Chicago, London, Beirut, Dubai: standard flight itinerary for Shady Samir, general manager of IT firm GET Egypt and the owner of seven IT businesses located across the MENA region and Europe.
At only 34 years of age, Samir has already distinguished himself globally as an innovative entrepreneur and manager. The stellar salesman’s success is the kind that starry-eyed business school students daydream about during their accounting lecture. But the jet-setting, metropolis-hopping, Italian-suit-wearing, adrenaline-fueled lifestyle is only half the story.
Samir’s career is the classic pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps tale of success, the kind that requires taking a plunge, 17-hour workdays, ironclad commitment to clients and, according to Samir, a dose of good old-fashioned virtue.
As his personal slogan puts it, “Success is achieved by persistence, hard work, ethics and, above all, faith in God.”
His career began when he was 16 with a small loan from his parents to purchase and resell clothing items. It wasn’t long before he discovered a knack for talking up customers and squeezing out profit margins. He hasn’t stopped selling since.
Eighteen years and many a frequent flyer miles later, Samir is sharing his wealth of experience with those daydreaming business students through his participation in NGOs and his own mentorship program.
Getting creative
After his first foray into sales as a teenager, Shady discovered the strategy that would prove the key to his success.
“One of the themes that you will find in all my businesses is that I never work against competition,” Samir says. “I never work for a line that has a lot of competition. I always choose the niche, and the niches never end. There are an unlimited number of ideas that could be explored.”
As an undergraduate at City University at the age of 19, Samir carved out his own small niche. It began with an airline catering company and soon expanded into providing hot, wet napkins for restaurants. Ever the opportunist, Samir began distributing the napkins to restaurants and collecting them to be washed at the end of the day along with staff uniforms.
“I remember quite well the first LE 500,000 that I earned,” reminisces Samir. “It was at the age of 19.”
Ever since his years as a young clothing salesman, Samir told himself that he would never work as an employee. Upon graduating with a degree in architectural engineering, however, rumors of potential salaries upwards of LE 80,000 per month made by employees of multinationals were simply too tempting.
After a grueling interview cycle with a multinational construction firm in 1999, Samir failed to get a position as an architectural engineer. What he did get was better and launched him on his path to success. He was hired by the multinational as a commercial engineer responsible for negotiating prices with sub-contractors and project owners. It was only enough to whet his appetite.
“I did a great job in [my first] three or four months, so they moved me and they assigned me to the headquarters negotiating at a higher level, but I couldn’t find myself [in] this,” he recalls. “I discovered that there are several levels one has to go through to earn LE 80,000 per month. It was far away.”
Despite his frustration, his time at the multinational built his sense of confidence. Soon, he took notice of an industry that, like him, was young and booming — information technology.
After a year at the construction multinational, he joined an IT firm and for the first time felt he had found work that matched both his talent and ambition. Responsible for implementing telecom solutions, he also built up a formidable client network in a key sector.
“I boomed,” says Samir. “There I discovered a lot of skills I never knew about. I was always able to reach whatever I wanted through good communication skills.”
His years at the company were grueling. As an international products manager he found himself following an exhausting flight schedule around the MENA region. Leaving Egypt on Saturday, he was on a flight to another country the following Monday, returning to Egypt on Thursday.
“It was getting on my nerves, it was crazy,” he recalls. “I was happy in the beginning that this was [giving me confidence], that I was always on a flight, in a business meeting, but I got fed up.”
Returning to Egypt, Samir found more sedentary work at an electronic financial transaction company. Again, he didn’t fail to impress, with the company signing on 12 banks in a single year.
Raking it in
With a strong network within the telecom and financial sectors, Samir finally decided it was time to strike out on his own. In 2006 he founded EMC as an IT provider intended to holistically transform any company’s operations through cloud computing, allowing firms to maximize the potential of their information.
EMC offers software and solutions to IT departments in a wide range of industries to store, manage, protect and analyze their information assets in a more dependable, cost-efficient way.
“We made millions and millions and I was 28. We made LE 30 to 40 million in the first year, LE 90 million in the second year and in 2010 we were making LE 300 million,” says Samir.
The services of EMC are based on the same core concepts — Information Lifecycle Management and Data Science — as the other businesses that would soon follow: VMware, Symantec, SPSS, RSA, StatSoft and Red Hat.
Information Lifecycle Management, explains Samir, is a system of classifying information and applications according to their value to business, then defining and implementing policies to deliver appropriate service levels and minimize costs.
Data Science is using the available data to connect the dots. The Data Science approach reveals relevant trends and patterns to maximize the efficiency of an organization’s operations. The concept is applicable to a wide range of fields including healthcare, government, financial services and retail, allowing them to simplify complex issues and identify opportunity.
The companies boomed, leading to the opening of an office in the UK and an office in France to manage operations in the Schengen countries.
Always looking for new niches to exploit, Samir is now tossing about the idea of a European-based Islamic investment fund catering to wealthy Gulf investors.
Amid his dizzying ascent to success, Samir never abandoned his belief that his success and wealth was a blessing from God.
Handing down a legacy
At the age of 28, the rise from modest origins to fame in the business world was getting hectic as Samir continued running day-to-day operations. He was also in need of some company for the road.
Itching to share his wealth of business wisdom with others, he selected four recent graduates to mentor. He chose the students from MSA University, the American University in Cairo and the German University in Cairo, based not so much on their academic records, but rather on their character.
“I didn’t even care about what they learned at university,” he says. “I cared about their morals and behavior, because what their families couldn’t raise them on in the last 20 years I won’t be able to raise them on over the next 20 years, but I can teach them any kind of business.”
Samir’s protégés were put to work in his companies, accompanying him to business meetings and flying with him around the world.
“They watch, they learn, they shadow […] they participate in the business plans,” explains Samir. “So [now they replicate] my concepts.”
The protégés are now 26 years old and at the head of Samir’s companies, with one running operations in the UK, another running two companies in the UAE and two others working in Egypt.
“It happens that two of them excelled in the business side and in the operations side,” Samir says, “so they started to help me on the strategic level and acquiring new products and flying for negotiations with the vendors and the suppliers.”
“They are now successful, 26 year-old businessmen […]. Once you see them you know [they are] businessmen,” says Samir of his protégés. “You will find them in the Emirates today, in the US tomorrow and in Germany the day after. They are living a very tough life for their age, but I think this is the age [at which] we learn.”
Though still young, the protégés may soon become mentors themselves. The program was so successful that Samir is considering taking on a new batch of young graduates — this time assigning them to the young businessmen that he himself mentored. Samir says he is prouder of his protégés than he is of his own accomplishments.
“This is one of the main achievements I made in my life,” he says. “Across the country I have about 400 employees. I care about all of them, but these four people are my personal responsibility.”
Words of wisdom
Eager to share the knowledge gained over the course of his short but distinguished career, Samir also works with Egyptian NGO, Tamayouz, lecturing young students on how to reach their full potential.
It all starts with a little creativity, he suggests. It’s not only about finding opportunity, it’s about creating it.
“Don’t tell me there are no opportunities […],” he says, explaining how young businessmen can advance. “We are 80 million [people in Egypt], if you manage to grab one piastre from everyone a month, you will [nearly] be a millionaire. Don’t tell me I don’t have an idea to grab one piastre.”
“Stay away from the competition,” he continues. “The new ideas never end. Look for a newer one, pursue it and achieve it. None of my companies are implementing a current idea.”
Once you’ve found a foothold, don’t let it go.
“Never leave an opportunity,” Samir says. “I never run to target something and then I leave it. Let’s say I want to finish [a sale] before the end of Q1. I might not reach the target date in Q1, but I never leave it. I keep trying, even if we get into the end of Q4, I will keep pursuing it.”
Be patient and focus on the long term.
“The long selling cycle is boring for the sales team, but when you start the cycle today for 12 months you’ll have business for next January,” he says. “When you start in February you’ll have business next February. […] For the second year, you’ll have business every month. And you could be lucky and close it in six months, and you will taste the flavor of success and achievement.”
Most importantly, build your relationship with the customer, even if it means sacrificing profit in the short term.
“We are always people selling to people,” says Samir, “regardless what product we sell, regardless what business card we present. So we have to build our legacy of efficiency and commitment to the [customer]. Those people will buy from me today and they will buy from me tomorrow […] from this company and from the other company.”
No matter what your business strategy, it all comes down to ethics, he believes — and ethics come from faith.
“I believe in Allah because there are a lot of people who are intelligent, exactly like me, and actually more intelligent than I am,” Samir says, speaking openly about the role he believes God plays in his life. “I work 16 or 17 hours a day, and there are a lot of people working 16 or 17 hours a day, maybe more […] but they are not [as successful]. So we always [have to] believe that Allah is the one that supports our success.”
Samir claims that his ethics have convinced clients to respect and trust him and to recommend him to other companies around the world.
“When it comes to money and success, it’s never one plus one equals two,” he concludes about his business approach. “Let’s say you’re making a salary of LE 2,000 a month. It’s not a must that at the end of the year you have LE 24,000. It’s a new way of business, a new stream of revenue that Allah is sending you every day.” bt
