difference, so to speak. While at BulkWhiz I was building my own thing. I got to shape a culture. I get to, you know, employ people and train them. I get to show people new things and new ways of doing things. It was just my way of trying to create something different and be creative in my own way, I guess, and that’s why I’m passionate about it.

 

Rana Nawas: (11:54)

And we just talked about Facebook, but your corporate career spans, you know, tech, management, consulting, finance, FMCG, and advertising. I would like to come back to a point you made earlier about the gender issue. Across all these industries, where did you feel there was the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:13)

Consulting, I would have to say.

 

Rana Nawas: (12:16)

Oh, that’s interesting because people think tech and actually my bias is that that’s actually not true. So I’m curious, why would you say consulting had the most gender parity?

 

Amira Rashad: (12:26)

I think nowhere is there, have I seen a focus on the actual individual or the employee as much as consulting because the saying is “your assets walk out the door every day.” That you really have no other assets and consulting except the individuals. So there’s a great deal of care and interest that is taken by the firms to make sure that the environment is conducive, that you have the right people walking through the door every day, you know, their needs are being met and so I don’t know that I’ve had conversations about my career and interest anywhere more than in consulting. Actually, it’s interesting because consulting happened to be in my career at a time where I was starting a family and you know how consultants are. They’re on the road for four out of five days a week and the general thinking was that this was going to be extremely challenging and I made a point of actually taking this head on in the sense that I was not going to shy away from starting a family. I was not going to delay it. I was actually going to do it then and I was going to, you know, almost test the firm on what they were planning to do to support me and they were extremely supportive and I’ll give you a couple of examples if we have the time.

 

Rana Nawas: (13:39)

Please.

 

Amira Rashad: (13:39)

So basically I was pregnant with our first son about a year into my consulting career. I was just an associate and I made it a point to actually go through all the travel that I needed to do up until the seventh month. I traveled regularly. There was absolutely no issues whatsoever and then from that point onwards, I planned or I worked with my mentors and the partner who was sort of guiding my career to plan for a period pre and post my maternity leave in terms of ensuring that I was getting not just the leftover projects, but the actual projects I wanted to work on and they were all grounded in Manhattan where I was living at the time. So I was working in the communications media and technology group of the firm. They actually lined up a number of projects, all of which were in New York City, various challenges, different types of work and I didn’t feel for a moment that my career was being sidelined or I was just being accommodated or what have you. I was really seriously working very hard but I didn’t have to travel. During the time that I was actually in the office, there were two stints in those two years where I actually was on internal company projects. So working, for example to build an advisory board for the firm and what have you. I noticed that it was actually the first assignment was building the advisory board and I noticed that there was no, I was nursing at the time, there was no nursing room in the office. We’re smack in the middle of Manhattan on Park Avenue and there was nowhere for me to go, so all I did was I walked into the partner’s office and said, you have two choices. I either spend the day here and you provide a nursing room or I go home. It’s as simple as that and within a week they had retrofitted a setup and there was a nursing room in the office, you know. So in many ways I think the consulting environment, in my experience, the incentive to make sure that, you know, it’s gender friendly.

 

Rana Nawas: (15:38)

Yeah. Well I have two thoughts on consulting. One is the pay is also fixed by rank, so consultants, senior consultant associate. So actually I think there’s very little pay gap, gender pay gap. The normal one that you find in firms, you won’t find that because it’s fixed if you’re an analyst associate, etc. So that’s one sort of pro, again, for consulting. The flip side is a lot of the consultancies are really struggling to retain women at senior levels and they’re calling me, you know, I’m working with some of them now to figure out why their women aren’t making it to partner and so I wonder, you know, you had a great experience. So why did you leave?

 

Amira Rashad: (16:18)

So I actually left because I started, it was my first venture into entrepreneurial world. I started my own consulting firm and I focused on partnerships, you know, basically marrying a bigger companies with smaller, more innovative companies to launch new lines and so on. So I just found my own kind of niche and I decided to do that. You’re right. I actually didn’t stay in a large consulting firm environment long enough to kind of hit any ceiling, but at my level it was, I felt very fortunate.

 

Rana Nawas: (16:52)

Great. So let’s go back to the question about your corporate career spanning all these different industries. In which industry did you feel the least gender parity? I’m curious.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:04)

I think it was in consumer products. So I started very early on with a consumer products company in this region. I was the only female executive in the entire region. I was very junior, but I was the only one. So there was a lot of, let’s just say, you know how it is in a professional environment there’s a need to bond. There’s a need to be one of

 

Rana Nawas: (17:27)

One of the guys, you need to network.

 

Amira Rashad: (17:30)

Exactly and in many ways than one that kind of shaped my professional development because I decided to mimic what I saw as successful behavior or behavior that lead to success, which was predominantly male. I developed a very loud, aggressive approach and that got me to be heard and it’s still in many ways still stays with me. I’ve realized as you know, as I moved to different environments and so on, that there are so many different things that women can bring to the table, so many different ways that they could actually express themselves and be recognized and so on that I’m still learning right now. Learning both to implement myself but also to recognize and appreciate in others, so, you know, that that soft voice at the back of the room might really be the most valuable one and as the leader in the room or the manager in the room or what have you, you really need to be cognizant of what everybody brings to the table. I didn’t start out that way and it took a lot of development for me to get to that point.

 

Rana Nawas: (18:33)

What specific challenges have you seen that women face in getting to leadership positions?

 

Amira Rashad: (18:42)

I actually think that, and I don’t want to generalize, but courtesy bias is a very big one. Women really care about not upsetting people or being liked or coming across as being positive, comforting, happy, friendly, whatever it is and in many cases, I think we curtail our own opportunities without anybody actually getting in the way, so to speak. So just learning that what you’re bringing to the, knowing our own self worth. Knowing that you’re bringing value to the table. Nobody’s doing you a favor and that you will learn to A) identify the value you’re bringing but also having, being very comfortable having others, selling it to others basically. Because in many cases people who succeed or move sort of up the ladder so to speak, are very comfortable selling the value that they bring to the table. Now obviously, there are quote on quote imposters who don’t have the value and yet they sell, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people being very comfortable knowing their worth and knowing what they bring to the table and not being shy about actually letting others know that.

 

Rana Nawas: (19:46)

Yeah and Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgason in their book “How Women Rise: The 12 Habits Holding Women Back in the Workplace” this is one of them. That the lack of self promoting your value, definitely. Alright. We’ve talked about the women. You know, know your worth and promote it so that the people who matter know. What about at a corporate level? Because, I mean, my personal theory is that we keep putting the burden on the woman. When, you know, I mean this poor women. Lean in, get a mentor, get a sponsor, know your worth, self promote. All of this, but I feel like, and I’d love your opinion on this, my own view is that the corporate world is designed in a way that should a woman stand up, she’ll be penalized for it.

 

Amira Rashad: (20:32)

I actually think that because, like I said earlier, success is designed and identified primarily through a male developed yardstick. It is almost as if women are set up to fail because, like I said, if you know, if you don’t have that aggressive approach or if you don’t have that loud voice or or whatever it is, you’re immediately deemed lesser than. I think we’ve also, corporate cultures have been in general have been conditioned or developed to focus on the male needs, so to speak. So the fact that he doesn’t have to go home and work on homework. He does not have to, you know, accommodate picking the kids up from school and so on. So it has almost become a liability to have a life because somebody else was doing it on his behalf. So when someone actually becomes, comes out as real. Comes out as I actually have a life, that is not seen as something that is conducive of success, so to speak. So I think the sooner that corporate cultures are kind of tailored to see human beings in a 360 view. The fact that we all have other lives, whatever it is. Doesn’t have to be kids. It could be parents, it could be whatever. It could be the sport that you want to play, whatever it is, a healthy well rounded individual does other things and the sooner the culture A) identifies that as being healthy and B) accommodates for it, the more we’re going to have other success stories or other scenarios from the old male scenario be appreciated, women being the primary case.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:28)

Alright, let’s move back to entrepreneurship if we could. What advice do you have for people who want to set up their own business?

 

Amira Rashad: (22:35)

Take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:37)

No matter what.

 

Amira Rashad: (22:38)

Just take the plunge. You will never know. You will never know what it’s like nor how deep that pool is, nor how cold it is or whatever it is. Just take the plunge. Fail fast if you have to fail and understand the learnings if you’re going to succeed. Just do it. There is no other way around it.

 

Rana Nawas: (22:59)

And is it the same advice you’d give to a 25 year old that you’d give to a 45 year old?

 

Amira Rashad: (23:04)

Yes, it would be. It just depends on what kind of plunge it is. I’m not necessarily thinking that a 40 year old is any more or less prepared. Arguably he or she have more experience but it might be the wrong kind of experience. Right? So just assess what you’re bringing to the table. Identify the problem. Match those two things and take the plunge.

 

Rana Nawas: (23:27)

Alright. You take the plunge. You’re working your butt off. It’s not working out. How do you know when to stop? Because there’s all these mixed messages on social media. Just keep going. The struggle is great. You know, all of this. When do you know that, you know, you’ve got to stop now. It’s just not gonna work out.

 

Amira Rashad: (23:46)

There’s a very famous fast moving consumer goods company, I’m not gonna mention the name, they have this term that they use called the “moment of truth.” The moment of truth is essentially when a consumer interacts with their product on the shelf or at the home or what have you, everything, everything in a startup is conditional upon one thing and that is the need for your product and your ability to meet it. So be it a consumer, be it a business or whatever it is. If you can identify that fit, how you sold it, when you sold it, with whom and for how much is all something you can work on, you can pivot around whatever it is, but if you’re unable to create that basic need fit then I think you should quit, right? If it’s not there, you can be too early or you could be too late. But if the need isn’t there, then, you know, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:48)

So you were 25 years in corporate before you started your business, right?

 

Amira Rashad: (24:53)

Yes.

 

Rana Nawas: (24:54)

So entrepreneurs don’t have to be fresh grads.

 

Amira Rashad: (24:59)

Not at all, actually that’s a myth. I think there were very recently several pieces of research have shown that the most successful entrepreneurs in sheer numbers, the ones who have had the biggest exits and so on, are on average in their forties because it, here’s the thing. It isn’t just a matter of work experience. As an entrepreneur, you’re really doing a couple of things A you’re identifying a problem and you’re trying to rally resources to address that problem or that need A) you’re talking to investors, you’re trying to convince them. So there’s a lot of communication skills there. There’s a lot of ability to persuade and so on but then once that happens, every other interaction you’re having is about convincing someone to do something. You’re an evangelist, essentially. Lead employees, be it suppliers, customers, whatever it is, right? So you learn a lot of that along the way in whatever experience you’ve had. Be the successful experiences or failed experiences, the likelihood that you’ve gone through this and you’re able to convince others to join you or see your vision is somewhat higher if you’re older but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t younger entrepreneurs who are very good at it.

 

Rana Nawas: (26:18)

It sounds like the corporate world really prepared you for entrepreneurship. You mentioned earlier the communication skills and your influencing skills. What else did you learn from the corporate world that applies?

 

Amira Rashad: (26:30)

Oh, a lot of the just the scaffoldIng aspects of building a business. So the processes, the skill sets of planning, learning how to manage people and resources, financials. So I mean, you name it. There’s just every aspect of running a business comes in handy when you’re running your own, obviously. What the corporate world does not prepare you for though is the risk taking aspect of this. Essentially you’re at the driver’s seat 24/7 and you can’t afford to nod at any moment, which is definitely not the case in the corporate world.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:07)

Now you got an MBA at harvard. Why did you decide to go for an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:12)

The MBA, by the way, was my second masters degree. I had, I was lucky enough to actually be the recipient of a Japanese scholarship from the UK foreign office to study in Manchester, a master of science in marketing.

 

Rana Nawas: (27:27)

Is that when you did your skydiving?

 

Amira Rashad: (27:32)

Yes, that is when I did my skydiving. That prepared me to be a solid marketer. Gave me a very strong platform to build a career in marketing, which I did, but I very quickly realized that I really enjoy sort of the general management aspect of things. So I need a very, I needed to go somewhere to learn about all of the other aspects of management, be it finance based strategy, be it people management, what have you. But I had already been working for five, six years and the last thing I wanted to do was go and sit in a lecture hall, just didn’t have the bandwidth for that and harvard just happened to have the exact program that I was looking for. You don’t, you’re not actually taught anything in a harvard class, a harvard MBA class. You do all of your learning outside of the class, what you do in the class is you actually discuss real life company problems. You know, the professor would walk in and he would say something like, how did these guys make money or where they go wrong or why did this guy end up in jail or whatever it is and they are real issues that you have to grapple with and there is no clean cut, nice answer, just like there isn’t in life. So I learned quite a bit from the actual content itself. That was a huge draw. The other huge draw is actually the people sitting next to you in class. So, just sitting next to me in class was a brain surgeon who literally as a job took bullets out of the heads of little children in east LA who are being shot and she was in that classroom because she wanted to use her medical expertise to get into biotech. Sitting on the other side of me in that class was an air force pilot who, when I told him I grew up in Kuwait, he said, yeah, I used to fly over Kuwait everyday during the gulf war and here’s what I did. You just, you get a completely different perspective on life and you get, when you’re discussing business problems, you get a 360 perspective on be it from a business perspective, from a science perspective, a government perspective, what have you and that was just invaluable to me.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:38)

So you’d do it again if you had the choice.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:41)

In a flash. In fact, I was back at campus very recently discussing our own BulkWhiz case.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:48)

I saw, congratulations. I think they’ve written a case about it.

 

Amira Rashad: (29:51)

They have, yes. About a female entrepreneur in the Middle East negotiating to start her startup with various stakeholders.

 

Rana Nawas: (29:59)

Oh wow. I’ll have to put a link to that in our show notes.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:02)

Sure.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:02)

Great. Would you advise everyone to get an MBA?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:05)

No, absolutely not. It really depends on what you’re looking for. In my case, I wanted that kind of rounded experience. I also had an ulterior motive. I wanted to leave the region. I was, most of my career was in the Middle East up until that point and I needed a platform from which to launch a different career path in North America and that’s exactly what it helped me do.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:26)

Well, if you could go back in time, what is one thing you would do differently, Amira?

 

Amira Rashad: (30:31)

Oh, there are a lot of things.

 

Rana Nawas: (30:33)

Oh, wow. Normally I get people who say nothing, I don’t do regret.

 

Amira Rashad: (30:40)

I know. I mean, I don’t dwell over it but I’m very cognizant of what I would’ve done better because how else am I going to get better, right? So one thing I would have definitely done differently is removed the fake barriers or partitions between my personal professional lives. I, like I said, I was conditioned to think of my professional life as being, you know, in this silo and my personal life is being in a different world altogether and to separate them because, if God forbid they, you know, were mixed in any way I would suffer. I would either be perceived as unprofessional in the professional setting or I would be perceived as, you know, the workaholic in the personal side of things. I’ve realized that these two things have so many things in common and that creating these false partitions hurts me. It makes me more stressed and prevents the flow of learnings between those two environments. So that is one of the biggest things that I’ve learned. What is a question you wish people would ask you more often?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:49)

I wish people would ask me what makes me happy because, you know, trying to guess it was a waste of time. Just ask.

 

Rana Nawas: (31:56)

I love that. What does make you happy?

 

Amira Rashad: (31:58)

Helping people. Seeing the smile on people’s faces because you actually did something differently. That’s probably the biggest thing that makes me happy.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:06)

Wonderful. Now you’ve run your business. You have two kids. How do you switch off when you feel overwhelmed?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:13)

A couple of different ways. One is I go get a massage. Two is I read, I love reading and it’s mostly, you’d be surprised, just complete fiction. I escaped through fiction.

 

Rana Nawas: (32:25)

Okay, well then the obvious question is, what’s your favorite book?

 

Amira Rashad: (32:29)

I read a book recently called the “History of Love.” There is no “the” it’s “History of Love” and the book has absolutely nothing to do with love at all. It is actually a pretty interesting book reflecting about the story of world war two survivors as they move, as they immigrate to the US and you realize down the road, I’m not going to burn it for you, but you realize that what you’re reading isn’t really what you think you’re reading and the connections between people and how they develop. There was a lot of thought that was put in developing the characters and getting you to go through that journey with them. I write myself as well, so I really appreciated sort of the skill in that was involved in that.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:16)

Oh wow. Do you have a book that you’re writing?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:19)

No, no, no. I’m not writing a book.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:21)

Creative writing hobby.

 

Amira Rashad: (33:23)

Yeah, I just enjoy it.

 

Rana Nawas: (33:24)

Lovely. Alright and if you had a billboard and you could put a message on it the whole world would see, what would it say?

 

Amira Rashad: (33:33)

The classic biblical saying. I’m not sure if I’m saying it correctly or not but basically “do unto others as you would have others do to you” basically. So just if everybody thought for a second how they treat others and just reflected on how they would be treated themselves, life would be so much easier. We spend a lot of time trying to bridge that gap. The double standards, Iguess.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:03)

Yeah. I love that. Thank you, Amira. Where can listeners find you?

 

Amira Rashad: (34:07)

So I am on instagram @amira_s_rashad. I am also on twitter @amira123.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:19)

Thank you so much. This has been such a diverse and interesting chat. I really appreciate it.

 

Amira Rashad: (34:24)

Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:28)

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I’d love to hear from you so please head over to WhenWomenWinPodcast.com to give feedback. While you’re there, you can find all episodes and show notes and sign up for our monthly newsletter. Wherever you’re listening right now, do remember to hit the subscribe button to be notified of future episodes and please write a review when you can to let others know what to expect. Thanks and have a great day.

 

Amira Rashad: (34:24)

Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

 

Rana Nawas: (34:28)

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I’d love to hear from you so please head over to WhenWomenWinPodcast.com to give feedback. While you’re there, you can find all episodes and show notes and sign up for our monthly newsletter. Wherever you’re listening right now, do remember to hit the subscribe button to be notified of future episodes and please write a review when you can to let others know what to expect. Thanks and have a great day.