Welcome to the top floor where I delve into stories for visionary leaders reshaping today's business landscape here in the Middle East. I'm your host Simon Lewis, Vistice Chair in the UAE, and today we have a trailblazer with us whose journey epitomizes innovation and transformation. Joining us is Uzair Muza, a dynamic entrepreneur who transitioned from being an IT analyst to a global leader revolutionizing industries from aviation to FinTech. With a knack for turning challenges into opportunities, Uzair has a proven track record of converting loss-making ventures into profitable enterprises through strategic planning and disruptive yet sustainable business models. He's not only led high-performance teams across the globe, but also introduced ground breaking technologies that have set new industry standards. I'll be exploring these with Uzair today. So stay tuned and we'll understand his exciting leadership journey and uncovering the sites that have propelled his remarkable career. So Uzair, a very warm welcome to the Vistice top floor. Thank you. Very glad to be here. Great stuff. I'd like to kick off by looking at your journey from essentially all those years ago in one of the big four as an IT analyst to an entrepreneur. What inspired you to move from an early role as an IT analyst since the realm's entrepreneurship? Yeah, I think it wasn't a planned journey. So back then, I think this is what, 20 years ago or so, had you asked me where I would see myself in 10 years or so, I would have never imagined being where I am today. One of the things which I've always done is optimize for good opportunities, and whenever I found a good opportunity, I've just jumped on it and done that leap of faith, jump, and then basically just try to make the best out of the decision that I've done. So, it wasn't a very planned decision. It's just that opportunities came along, and I just jumped on those opportunities and things. One thing led to the other. I think they call that luck, don't they? Yes, but as they say, luck was a brave, so you need to take on that opportunity and make the best out of those opportunities that come your way. Absolutely. So, looking back over those years, 20 odd years, can you share any pivotal moments that motivate you to take that leap into leading diverse ventures? Yes, so I think the most pivotal moment in my career was post MBA. So, I worked in two big global organizations, KPMG and Cisco, went to do an MBA at NCAD, and post NCAD, like the typical career path for NCAD is basically joining a big corporate firm, or basically going into investment banking, or going into consulting. These are the three typical career paths. So, like all in Seattle, post graduation, I was presented with an opportunity to join one of these big global IT firms in a regional role based out of Paris, and seemed like a very nice, comfortable role, very relevant to what I'd done in the past, and so that was one option. The other option at that point in time was moving to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which at that point in time was not as exciting as it is right now. Of course, it's gone through massive sort of transformation since then, but the opportunity was for an airline that was going through a tough time, was looking for a turn around team, and I think one is basically, it sounded very exciting in terms of the opportunity, and the second thing was I was young and naive, right? So, look on the opportunity and jumped on, not realizing how difficult the opportunity would be, right? So, I tell this to people that day one of my role, right? Like when I joined in, as part of my onboarding, my boss was walking through different things, and he said that, look, I should tell you this, that in six months time, you might not have a job, right? So, welcome onboard. God, bloody. I mean, at least they're honest, I suppose. That's the good news, and it obviously didn't impact you too badly. Yes, exactly, right? So, it was fortunately one of those situations, whereby we were able to turn around the company, the company is still alive, and by the way, the company is called Flynaus. So, this was in 2010, when they were facing an existential threat, worked there in 2013, and the airline is still going on, flying into multiple destinations. So, yeah, very proud of being part of that journey at that point in time. Yeah, and a lot of the airlines at that time were recovering from the SARS issue across the eastern routes and getting back into the swing of things. So, yes, a very challenging time. And, you know, looking at yourself, and I love the honesty that's coming out, how has your leadership style evolved as you sort of transitions across these industries, you know, from IT to Aviation, and now FinTech, and that sort of thing? Yeah, I think it's more of a role of experience rather than sort of changing industry. So, I think definitely my leadership style has evolved a lot across the years. It's been more to do with gaining that experience and sort of evolving my leadership style. I don't think being in different industries has really changed because leadership principles are more or less the same, right, like wherever whichever industry you want to apply to. I think one of the biggest lessons that I learned in terms of leadership is that having those uncomfortable conversations, right, like, so it's like when you join an organization, right, most of the times people who are working there know what needs to be done, right, but it's that uncomfortable decisions, right, which no one wants to take, right, no one wants to discuss, right, and so I think this is one of the things that I've really embraced that have those uncomfortable conversations, have those uncomfortable tasks that you have to do, right, like to ensure that you get to the right outcomes and get people aligned in terms of like making those things happen. So, I think that's basically one of the biggest roles of leadership, like the problems that everyone wants to solve are already being solved in the organization. You don't need leaders for that. The role of the leaders should be to surface up those uncomfortable situations, those uncomfortable conversations, especially when it comes to people, right, like, so when you walk into the organization, right, like, and you ask people who should be part of this organization, who should not be part of that organization, right, like 80% of the times, right, like all of them would point towards the same people that these guys are performing really, really well, and these guys are not really performing at the top of their capabilities, right, so it's like organization knowledge is there, but it's like no one wants to be the person who is the bearer of bad news, right, and especially when it comes to people, right, naturally, right, like, we want to protect each other, right, like, that's how these societies are formed whereby we want, like, there's a, there's a camaraderie between colleagues and all, right, so they don't want, even if they know that the colleague is not performing up to the expectations, they don't want them to, to, to really leave, right, and so I think that's basically one big part of leadership. Okay, that's interesting, look, you mentioned, you know, leadership principles don't really change depending on the environment, so what are your core leadership principles that you've maintained throughout your career? So I think one thing is basically getting the team aligned in a common vision and mission, right, like that's really important, like your team needs to rally around it, like the why of things, right, like why are we doing this, so having that vision, communication of that vision, rallying the team on that vision, and then monitoring the progress on that vision, right, like so that people can sort of see that this is what they're moving towards, and it's really important to not only share the big picture, but also to translate into weekly goals into monthly goals so that people can see progress, like when people see progress, right, one other thing I would sort of say is that while you're creating this, right, like create, create sort of some competition, healthy competition between different teams, right, and that I think really helps, so from the biggest principle is that how do you share that vision? Second thing is that transparency, right, like so communication and transparency, right, like let people know as transparently as possible in terms of like where you're heading and where you're not heading as well, so that there are no surprises, right, like I think a lot of times leaders feel that it's their responsibility to hide information because their team would not be able to bear bad news, right, like well that's not true, right, like everyone who's working in a company is an adult, right, and so they already know what's happening, right, like when you don't share the truth with them, they already know that you're not telling the truth, right, you're sort of like protecting them from bad news, so no like surprises, right, like the best thing is to share transparently, like look, these are the things which are working, but these are the things which are not working, and if you don't fix it, then these are the kind of consequences which might happen as a result of that, and if people are aware of that, then I think that really rallies them behind you as a leader and gains your trust, and then the third thing is, I think this is really important as well, is that how you treat people, and I think it's very easy to treat people well when the situation is really good for the organization, right, I think it's really hard when things are not going well and that's when you need to back people in terms of support, in terms of like having conversations, and sort of yeah, I think that's the third part of it, right, like how do you treat your people, and ensure like I think one of the, one of the things which I really like is radical candor, right, which is you talk to people and share the truth as if you really, so as empathetically as possible, and with true care, right, so that when you're delivering this message, people are getting the truth, but they know that it's coming from a place of empathy rather than, rather than harm. The bottom line, which I think is all too often the case, so that's really interesting, so let me just recap, you talk about providing a clear vision, mission, people to understand the context of their role in achieving that, you've talked about transparency, you've talked about empathetic communication, yeah, and I think when you look at the times that you've turned a loss making business around, what strategic approach have you used in initiating that turnaround with those leadership principles? So the first thing I always do when I join an organization is meet all of the department heads, right, like spend time with them because these people know what's happening in the organization, so spend like detail time with each different department, understand what's happening within that organization, and trying to figure out like what should be the key matrix, like how do we come to a shared success vision for this department, right, so build that sort of like stokey board for yourself in terms of like how are these different departments, and when you're talking to one department by trying to link what you've heard from one department to the next department, and that's sort of like when you add all of those pieces together, right, that's basically when you get the complete story in terms of like what's happening within the organization, and as I said, like most of the times it's the people within the organization who know exactly what needs to be done, right, they've not been empowered or they've not been given the trust or they've not been given the support in terms of taking those actions, right, so once you have that, this is when you take all of this and sort of like prioritize in terms of priorities for the organization, what are the top three things that we can do, right, I like these three things, right, rather than sort of like giving out, okay, these are the 20 things to, we like to do, have like three themes, like these are the three things that we're going to do in terms of getting these three things done, this is how it would get across all of the different departments, this is how we're going to rally each one, this is how we're going to measure progress week by week, and then basically share that, right, like, and so that sort of like allows you to get everyone aligned, get, and sometimes I think it's really really fun to have have sort of like a fun activity which happens when people don't perform, right, like, so I think like in one organization what I did was that, okay, these are our targets, and whoever does not meet these targets on a weekly basis, right, like at the end of the month, right, like the person who's a worst performer would need to do a chicken dance in front of everyone, right, and say that look like, and then basically on the counter side, if all of the team members achieve their targets, then basically the deal with the team will start, then I would do a chicken dance in front of everyone, right, and so that is like sort of a fun activity which rallies the people, you know, like people have a laugh about it as well, it's some fun, there's some competitiveness, and then basically you get to your outcomes as well. How many chicken dancers did you do? Just one, and it's on video, right, so we're not very proud of it, but yes. Well, good for you for sticking to your word, and look, in those moments when you're turning around a company, I'd love to understand how you identify, um, priori, and prioritize areas of cost reduction, or optimization perhaps is a better word, and revenue generation, particularly the struggling companies. How'd you, how'd you go about it? Yeah, that's a, that's a very interesting one, right, like I think so the way you do it, like the way I would do it is that, um, go and talk to the different team members, and then basically start identifying the lowest hanging fruits, right, like, okay, so for example, like, okay, we have this department, is it really contributing to us at this stage? No, it's not, right, like, okay, um, can we leverage the people from this department into some other department? Yes, we can or not, we can, or no, we cannot, right. And so based on this, right, like, you start taking those decisions that, okay, this is the lowest hanging fruit, what would be the impact of taking this decision, and what's the, uh, what's basically the difficulty level of this decision, right, and if you have this sort of matrix that impact versus difficulty, and sort of like figure out that, okay, things which are, which have a high impact, but lowest in terms of like difficulty levels, and those are the first ones that you prioritize, right, and you start sort of taking those decisions, uh, along the way, right, like, uh, but I think like one of the things which I try to do, which is really important is that rather than going for a top-down view, right, trying to build that bottom of you as well, right, so asking people, um, what would be your opinion, right, like, how would you go about it, right, like really incorporating that feedback, and when people see that their ideas have been heard, right, and some of those ideas have actually been implemented, that really rallies them up, right, so the most important thing for people to feel is that okay, they've been heard, and the second thing is for them to sort of see their ideas come to life and being implemented, so I think it's really important to sort of like do a mix of like, I don't think you can do complete top-down and complete bottom-up, it should be a mix of, uh, bit of mix of both, but yeah, having that support from the team really helps in terms of taking this, uh, decisions, one thing I would say is that like the most important thing I would say, especially in turn-around situations, is creating that urgency in the team of taking action today rather than tomorrow, right, a lot of the times, like, I've been in organizations with the lost making, which are losing money, but then people are operating at a pace which does not match the agency, and so you really need to instill that drive and urgency and fire amongst people so that quick actions are taken because every day that you're losing money is not good for the company, right, and that could basically be the difference between life and death. I mean, that's a lovely segue into my next question around high-performing teams, and you mentioned, you know, using fun games where you get involved and everybody's on an equal footing in that sense, so what strategies do you employ to build and sustain high-performance teams across different cultures and industries? This is a really good one, right, so I divide this question into two parts. One is basically when you walk into an organization, you inherit a team, right, and the other thing is that you're building a team from scratch, and what I've realized is over my experience is that it's easier to build a team from scratch rather than inheriting a team, because when you inherit a team, there are certain culture or cultural attributes which the team is already sort of exhibiting, right? Then there's legacy. There's legacy, right, and the hardest thing to do is making people unlearn, right, when you're teaching something from scratch, it's much easier when you're building that culture, when you're already inheriting that legacy, then it's much harder because there's a lot of institutional knowledge, and then you want people to change the way they have been behaving for like past three or four years, and that's very hard, right, like it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of energy, and so we are inheriting that team, I think is the harder part, building a team from scratch is the easier part, right? So now in terms of inheriting a team, I think you need to have those open conversations, have clear expectations, and then sort of have those tough conversations early on, right, when you see that things are not working out, rather than really dragging those conversations, right, for months and months, you probably need to have those tough conversations upfront. Let people know who you feel would have a future in the company, and let people know who you feel would not have a future in the company, and do it very, very, very more ecologically as well, right, like for people who are leaving the company, so that's really important. Now in terms of building the culture from scratch, right, over here, it's the first thing that you need to do is raise the bar in terms of hiring, and when I, so like I'll sort of share my strategy in terms of doing that, right, like, so number one thing that I do is I've got three interviews. The first interview is me selling the opportunity to the candidate, right, so this is just about like I've already identified that this profile is really good, and so I'm selling to the candidate that this is why you should work at our company, this is the opportunity ahead of us, this is the impact that we can make together, right, so the first thing is exciting to candidate. Then once the candidate is excited, and this is really important, you move to the second part, you give them a case study, right, and that case study is very, very reflective of the real role, right, so in fact a lot of the times the exact challenges that we're facing as a business, I put them in the case study, so that they get a real flavor of what it's like to work with us, and we get a real flavor of your thinking, right, so now why, why one is important is because if you don't excite them, they're not going to put in the effort in the case study, right, like they need to understand why they should put in two hours, four hours, ten hours of their life into a case study, right, and so they need to be excited about the opportunity, and so just reading a job description, these days this is the other thing, right, in the world of charge GPT, right, like everyone can come up with the best JD job description, right, so, so I prefer that personal touch, that the first interview is just me selling the opportunity, second interview is more about the case study, and then in this case study, normally what we do is we engage people from different departments in different backgrounds, right, so that there's a lot of diversity in the room from a, from basically a culture perspective, from a department perspective, from a gender perspective, all of that, right, that way the candidate feels a lot more comfortable as well, and then you have an educated, basically a educated discussion on actual business problems, right, and so you can, you can sort of sense from that like that how this person is interacting with the different team members of how he would interact with us, right, and so that case study is anywhere between one hour to two hours, that gives you a real feel of how this person would operate in a business context for us, right, and then basically the third and final part is a cultural fit interview, right, which is whereby we just do the normal HR questions and all, so we, and basically like one of the things that we do after the interview process is two questions we ask all of the people who are being part of the interview, and this needs to be done very, very close to the interview, right, so if you're done the interview today ideally either do it the same day or maximum maximum the next day, and the two questions are the first one is of course, and this is the one that we start with, right, why should we not hire this candidate, and that sort of puts off people that, okay, what, like I thought we were supposed to, like no, no, tell us why do you think we should not hire this person, and then the next question is why should we hire the person, right, so that way people are sort of like thinking in opposite directions, and what this does, right, like, and by the way, like 100% of the times any red flags that you see in the interview are going to be accentuated like 10 times when that actual person is working with you, right, everyone has a different style and all, so like when multiple people in that interview room are sharing that feedback on that red flag, you know that, okay, this person probably is not the best fit for our organization, right, so these are the three things that you do to really raise the performance bar and ensure that we hire the best of the best candidates, then basically you've got the probation period, right, and this is basically the best time to sort of understand whether this person like it, at every organization, anyone who's new and who's joining the organization, this is the best performer that you'd get out of that person, and if that person doesn't impress you in the first month, in the first two months, in the first three months, and you let them continue on post the probation period, then it's on you, it's not on them, right, so this probation period, I think, I would use really, really wisely, and to be honest, like there have been times very rare, but there have been times when we've had to take tough calls within the first week of the employee working with us, we're like, okay, this is not working out, let's not waste more time on our end, let's not waste more time on the person's end as well, and let's just have that open conversation, and let's part ways as early on in the journey as possible. That's fascinating, you know, well done you for taking such a, I'd say, pragmatic approach to find the right person, it reminds me very much of my first career, which was in the military, and you know, you went through several processes before you actually got selected, and each process was slightly harder, you know, they were just looking at every single angle, because they're going to invest in you, they're going to spend a lot of money on you, so why take a short sharp trip when you can actually take a bit of time and get the right person the right job to deliver the right results, that's fascinating, I want to move on and look at your cross-industry success, yeah, you've held leadership roles in various industries, how do you adapt those skills to different industries and challenges and dynamics that come across, because you know, I look at the aviation industry, which I've got a fair amount of experience of, I look at your IT, I look at the big four, they're very different cultures, very different industries, so how do you find success in each one of those? That's an interesting one, right, I think like subconsciously definitely helps me, right, because you, your way of thinking expands, right, because you've not been just in one industry, sorry, we've lost you, we've lost you, as a, right, hello, am I back? Yep, yeah, you're back, all right, so interesting question for us, right, like I think every industry is different, and subconsciously I think working in these different industries allows me to bring in the learnings from each different industry, right, each different industry has a different way of operating, right, like for airline for example efficiency is really high, right, especially in terms of like, so for example I used to work in a low cost airline, right, in that like the biggest thing for us was how do you keep the planes in the air maximum time, right, so the key metric for us was aircraft utilization, right, like if you can increase utilization from 11 hours to 12 hours, right, on average, that had a huge impact on your revenue and your, and as a result on your, on your bottom line and all as well, right, so, so I think like taking all of those learnings, subconsciously, I don't think I think about it okay, this is how it's done in that industry, that's, but I think it's just like your, your exposure to different sort of problems really expands, and as a result I think you, you're, you're just a better problem solver. So, perhaps look at it from a different angle then, you know, have you developed a set of universal business principles that you can, you can apply regardless of industry or do you adapt as you go? Yeah, so I think those business principles probably remain the same, right, like, so business principles I would probably say that like open communication, right, like transparent, taking care of your people, right, like those are basically university principles which I think would apply to every single industry, regardless of where you're working at globally and across industries, right, like those are sort of principles that I would presume that just transcend all boundaries. I want to look now at your activity as an investor. Yeah. How has your experience as an investor influenced your approach to actually leading companies? I think this is a really good one, right, like because when you're an investor you're thinking very differently, and so being an investor allows you to put yourself when you're, when you're a leader in that position, right, okay, this is what the investors would be looking for, right, like this is the messages that need to be delivered, this is how we should communicate with them, right, like, so I think being on both sides of the equation really helps you to become a better leader, a better communicator, and also like really boiling it down in terms of like your execution strategy and getting to the right results, right, because investors don't care about what has happened in terms of the details, what they really care about is basically the number, right, the final number, the metric, right, so yes, the story is important and all, but most importantly is the metrics, right, like that, how would this story get you to get you to that metric, right, so I think from that perspective, like having a lot more clarity in terms of your communication and also like having a clear outline in terms of like what do you want to achieve so that the investors would sort of like give you the right support. Interesting, so what do you look for when cultivating partnerships with executives and startups? I think shared business values, this is the most important one, right, so I think there are just different ways of doing business in the world and if you do not share the same business values as your partners or your executives, right, like I think no matter how good you are, no matter how good the vision is, it's just going to be very very difficult to come up with a successful outcome for yourself, right, like so I think I would definitely recommend that you won't compromise on your business values and sort of spend time on ensuring that you're not just partnering with anyone and everyone, you're partnering with people who you would share the same business values because I think like as I always say like in good times everyone is good, right, you want to sort of see how people behave when things are not going well, right, and that sort of like brings out the two colors of people and so you want to sort of imagine that situation, like what would happen if everything goes wrong, would I want to work with this person, would I want to work with this company, right, and that would sort of like be a really really good filter to see if this would be a partnership that would be worthwhile. Interesting, look, you know, we're all familiar and know of sort of good investments and bad investments and how people have managed them and you know how partnerships have fallen or partnerships have flourished but when you're overcoming these challenges, what are some of the biggest challenges you've faced in your leadership journey and how do you overcome them? I think this is an interesting one, like what I've realized is that at times people expect a lot from leader, right, and it's everyone, right, it's your employees, it's your customers, it's your investors, it's your board members, right, there is like huge expectations from you and it's like you're basically the superman who would or superwoman, right, like who would sort of like resolve all of the challenges for everyone, right, and it's like you would have the answers for everything and that's the expectation and when things are not going well, right, like you're the one who faces the brunt of everything, so I think like this has been a there have been times when we've been in situations which are very very tough and at that time I think you just need to maintain your character and sort of like focus on the longer term plan that you've envisioned for the company and stick to it, right, I think that's the most important thing, right, a lot of times people would pivot in different directions under pressure although they themselves know that this is probably not the right direction for the company for themselves but within these pressures, right, like they are not able to live up to what they're already envisioned for themselves and for the company, right, and that I've never seen it work out, right, so I think this is what I've realized, right, like stick to the plan, focus on execution once you've committed to something, try and get it through to execution unless you yourself feel that this is not working out and you feel that there's a bit of vision for the company, right, like do not fall succumb to pressures of others, right, customer centristies are a passion of mine and I firmly believe that every business strategy should be customer centric and as part of that obviously then the ability to lead a customer centric strategy and turn it into a profitable concern is key and look, you've won the Australian Customer Service Award which is a significant achievement, how did you prioritize your customer experience in your business model? This is a really, really good one, right, like so what we did over there was that we introduced the use of AI calls, at that time they were pretty new AI calls, right, and we decided to deliver on customer experience at a scale with these AI calls, right, and the funny thing is that when I first, you know, like played with this concept and talked to my team that guys, you know, what do you think we, so the use case that we had was that we wanted to contact all of our customers who sign up on the product immediately, right, like so you wanted to ensure that we have the first touchpoint with them and we actually employed humans to do it, right, and what we realized was that the touchpoints were only around at 30% or so, so we pitched this idea of AI, everyone in my team was against the idea, right, they were like that this would not work because it would make us feel very impersonal, right, and so we had to sort of like look at what's the end goal that we have and how would it help us, right, and the AI program that we used was actually smart enough to detect the tone of voice of humans to the extent that if they were getting angrier, right, it would actually give the option to customers to speak to an agent, right, and if they detected some swear words or something, they would immediately transfer the person to a human, right, so I think like when we, when you talk about customer centricity, right, like it's like you look at what's the, what's the end goal, why are you deploying technology and how would it impact the overall customer experience and so I think like what what we focused on was that having a mix of technology and people to ensure that people get the best experience and we can actually get to as many customers as possible, right, so our contact rates include from 30% to almost 70%, right, which gave us a lot more insight in terms of the customers and gave the customers a lot more better experience, right, because it's the first point of contact whereby if you can show them the power of your product, right, then they become users for life, so it required an investment from that perspective and I think this is why the Australian authority is really like our concept, the way we delivered it whereby there was a human element to it and there was a technology element to it and it was scalable and it was sort of like serving the purpose, right, so yeah, impressive. I've got a couple more questions just to round off this fascinating interview. I want to talk about scaling business and you've been involved in Kareem, which is a remarkable story here in the Middle East region. What strategies have you found effective in scaling businesses rapidly? You expanded Kareem to over 6 million customers. How? Yeah, this was a I think it was a very, very tough journey, right, like and we were competing with now their partners Uber but at that time they were like our competitor, right, and they were a formidable competitor, like they go all out. So I think like from a strategy perspective, the first thing we did was that we wanted to be really, really close to the customers, right, and what we focused on at that point in time was that what are the things that the customers want which no one else is providing and can we somehow provide that, right, like and we did not care about scalability and all at that point in time, right, it was more about delivering that customer experience and so the three things we focused on which really helped us differentiate, right, like the first thing we identified was that this is 2014 or so, right, so at that time females in Saudi and Saudi Arabia were not driving and so we realized that almost 70 to 80% of our customers were females and for them the most important thing was security and when people want to feel secure they want to talk to people who speak in a similar dialect in similar language, right, and so we actually invested in a local call center and hired Saudi females which was not the norm, right, like the norm at that point in time was to outsource locations which were providing a lot more cost effective solutions, right, but we actually invested in our own call center in Saudi to have that security piece sorted out, right, so that was number one. Number two, what we felt was that in terms of the appearance of the driver it was really important for us to focus on that and so there was no regulatory body in Saudi who was doing it but we somehow convinced our drivers that in order for you to work with us and to get your earnings, right, like we actually created these categories, right, that you start off with a bronze driver then you move on to silver category then you move on to gold and then once you were like the best captain we used to call our drivers, driving partners captains, right, so when you go to that then basically become a Kareem captain and Kareem captain is basically epitome of how customer service should be delivered and we linked it to their earnings, right, so if you're a Kareem captain we would try to prioritize bookings to you so that you maximize your earnings and so as a result of that we really focused on the appearance of the captains, right, so they had to wear like white shirts, black pants, tucked in, open doors for customers and provide water and we're not providing any additional payments for this but the payments would be that this would allow you to move up the ladder in terms of your tiers and once you move at the top tier then basically you earn much higher, right, so that was the second thing and the third thing was this was the hardest thing for us to do, right, like so our value proposition initially was that cashless payments but we realized that in Saudi at that point in time a lot of people preferred paying in cash, right, and so we were like either we sort of like not listened to the market which is telling us that they need cash or basically we sort of like stick to the older ways of like credit cards and all right, so we actually went ahead and launched cash, I was a really really operationally disaster, right, because the customer would say we've paid, the rival would say they've not paid right, how do we collect the cash from all of the driving partners, all of that, right, like so we faced massive operational challenges but at the same time from a growth perspective we tripled our numbers, right, like in two to three months and that basically just helped us accelerate our growth across all of the different comparator, comparator players. Amazing, amazing, so that's why I didn't get the cream drive that I was hoping for the other day because it wasn't good enough for the guy at the... it's a wonderful service, it's a wonderful service. It's been fascinating speaking with you and we could go on and I most probably won't call you back again for another chat because it's really great stuff. Closing thoughts, is there a personal mantra or philosophy that guides you in your professional role? Yeah, so my mantra is that a no-regret approach takes risks in life, right, like life is too short and I always go with this philosophy of what's the worst that can happen, right, like and so like if I took at all of these different journeys that I took, like when I joined the airline, I'm like what's the worst that can happen in six months time with shuts down, big deal, like I had a corporate role, right, like earlier, I will find one, right, then when I moved from the airline to Kareem, once again it was a high risk move, right, because at that time no one you Kareem, I was by the way like employee number one in Saudi Arabia and employee number eight globally, right, Kareem is now like what 3,000 plus employees, right, so at that time was a huge risk, but I was like what's the worst that can happen, right, like okay, we will not succeed, no one is expecting us to succeed, but what if we actually succeed, right, like what would that look like, right, so it completely changed the mantra, right, and so this is basically what I sort of operate with, right, like take risks, no-regret life and then basically always imagine the what's what's the worst that can happen scenario and then basically you would be fine, right, like it's not that things would go like really really south, right, even if they do you can recover, right, like it's not like a completely reversible decision, so like I think yeah that's basically by personal mantra, right, like always think of what's the worst that can happen, no regrets, take risks and that's it, enjoy life. Wonderful, great advice, love it, love it, so how can our listeners follow you, your work and get involved with your current adventures? I'm mostly active on LinkedIn, that's the platform that I am most active on, so yeah they can follow me on LinkedIn, I work for SWAP, right, so they can follow a website, join SWAP or Instagram or on Facebook and all, and yeah, like I would be happy to help out anyone I can and whatever I can. This has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today and you've offered some marvellous words of wisdom to our listeners and I think they can learn an awful lot from you and thank you again and find at the time your busy schedule to come and join us at the top floor, thank you. My pleasure, thank you so much for having me, thank you.
