SCALING DREAMS IN DUBAI

Skillionaires Podcast Episode 4

- Khaled Mohamed -

[Angela Thomas]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Skillnet, the podcast who shows you interesting people that know how to scale, go out to scale and show how to scale. So let's dive into an episode today. I have here Khalid Mohamed.

Welcome to my podcast. I'm very welcoming and eagerly to show what you have to tell. Tell us about where you're coming from and how are you scaling?

[Khaled Mohamed]

OK, well, thank you for having me. My absolute pleasure being here. I'm Khalid, Egyptian, born in UAE.

Moved to Dubai a year ago or like moved to Dubai lately, actually. And I basically run the biggest personal branding agency for real estate professionals in Dubai. So real estate agents, developers, people of that sort in that industry.

It's been two years since I started this journey in the agency world and I've scaled my agency successfully to more than 25 active clients, which is something that like only I think one other agency has in our industry. And I've managed to do it at 19, which is pretty cool.

[Angela Thomas]

You're 19?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah.

[Angela Thomas]

Wow, look at you. I have many questions that concerns to mindset. Having somebody who is 19, that bold to go out and deal with the big fishes, I suppose.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100%. I mean, our industry is filled with billionaires and big people like industry sharks. Since even Dubai, most of the attention is on real estate and tourism.

So those are like the biggest two industries where you would make money. And it made sense. I mean, go to an emerging growing market.

It is where you would scale. If you want to scale, you want the market to be with you, not against you. Go to a growing market rather than a market that's decreasing in size.

And for sure, I'm sure you know, and every single viewer that lives here knows that wherever you walk in Dubai, you will find something related to real estate. Whether obviously it's the skyscrapers themselves or the boards across the main roads advertising real estate developers and brokerages, right?

[Angela Thomas]

Khalid, tell us a little bit. When did you find your first igniting impulse of having the feeling and the nudge to scale? I mean, a 19 year old can do different other things than going to a party, jumping after girls.

How did you came to that impulse of going after scaling a company? A lot of people who are at that young age want to be an entrepreneur. They don't even think about scaling.

They're just thinking about arranging their lifestyle a little bit free in sort of a self managed timetable. But you had another vision of it. Tell us a little bit more about that.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100% I agree. Most people chase like the idea of going from, let's say, a normal pathway of the university to just having a company or becoming an entrepreneur and having the word CEO in their Instagram bio. But yeah, I mean, I started like that, obviously.

And after I had a few clients, let's say when I was at early six figures, right, like 10k per month, very few clients, three, four clients, nothing much going on still working. I realized I can take it to the next level. And I found that it's my goal.

It's what I want to do. I want to reach the highest level I can reach as soon as possible. And yeah, I didn't find any value in doing any other thing.

Like, I mean, it's the human experience. Let me get the most out of it by becoming the best I can be. Let me squeeze every ounce of potential I have.

So what happened was I reached the first milestone of a few clients or a few, like a very low level, low scale of operations where I wasn't known. And then I found that there is an insanely big gap in the market. Why?

Because it's a very rapidly growing market. And in a rapidly growing market, there are consistently gaps that come out of nowhere. So you will find new opportunities consistently every quarter of the year.

So what happened was I realized that there was a very, very clear opportunity where the real estate broker model or the real estate agent model was shifting from a main client acquisition method. Let's say it was lead generation and add to personal branding like it's an industry shift. How let's see how we can apply to podcasts is that the industry is shifting from normal media to podcasts.

This is what's happening, right? All the attention is moving from normal media to podcasts. Same thing was happening for real estate agents or in my industry.

I realized that one, it's a growing market, growing, heavily growing market, heavily growing economy, too much cash to grab, basically. Second, I realized that there is a shift and usually people make fortunes in the shift. When let's say there is a gold rush or whatever type of rush there is.

Currently, there is an attention rush. It's attention economy. It's personal branding economy.

It's the micro influencer economy. Many ways to call it. But the industry is moving marketing like it's market evolution.

The marketing used to be somewhere and now it's going somewhere else. It used to be lead gen and now it's personal branding. So I was like, OK, let me stand in the middle.

Let me be a participant of this marketing evolution. Let me as well as scale, because if it's there, it's an opportunity. If it's an opportunity, let me make the most out of it.

[Angela Thomas]

Marketing evolution. This is something strong, a strong expression. And just tell me a little bit more about your detailed work.

It's about branding. It's about awareness. It's about bringing your client actually into visibility.

And what are your unique points of where you are bringing them and how do you bring them there? What is your work? Definitely.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Sure. So what I do is personal branding. Specifically speaking, niche personal branding.

But before that, let me zoom out into how it came into place. Right. So the marketing evolution is moving from lead gen to personal branding.

Now, two years ago, what happened was that most real estate professionals that started personal branding were doing very broad content advertising Dubai because what the product they sold was obviously the highest ticket product anyone would buy. And it's the product everyone needs. Everyone needs a home or everyone needs to transfer their wealth into a more effective, into something that holds their wealth.

Right. So what happened was all real estate agents were branding real estate. Sorry, were branding like branding themselves in a very broad manner, only talking about Dubai, top of funnel marketing, things everyone would understand.

But no one then niche down to specific areas, niche down to specific industries, niche down to specific developers. So to explain to someone who isn't in the industry, I would say that if we use sports as an example, they were talking about sports, but they didn't talk about a specific sport. They talked only about like sports and doing sports in general, but they didn't talk about specifically rugby, football, swimming.

So what happened was I realized that what happens is when as per normal evolution, the market only gets more competitive. And to avoid competition or to win competition, you win at one through authenticity and through competence and through competence at something that's more niched down. More niched down meaning that they would move from being so broad to niching down to a specific area, to a specific developer, to a specific type of property.

So what happened then was people started niching down a bit, a tiny bit. And then I clocked it. And then I realized that that's okay, nice.

So this is happening. So as soon as I realized this happened, okay, then I branded myself as someone who does niche marketing only. Like I went against the idea of views.

Everyone's trying to go viral, right? Everyone's trying to achieve that. I came out and I started telling people going viral is bad.

Going viral is wrong for you. What you should do instead is build a niche personal brand. So that was my approach to it.

Many people liked it. Many people wanted to stick to dancing on camera and going viral. But so be it.

So what we can do. There are winners and there are people who are not winners in the market. So after that, I started working with real estate agents in a very niche subset manner where they would focus on something very specific.

And they wouldn't go viral, but they would be very known and present in our community. Well, then comes my first case study of a real estate agent called Camille, where he changed the perception of an entire area. So let's say there is downtown.

I'm sure everyone knows downtown. I'll take it as an example. Let's say someone comes and change the perception of downtown from desert to like what it is today.

[Angela Thomas]

Right?

[Khaled Mohamed]

So he changed the perception of that area. And after then, I had my first case study. And I started applying the same logic on every, like it was a formula, a successful formula that I had or that I still have.

They apply to anyone I start working with where they when they specialize in something, they become the face of it. That is number one, the face of that niche. And then second is they would change how people perceive it and say what nobody else can say and do what nobody else can do.

So that is basically what like I do. Yep.

[Angela Thomas]

Cool. I mean, maybe you can dive a little bit deeper into as a scaling expert. I always see where is a tangible business model.

And if you have somebody who wants to have a personal brand, it's something very important and valuable to do. But how can you scale this? How did you scale it?

I mean, because this is something that is so individual. And that is the point of where where business strategies are failing to be scalable. How did you get around this?

[Khaled Mohamed]

A hundred percent. So how I would scale personal or how I scale personal brands is there are two ways. You do more, better and then different.

That does it. Long story short, you do more, better and then different. When scale is effectively putting strain in the current set of processes you have.

So we have a process for, let's say, building a personal brand. We distribute or we create 15 pieces of content monthly, let's say, and we just put it on one platform. What we started doing is that if you want to scale a personal brand, one, we want to do more.

What does that mean? We double the content. We do 30.

We distribute it across four social media platforms. YouTube Shorts, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. All short form or major social media platforms.

And then what happens is that 30 multiply 4 is 120. So now every month you have 120 new pieces of content on social media. And then what we will do is that we would slowly and eventually find what works and what doesn't and do it.

That is the better part, right? We find what works and then like it's usually the top 20 percent. We start repackaging it and reusing the formula we had.

And then we keep on doing that until it doesn't work. And then we just keep on finding what works and what doesn't work. And we click the button of what works until it doesn't work anymore.

So, yep, that is like the normal personal branding scaling method on social media. Do you want me to dive deep into like the hooks, the bodies and call to action? Or do I talk about my business model?

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, I mean, you can you can share this with our community.

[Khaled Mohamed]

OK, OK, cool, cool, cool. Perfect. About the sauce.

[Angela Thomas]

Sure.

[Khaled Mohamed]

So going scaling a personal brand, there has to be a stimuli. You have to do something to scale it. It wouldn't like scale out of nowhere.

And the result of scaling would be dependent on the metric you have. Let's say my metric is qualified inbound leads. I want to get more qualified inbound leads.

Some other people's metric could be views or likes or followers. So you'd find your metric that you're optimizing for. It can be even email options to your landing page.

It can be landing pages, it can be whatever you want. You would find the most important metric to your business or the metric that would do the most difference. And then from there, you would optimize everything accordingly.

So what I would optimize for is qualified inbound leads or booked calls, actually in my landing page. And from there, I realized that one, the hook of my content has to be very, very clearly. The end result of my hook is them watching my content and then booking a call.

[Angela Thomas]

OK, cool.

[Khaled Mohamed]

So what I did then was I just kept on calling out the audience and my avatar. And then from there, I would obviously reward them in the body and then give them a call to action to convert.

[Angela Thomas]

Right.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Call to actions do not work in content. It's ideal if you do it like somewhere outside the content itself, because there's something called the give to take ratio. As a cute example, if you keep asking someone for something, eventually they'll get annoyed.

So ideally, you wouldn't ask for them because they won't watch your content anymore. So what you would do is just be as valuable as possible when creating content.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, and have it in the, have the call to action somewhere else.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Somewhere else. Yeah, outside your content.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, that's so my, that's so my nature. I always do the content, script the content for scaling my clients exactly that way. Bringing value to a client instead of, you know, like looking for the hook.

Where is the hook?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah, makes sense. Absolutely.

And then from there, as soon as I started like, I'll go the entire journey of scaling and what happened with me. So I started creating content in that manner, only valuable. And I went to the complex marketing, not simple marketing.

So there are two types of marketing. There is simple marketing, complex marketing. Simple is where everyone understand it and it's broad.

You can generate millions of views. But complex marketing is only if your avatar only can understand it. My avatar is the real estate agents.

I talked in a way where they only can understand it to the point where I explained and articulated their problems better than they did. So therefore, they had enough trust in me that I could solve this problem. Because usually even if you do not have social proof, even if you let's say you want to scale a company, you have to have enough credibility to do so.

But even if you let's say you're selling a service based business or service, let's say you're selling a service because we use this example because 70 percent of businesses on the entire world are service based businesses. So even if you do not have enough credibility and social proof, what you can do is you can explain and articulate your avatar's problems in a way that is with enough depth to the point where you articulate it better than them. Therefore, they would think they would perceive you as someone who understands it better than them.

Therefore, they would have enough trust in you to solve it. This is what I did, even with not much social proof. So after doing this, what happened as well as that, I got interviewed on a few podcasts, right?

I just went on three podcasts. I also started distributing this content across all social media platforms, putting me everywhere. And then what happened is story got around a few views here and there.

And then I started receiving a lot of book calls. I received more than like 100 book calls at some point. Right.

And I had a very high conversion rate because it was it was a very the funnel filtered out the bad leads from the good leads. Right. And then the founder of the company is on the call.

So automatically, the conversion rate is higher. It's different than when you put a closer.

[Angela Thomas]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Khaled Mohamed]

When you put a closer, it drops to like 15 percent. Originally, with the founder, you can reach to 30 percent. With a closer, it can drop to like 15 percent.

[Angela Thomas]

Yes.

[Khaled Mohamed]

So what happened after that is that obviously high closing rate, 30 percent, close a very big percentage of the people I got in a call with. And then now I had a lot of like I received a lot of like lead flow at once, but I didn't have the back end fit. And when you scale the front end without scaling the back end, now you're in trouble.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah. You're in very trouble.

[Khaled Mohamed]

If you do not fix it, you might like lose your entire business. You will get a lot of free. You will get a lot of refund requests.

You repeat. You will only scale bad reputation. You will not scale your business.

You will scale bad reputation.

[Angela Thomas]

You scale the old missing parts that you don't have. And the shit that's coming out with it, you scale it as well.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Exactly. So that happened to me, but I fixed it very early on.

[Angela Thomas]

I mean, you actually scaled your company from zero to 100,000. And in a matter of, I mean, less than two years. But how did you do it?

And where was your pitfalls? And when you say that you have some mistakes that you would definitely scale and nothing good is coming out of it. How did you detect it and solved it?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Good. Okay. 100%.

So going back to the front end topic where I received a lot of lead flow, what I did was I accepted a lot of clients at once while not having the back end. That was a big mistake I did. It puts me in a lot of trouble.

I do a lot of sleepless nights, but it's okay. We're over it. So what happened was like now I have 20 people.

They have to create like hundreds of pieces of content. I do not have a proper team. So what I did from there, I honestly joined the coaching program.

[Angela Thomas]

Aha. Very good.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah. You have to learn.

[Angela Thomas]

Sometimes you cannot see your own shadows.

[Khaled Mohamed]

100%.

[Angela Thomas]

Isn't it?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah. So ideally, you would have a mentor that would tell you what to do. And what I was taught is the first thing I have to do is like find the thing that people complain about the most and then fix it.

Because everyone's complaining. 20 people are complaining. So find what people are complaining about the most and then fix it.

I did that. It was like basically the speed of operations. Like it was a bit slow.

I had an ops manager. Okay, cool. That's number one.

The second thing is after this is fixed, just keep on finding the bottleneck and fix it, which is called the bottleneck theory by Alex Hermozy. I'm sure you guys know him from his latest launch. But yeah, I kept on finding the bottlenecks and fixing it.

Until now, I have zero marginal cost of scale. So whenever I add a new client, I don't do any extra work. Because now I have a full-on team doing it.

So I went from hiring an ops manager to people who can fulfill the service, a strategist, a content creator, editors, videographers, account managers, all of these things. Because obviously, I'm a person running agency. So from there, I was kept on hiring people step by step.

And a big mistake I did was hiring the wrong people.

[Angela Thomas]

Ah, that before everybody has. And at that stage, you have to come into the skill and mentoring. Because I'm showing you how to find the right people.

Tell me about it.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100%. So I did even...

[Angela Thomas]

How did you even realize it's the wrong people? And how fast? Because I have the philosophy, we hire fast, we fire fast.

How did you do this?

[Khaled Mohamed]

So I hired fast. And I didn't fire faster. But it's something I started applying later.

So what happened is that I even hired, like I hired friends. Which is a mistake.

[Angela Thomas]

Friends? Yeah. Right?

What is your mentor did at that stage?

[Khaled Mohamed]

What did your mentor do? He pulled his hair and he told me like, quick. Right?

So I realized this mistake like a few weeks later. Because when you're working with your friends, you give excuses. Like you give excuses to yourself.

And then personal problems bleed into business. And then it doesn't work anymore. So yeah, unfortunately, that didn't work.

And I wouldn't suggest like anyone working with friends. Unless it's like... If competence is pre-assumed, then it doesn't work.

If you think that your friend would be good, then it doesn't work. But if your friend is an actual professional, has credibility, and proved that he did it before, and he's competent enough to do it in a school, it works.

[Angela Thomas]

There needs to be a lot of preparation to work with the friend to find out what is the stage on how to do this. Yeah. I have a lot of friends who would fit into my company when they say, we better don't mix friendship.

And yeah. I agree. Business.

Yeah.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah. And when I did that, I reached like a bottleneck of revenue. Like I couldn't scale past it.

Because you cannot tell your friends to do things they don't want to do, or you cannot speak to them in a certain way. You certainly don't want to fire them. But then I fired them.

Anyways, what happened after that is that I started hiring the right people.

[Angela Thomas]

And... How did you find them?

[Khaled Mohamed]

How did I find them? Well, then this is talent acquisition. This is talent acquisition.

Finding that... Well, let's talk about the entire talent acquisition process. One, you have to find the right pool.

You have to find the right place to hire from. Some people would hire editors from Fiverr, which is absolutely like doesn't make sense. Why would you do that?

There is Fiverr, Twitter, Upwork. You can do it Instagram for inbound people. You can use referrals.

Because talent acquisition is just like client acquisition. It's the same thing.

[Angela Thomas]

It is the same funnel.

[Khaled Mohamed]

If your talent acquisition system is not as strong as your client acquisition system, it is set for failure. Eventually, you will reach a very bad position. So I started focusing a lot on talent acquisition system more than client acquisition system, actually.

Talent is the most important thing in the business because it's a part of your systems. It's a primary part of your systems. If you want to scale, you have to have an effective system to scale.

The systems are... Systems are... Everyone says system, system.

But what are systems? Systems are a set of components that have a function or a goal. So if I have a content creation system, it's a set of components.

I can use AI. There are humans in it, people that work. There is podcast studios.

This is a set. Like this is a component as well. So the most important component in a content creation process is the content creator themselves.

And who's the content creator? They're my talent. Meaning they are the most important part of the process.

They would... They're the people who would generate the results for my clients. And without the results, there would be no business, basically.

So I started focusing on it way more than anything else. Till I found... And I tried a lot of different like pools to hire.

I tried Twitter. I tried Instagram. I told all of these people.

For different types of hires, there are different pools.

[Angela Thomas]

Exactly.

[Khaled Mohamed]

And then from the pool, what you have to do is you have to filter and qualify them, right? You have to ask the right questions. You have to interview them properly.

There are different sets of like processes. Some people do group interviews. Some people do single interviews.

Like one-on-one interviews and all of these things. Honestly, the best process I've... Sorry, the process that's been working well for me so far.

And it might not be ideal from going from 100k to a million. But it's ideal from going to, let's say, 30, 50k to 100k. This is what's ideal.

Is that I would find the ideal pool and do like heavy advertise on it. And then I would ask like very, very long filtering questions in chat and ask for a video. And then if the candidate is ideal or looks ideal for me, I just hop in a call with him and ask him for the rest of questions and make sure he's an actual human on the call, right?

So that has been what's like the ideal talent acquisition process. Nothing too complicated. You will need a more complicated talent acquisition process at a further scale.

[Angela Thomas]

Maybe at a million a month, right?

[Khaled Mohamed]

But 100k a month, you wouldn't need something like that. And if someone is going like from a few number of clients, so let's say 30, 40 high-tech clients, yeah, this is what you would need max. And you can also use referrals, which make it easier because then you just trust the person you're asking for talent.

And from there, what I realized is that getting the right talent is not enough. Now you have to retain them and ascend them. Just like clients, acquiring clients is not enough.

You have to retain your clients and ascend your clients. You have to upsell, cross-sell and downsell. Same thing with your talent.

Obviously, you will not upsell them, but you will promote them.

[Angela Thomas]

Yes.

[Khaled Mohamed]

So this is talent ascension as well. So I started thinking about talent acquisition just like how I think about client acquisition. Like clients and talents are the same thing.

So yeah, basically.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, it is. I mean, it doesn't matter if your acquisition is going to one or the other group. It is just what you need them for.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, just acquiring humans, basically. So what I realized is that talent retention is also required. So then I started implementing things that would retain the talent further, which is one, building company culture.

Two, obviously incentives. Three, being a good leader yourself. Four, the job has to be worth it.

Like the job has to be worth it. It has to be meaningful for the talent that is working. Like working with...

There is a quote that Neva Ravikant always says, play long term games with long term people. If the person you're working with is playing a short term game and he is thinking in a frame of this is a short term person, like three months, six months, one year and I'm out. Then you are certainly in the wrong place.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, exactly.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yep. Additionally, there are a few like decision making heuristics I use when it comes to like very important hires. If someone is not a clear yes, it's a clear no.

If like I'm not really looking forward to work with someone and I'm so happy that I found them and they exist, then it's a clear no.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Unless it's because it doesn't make sense. And then when it comes to talent as well, there is the pain, like there is the short term pain of having to onboard them and train them. When I'm split on a decision of short term pain and long term game, or short term gain and long term pain, I always pick the short term pain and long term gain.

Because, yes, maybe in the beginning it will be slow, but eventually it would work and you would get the returns or return on investment that you were looking for. Whether it's freeing your time, whether they're making you more money, whether they're optimizing your process further, whether they're building a few automations into the business that would make everything better. So, yep, these are also a few decision making frameworks.

And then the ascension part, at 100k per month, you wouldn't really like need to ascend more. You would need to ascend like maybe one, two roles. But then it would be very easy to ascend, like they would be competent to ascend, as in promoting them would be easy.

Why? It's because, well, if we're talking to businesses who scale to like from zero, from 30k to 100k, you have people that have been with you from the start, who have full context on the business and who would be an ideal candidate for the new gap that you have. You can just ascend them.

And it would be a very simple ascent, like there wouldn't be any complexity of trying to find someone new, trusting them or boarding them.

[Angela Thomas]

So that is always better to have them from in the business promoted and brought into a new position where they have understanding actually for the whole process. Khalid, I'm interested in, you were talking about as an entrepreneur, as a young entrepreneur, about your mistakes and you were just talking and laughing about it. Now, I have a very different mistake culture than maybe everybody else.

I celebrate basically every bad note that my children have, because I know if they made, you know, they have a red mark and a five on it or a six on it, they never need to do this again. So I'm very happy with them also bringing bad grades in the house. So, however, I wanted to know, how did you actually celebrate your mistakes and what is the culture around mistakes?

Do you celebrate them and learn from it or do you torture yourself into, you know, why did I do and this imposter syndrome?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Okay, with scaling comes mistakes, that's for sure, because you're reaching a position that you didn't become yet. Like you're trying, let's say, to go from 100k to 200k. You didn't reach 200k, so you don't know how it is to operate at that level or with that complexity of operations.

So you would definitely do a lot of different mistakes in different aspects of the business, whether it's in client acquisition, talent acquisition, fulfillment operations, admin, legal, accounting, whatever it may be. But I mean, the point of mistakes is just to learn from them. Like a mistake is only a mistake, like you only lose from a mistake if you do not learn from it.

And the mistake keeps repeating itself until you learn it. So let's say someone keeps on doing the mistake of hiring the wrong people.

[Angela Thomas]

Well, then you have not realized that you did a mistake, isn't it? There's neglection of actually learning, I find. In my understanding, there's nobody too dumb to make a mistake, but it is dumb enough to do a mistake twice.

And then you just simply did not make your homework and you did not actually get your lesson. And that is something that I culture actually in entrepreneurship to foster mistakes as a very welcome thing. I had even an employee one time, she made a really big mistake.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Was it?

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, it was a very cost intensive mistake. And then she was done. Yeah.

No, she thought she wanted to resign. I was like, no, you stay here because we are together learning from this mistake. And it takes you at least two years to bring back the money that you have now.

You know, left on the street. So I'm no way I'm signing your resignation. You have to stay.

And she was very disturbed by that positively because she counted with your people, get people fired when they do mistakes. And that is something an entrepreneur who wants to scale has to take in account that he or she or the audience or the people that he works that he leads are doing mistakes. So how you are actually fostering your mistakes?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, sure. So when I had a very slow like with mistakes, I didn't learn from them quickly until it came to my attention that I have to like mistakes are the fastest way I can learn because it has been materialized and you've been hurt from the mistake, right? You've been punished from doing this mistake, whether the market punishes you or someone working with you punishes you, right?

So what happened was like I had to improve my learning curve to like identify mistakes when they like as soon as they happen and make sure I learn from them and start applying it in practice, not only in theory, like not, okay, I did a mistake. Yeah, I'll fix it later. And then like, I'll think about it.

And then like, I'll find a perfect plan to fix it. No, no, no. You fix the mistake as soon as it comes.

Additionally, you reach a point where you see that you see the effect of your mistakes before they take effect. Because when you do a mistake, what happens is that you get punished. Let's say, let's say, let's say mistake.

Someone stopped marketing. Let's say this is a major like very stupid mistake. What would happen is they wouldn't see the effect today or tomorrow.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, it's something.

[Khaled Mohamed]

There is feedback, a delay in the feedback loop. They would realize maybe one month later.

[Angela Thomas]

Even longer sometimes.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Depending on like the sales cycle of the product. If it's a high ticket product, then it has a longer sales cycle. If it's a shorter, low ticket product, then it's a shorter sales cycle.

So let's say someone stopped marketing. They would realize the effects like a few months later.

[Angela Thomas]

And the big misconception is that they're thinking, oh, it's working without marketing, isn't it?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100% because it didn't take effect yet. And this is like, this is how the marketing system works, is that you see the results a few months later. It's delay in feedback loops.

It's nature of feedback loops. It's how systems work. You do input A through process B to get output C.

You would see there is like the output a few weeks or months, like there will be time gap after you do the input. If you start going to the gym consistently today, you will not get fit today. It will take some time till you get fit.

[Angela Thomas]

And the other way around as well. If you stop going to the gym, you are not getting fat right away.

[Khaled Mohamed]

100%. So what happened was like I had to start thinking in like second order consequences. Because people who do the mistake, what happens is that they are too short sighted to see the second, third and fourth order consequence of their mistake.

But like what would happen three months after I do this mistake? Not what would happen tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'd be just fine.

But a few months later, I wouldn't. So this is something I also had to develop.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah, that is something that I always teach also my clients that actually you have to showcase your whole entrepreneur and business, whole entrepreneurship and business as a horse carriage. That's how I explain it. You as a startup, you riding your horse yourself, and then you employ somebody to sit up above, to lead the first and the second horse for you, or you leading it yourself.

Secondly, you actually made as an entrepreneur to go in the back carriage to just work on your business, not inside your business. And that is something that is also need to go in the mind of entrepreneurs that each of these steps and each of these positions are coming with a wider perspective of you. And you just mentioned it as well, to have the second side of consequences.

And an employee at a certain position doesn't have to know what are your plans for two or three years. But the person who's maybe leading the team with you has to see a little bit farther than this person that is on the front and does the operational part. And you cannot always also communicate with the people around you what kind of plans you have, because they are just not having the capacity of thinking in these spheres.

And that's something that I think it's very important for an entrepreneur also to know.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100%. You mentioned two points, which is working on the business and versus on the business. And the second is communication and how to prepare your team for certain events.

Now, obviously, this depends from team member to me, from position to position.

[Angela Thomas]

Position to position.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Some positions don't need to know, some positions need to know, right? If someone will be involved in a three-month plan of scaling from, let's say, scaling like the revenue to double, then obviously they have to be aware. Let's say you're an accountant, they have to be aware, right?

More taxes, more whatever they might be dealing with. But yeah, 100%. Some team members, yeah, they have to be aware.

Some team members do not have to be aware. And then going back to the point of working in versus on the business. This is like a trap where entrepreneurs are stuck because they have the founder syndrome where they do not want to delegate, right?

They don't want to give someone else the work because they always think that they will not do it as good as me. And how I escaped it is through understanding how to document.

[Angela Thomas]

Did you have it?

[Khaled Mohamed]

Early on?

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Before scaling, no. I started doing it as I was scaling. I started documenting roles, doing SOPs, video detailed SOPs.

And then, obviously, this is also a system, right? A system of documentation.

[Angela Thomas]

Definitely.

[Khaled Mohamed]

I started with doing mistakes. My SOPs were too long. My video detailed SOPs were 30 minutes.

But for some roles, that is ineffective. I had to be more efficient. I have to see if it's effective.

If it's not, then I had to limit the number of details and make the details as perfect as possible. I started thinking like being more efficient when it comes to delegation and like SOPs, video details, SOPs, automations, and all of these things. But yeah, they eventually come.

But removing the founder syndrome is like a shift in business because then you start having access to leverage.

[Angela Thomas]

Yes.

[Khaled Mohamed]

One for leverage is getting this disproportionate output from one piece of input you put in, right?

[Angela Thomas]

Yes.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Getting more for what you do, basically.

[Angela Thomas]

Detach, actually, factor time from the tech workforce.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Detaching your time from the business.

Or not trading your time for money. This is how people usually say it. So what happens then is that when you have founder syndrome, you do not hire anyone because you're scared.

You're scared. You don't want to give anyone the workers. But then as soon as you start understanding documentation and proper delegation, okay, you start doing it.

Now you have access to one of the types of leverage, which is human resource, right? People start doing leverage. People are doing the work on behalf of you.

Right? So yeah, you have access to leverage, meaning now you can start scaling. Because with scale, unless you have way more hours than us, which we have 24 hours.

[Angela Thomas]

Well, everybody has 24 hours. It is just a question what you're doing with it. How effective you are just placing your time.

[Khaled Mohamed]

100%. And always make sure that you're working on the bottleneck of the business and high leverage activities. If you're doing accounting and you're like pulling 100k a month, it doesn't make sense.

Like hire a bookkeeper. Exactly.

[Angela Thomas]

We just had this discussion in my company. I had employed a bookkeeper and he said, can you provide those invoices? I was like, no, I'm not doing that.

That's your job.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, exactly. I'm like the founder has to work on high leverage activities. And then, okay, now what are the types of high leverage activities?

There are four types of high leverage activities. There is capital, right? Allocating capital, code, and then code content and then people, right?

Unless you're detaching your time and making other people work for it. And unless you're creating content, unless there is code, or unless you're working on code and automations, machinery, unless you're allocating capital, it's not high leverage.

[Angela Thomas]

Yes, it is.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Right? These are the highest leverage activities where you would work for one hour and you would gain disproportionate outcome. Because a very good example, personal branding or content, something I work in, I can make one piece of content and get 10 clients calling me tomorrow, wanting to work with me.

Just like something just happened a few minutes ago. A guy, a random guy called me, Khaled, please take my money. I want you to work with me.

Okay? So yeah, this only comes out of high leverage activities. So yeah, work on leverage.

Don't be stuck in the business.

[Angela Thomas]

Very good. Thank you for giving us such a big insight in your way of how to scale. Khaled, let our community else please explain how actually and what you wanted to achieve.

A lot of people, they are just actually having a one year plan. I think it's so much overestimated what you do in one year of a forecast in your achievements. But that's why I'm asking what you want to achieve in your three years, because that's highly underestimated out of my point of view.

So just for the last couple of sentences, just share this with our community, what we can wait for Khaled in the next couple of three years.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Well, this would be interesting. I would look back on it, right? In three years, three year plan.

Okay. Well, the broader mission is to make personal branding the mainstream method of client acquisition. The mainstream.

So everyone would be doing it. And I would achieve it obviously through my branding company. And the mechanism I would use is one my agency.

We'd scale to 100 real estate agents. Plus, we'd build the most, we'd build the biggest personal branding e-learning platform for real estate professionals. So that's the mission.

And that's the mechanism. And hopefully we achieve it in three years.

[Angela Thomas]

Well, we look at this podcast in three years. And thank you for being guests on my podcast. Stay tuned for another episode for skillionaires.

And thank you Khaled for being here. And we have all information on the info box. And maybe you want to share actually where we find you.

[Khaled Mohamed]

Yeah, you can find me on my main Instagram account, Khaled Branding. You'd find it somewhere in the description. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

[Angela Thomas]

Yeah.

[Khaled Mohamed]

And my YouTube channel is also Khaled Branding. So that's all.

[Angela Thomas]

Good. We're gonna connect everybody with you. So they get a way of getting in contact with you.

Thank you for being here. And thank you for watching till the end in another episode of the Skillionaire podcast, that podcast for scaling people, for people who know how to scale, go how to scale and show how to scale.