What’s the biggest career mistake you would gladly make again? 11 leading entrepreneurs tell us.
“Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom." -William Jordan
In career, and in life, we make mistakes. You can’t prevent them
and avoiding them is a mistake in itself. Business leaders make
many and have the scars to show for them. They can cause harm and
loss, but they can also open doors and serve as learning
opportunities.
We asked some of the Middle East’s business leaders and
entrepreneurs a simple question:
What is the biggest mistake you made in your career that you would gladly do again if you go back in time?
Here is what 11 of them had to say:
Ihsan Jawad
Partner, Honeybee
Technology Ventures
Previously:
CEO & cofounder, Zawya.com (acquired by Thomson Reuters in
2012)
One almost fatal mistake early on in Zawya's formation was
to kick off operations with smaller capital than the business
required. This could have killed the business when things did
not go to plans and indeed that's the main cause for most start up
failures.
However, looking back at it now, I may just do it again as the
situation made us take the right survival choices rather than just
drift along and disappear into irrelevance. The real
constraint resulting from that mistake forced us to get creative
and innovative.
Rabea Ataya
CEO and Cofounder,
Bayt.com
Also incubated a number of startups including
GoNabit, Mumzworld.com, YallaMotor, and
DoctorUna.com.
Previously: founder, InfoFort
“I have continually underestimated the complexity involved
in starting new businesses. This recurring mistake has been a
blessing as I would have likely not taken on any new ventures had I
understood a priori how challenging they would be.”
Hussam Khoury
President, Jabbar
Internet Group
Cofounder, Maktoob.com (acquired by
Yahoo in 2009)
The biggest mistake was to jump into a new idea or venture
like Maktoob at a time that did not make sense, and with little
study of the situation, with everyone around telling me you are
crazy!
Yousef Touqan
CEO, Flip
Media
I think the best "mistake" I made was to choose to work with a
young startup digital agency instead of taking a comfortable and
safe client-side role as a Director of Marketing. I'm so proud of
everything we have achieved together at Flip in the last 8 years,
and I'd gladly do it all over again.
Omar Koudsi
Cofounder and CEO,
Jeeran
"I can't think of one "big mistake" but I have made a ton
of mistakes that have built up my experience and I am glad I went
through them. As they say, good judgment comes from
experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
Laith Zraikat
Founder,
Olgot.com
Previously: Cofounder, Jeeran
The biggest mistake in my career was not getting some corporate
experience before I started my company. In retrospect, it would
have been impossible to have that anyway since I started back in
1997 while in my second year of university. There have been
tremendous advantages to startup at that time and under those
circumstances so I would gladly make that mistake again :)
Corporate experience will give you reference points when dealing
with employees and trying to put yourself in their shoes. For me it
was all guessing, as I was never an employee. In the least, they
would not be looking at you as someone who has not been in their
shoes.
Rama Chakaki
Cofounder, Baraka
Ventures
My biggest mistake was leaving my last corporate job as a COO, to startup a business in a domain I knew nothing about.
I was in the IT and telecom sector, and yet my heart was in
social causes & development. I felt we could combine both. I
saw a need to explore a new business model that combined social and
financial goals, as existing businesses often placed all the
emphasis on a financial bottom line, with little attention paid to
their social or environmental impact.
So I left the job, and risked all. Because it was uncharted
territory for me and unfamiliar to others in the region, I had to
learn by trial and error. I invested in social ventures that
failed miserably, but I learned a lot from those failures.
The flexibility of running my own business allowed me to step
outside the office, work in the field and gain amazing insights on
social and environmental challenges first hand.
Venturing into a "green field" also allowed me to explore creative
ways to get things done. The lack of financial support from
third parties kept me alert to making the business run on a "bubble
gum and shoe string" budget.
Perhaps it was a mistake to risk everything and invest my savings
at a time when I could have been earning a significant salary in a
booming economy. But I became fearless where it came to
financial risk and learned the merits of a values-driven business.
Best result: I am surrounded by a community who believes in
social business.
Alper Celen
Founder &
Managing Director, Commit Network
Most people quit their consulting jobs at McKinsey after many
months of soul searching and rigorous comparison of numerous
corporate opportunities. So, when I quit McKinsey in 2009 to
“become an entrepreneur” without a clear long-term plan, many
thought that I had made a major career mistake.
My McKinsey colleagues had a hard time understanding how I could
take on such a risk with a wife and new baby to support. My
friends thought that the first step after the Firm was the most
important in one’s career and that I should have taken a director
or CXO position in a tech company instead of founding my own
startup.
On most accounts, my choice to let go of a dream career and
guaranteed income and benefits as a consultant seemed like a
mistake. Yet, I would make that mistake all over again if given the
chance. The truth is that the best reason for invention is
necessity. Without fully facing the risks of being an entrepreneur,
I would not have met the people that I met, I would not have had
the ideas that I had, and my company Commit would not have shaped
as it did. Thus, my advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is often
summarized in one word: “quit!”
Of course, be sensible in doing so and calculate your options in
case of failure.
Mona Ataya
Founder,
Mumzworld.com
Previously: Cofounder, Bayt.com
All choices I have made and will continue to make are
based on the data I have at the time, my experience and my “gut” as
the final tipping point. Some of these choices were perhaps
not the best, but were resulting in learning nonetheless. So I
don’t consider any of these choices mistakes, but rather pieces of
the puzzle that are guiding me to where I need to be.
Fadi Ghandour
Founder & Vice
Chairman, Aramex
Cofounder & Director, MENA Venture
Investments
For me, there are no “biggest mistakes.” There are a
series of many smaller ones that are gems of knowledge in my life
and I am sure in the life of every entrepreneur.
That is how we have built our businesses over the decades, making
mistakes and failing and learning along the way. I am a firm
believer (out of experience) that through failure you learn, and
that through many small failures, you learn everything.
Trial and error has been a guiding principle for me ever since I
can remember. Not because I took it up deliberately, but as I was
building the business, I discovered that as I try things, and take
decisions (many of them every day), I am making judgment errors,
and other mistakes. But I also discovered that every “bad decision”
I have made was something that stuck in my mind, (meaning I learned
from it, that is why I remembered it) and these mistakes where the
building blocks of my cumulative experience and
knowledge.
So I would never trade these mistakes ever... they are what got
me here, and I would repeat them again and again. Just like working
in a laboratory, you try and try to find the right formula that
clicks.
Dany Farha
Cofounder & CEO,
BECO Capital
Cofounder, Butlers, and
Intercat
Previously: Cofounder of Bayt.com
I have had the privilege of being an instrumental part of
and co-founding a multitude of businesses over the last 18
years.
At the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I was adamant about
performing all the core functions in the company. I
self-inflicted the painful process of shadowing not just core
functions but key business areas that I determined could lead to
the success or failure of the company, all the way down to fraud
detection.
I spent many days, weeks and months performing these tasks myself,
working very closely with store keepers, accountsclerks, delivery
drivers, technicians, receptionists, sales managers, HR
staff and more as I focused on learning many facets of the
business.
This was a consistent mistake in that it was extremely tasking on
my time, and I often worked 15 hour days, 6 days a week, to make up
for my own key management duties. I was often rightly accused by my
friends and partners of not delegating, being too “hands-on,” and
trying to do too much.
I also did much of this reluctantly and didn’t always enjoy the
process. But in hindsight, what seemed to be a consistent mistake,
even 15 years on, now seems like a fantastic investment. The
drawbacks can be severe, particularly slowing growth in the earlier
years, especially when, as a founding managing partner, you are so
instrumental in driving the growth of the business. My
pursuit for knowledge and functional excellence took away from my
being strategic, creating an elaborate growth plan, hiring and
managing talent to execute the plan and spending time with key
stakeholders.
These actions worked against me eventually, but they were a
“mistake” that I would repeat in a heartbeat. The benefits are
innumerable. A detailed command of every aspect of your business,
enabling you to better manage these functional managers in the
future, understand what is possible and how to raise the bar and
promote innovation. These skills are often transferrable, hence the
ability to compound this knowledge and experience across functions
and businesses.
The pluses include camaraderie and being able to identify top
performers; many of our stars came from the hidden bottom of the
ranks. Identifying new business opportunities, products and
services, acquisitions and new markets also come out of this tiring
process.
To demonstrate that we still walk the talk, my partner and I at
BECO Capital are once again performing all the core functions
ourselves, right down to the filing, and hiring key positions only
once we’ve mastered all the details that go into building a high
quality investment firm. The big pay-off today is for our portfolio
companies as we transfer these experiences to inform them where
appropriate.
What do you think? Share your thoughts.