050: Creating More Innovation by Celebrating Failure and Rewarding Success with Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast

We celebrate failure, and we reward success. And the reason why we have done that early on in the company is that we want innovation at Simply Cast, we want to allow every member of the team to make mistakes. If you are punished by making mistakes, chances are you are not going to innovate and chances are we are going to fall behind as an organisation. So we always celebrate failure, but when you succeed in our company, you will get rewarded either monetary promotion or just a pat on the back. So that is a model that we have created early on, and we have stuck with and it has been really good to us.

#00:01:11-7# Neil: Hello it’s Neil Ball, thank you so much for joining me today on the entrepreneur way. The entrepreneur way is about the entrepreneurs’ journey, the vision, the mind-set, the commitment, the sacrifice, failures and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, Saeed El-Darahali, before I introduce you to him though I have a little quote for you, Noem Chonsky said ‘as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.’ The entrepreneur way asks the questions, so we all get the insight, inspiration and ideas to apply in our businesses. Saeed, welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of the entrepreneur way with us?

#00:02:00-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yes I am and thanks for having me on the show today. #00:02:03-7# #00:02:03-7# #00:02:03-7# #
#00:02:0Neil: Thank you for coming on the show Saeed. Saeed El-Darahali is the driving force behind SimplyCast’s all-in-one marketing solution, which has grown to serve clients in over 175 countries. Saeed brings over nine years of management experience, and a strong interest in strategic partnerships, corporate financing, strategic growth, operations, and sales and marketing management to his business and the IT industry. He enjoys sharing his experiences in growing a business from the ground up with start-up companies. Saeed, can you provide us with some more insight into your business and personal life? To allow us to get to know more about what you do and who you are?

#00:03:08-6# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Well again, thanks for having me on the show Neil, again my name is Saeed El-Darahali the president ceo of Simply Cast. Simply Cast started back in 2009. Our goal was very simple, was to basically help every business, small medium or large to communicate with their customers, using their preferred role of communication. As you can imagine today and you are listening to the show, you have basically been bombarded with so many different communication channels, your voice mail is a channel, your email is a channel, YouTube is a channel, Facebook is a channel, twitter is a channel and the list goes on, and small businesses have been struggling for many many years to actually communicate with their customers using that preferred mode of communication. Corporations, fortune 1000’s have the capabilities, the resources. However small businesses did not and this is where my vision came up, where we wanted to really create a simple solution, that’s cost effective, that is not even going to break your bank. That will allow you to communicate with your customers, using everything from email, SMS, voice, facts; you see our technology, online chat, and everything else in between. And this is what Simply Cast is about, my vision for the company and from a personal entrepreneurship perspective, is I am looking to make an impact and communication was something that I kind of grew up with since I was on the internet since 1991, and I saw that that is a major disruption that we need to work on to allow the small businesses to have access to the same type of solution that a big corporation has and that is really my life dream is to allow you as a business to be able to grow your business without breaking the bank and giving up a lot of that hard earned dollars and pounds that you are creating back to another company that requires a huge amount of effort and you know and time and money to launch your campaigns and your solution.

#00:04:48-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: And that’s really the story of Simply Cast, I am a father of four young kids, all under the age of ten. And I guess a little bit of background about myself, I used to be in the Canadian armed forces, when I was 17 years old and I have a bachelor of computer science, business administration, human resource management and MBA, Masters and Business Administration, and IT and Finance from St Mary’s University, right here in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia.

#00:05:15-1# Neil: Ok thanks for that Saeed, Saeed, can you just give me a little bit more of an explanation, I understand that your software, it’s sounds to me like it connects with all these other pieces of software and I take it, that is what it is doing. Can you just give us an example of how somebody would actually use that?

#00:05:34-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh I will start off with a statement that our customers have used in the past and then I will give you an example of how somebody is using our application.

#00:05:39-1# Neil: Ok.

#00:05:39-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Our customers usually say as google list a search, Simply Cast is the communication, so when you do a search, google does not really care what type of search you are looking for. You put in your information and hopefully will give you the answers. Similar to Simply Cast, where any type of communication that could happen with our technology. Which marketing have to be a sub-set of that communication. An example of what our customers are using it for, for example we have an organisation that has used our application specifically for debt collections. So any customer that is behind on their bill, using our CRM and our voice SMS and fax and email technology. It will send them various reminders of where they are at in their collection process. You have missed your first bill, an email will come out and will be sent to you reminding you of your bill. The second basic phase of it, if you are 30 days overdue, you are going to get a voice message. The third, you are basically, if you are 60 days overdue, you are going to get an email and then finally, maybe if you are a business, you are going to receive a fax, basically telling you that your account is potentially going to be shut down, if you don’t pay up within 90 days, so that’s a pretty interesting example that some of our customers are using, other customers, some are probably to the people that are listening to the show today, are using us for email, so email marketing, email newsletters, other businesses are using it for SMS. For couponing, basically sending a reminder, that this is an opportunity that they should purchase, especially discounted or an opportunity where there is a reward of some sort, so our system has no specific use case, it’s basically it fit’s the specific needs of your business.

#00:07:24-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: And that’s why we created Simply Cast, almost as a tool kit, that meets the demands of your business but it’s not a strait jacket that allows you to fit into the way we do business.

#00:07:33-1# Neil: So when you talk about email for example, is it using your platform for the emails? or do you interface with other people’s platforms?

#00:07:41-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: No, we actually own a 100% of our platform and we own everything within our, we own our back end emailing infrastructure and the front end emailing architecture.

#00:07:49-5# Neil: Ok, right thanks for explaining that a bit more. So what do you enjoy most about what you do Saeed?

#00:07:56-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think the biggest enjoyment for me when I wake up, early in the morning, is coming to actually meet with my team. My team is some of the best people in the world that are, work really hard every single day. And working with them, just feels like a second family, we were working together to make that huge impact. So that is my biggest enjoyment of coming to work every day, at Simply Cast, and I guess my second one is serving my customers and ensuring that they meet the needs of their business. Every single day we receive probably anywhere between a couple of hundred feedback messages, telling us you know how well we are doing or if there is an issue, people obviously give us a note of there is an issue of a specific component that they would like us to improve, so reading a five out of five almost 95% of the time, is really a great way to start the day. And then focusing on the people that rate us below four and three and sometimes a one out of five when they have an issue with the software, and then we kind of get really moving to ensure that that is being solved. Then we do that, pretty much every single day.

#00:08:59-4# Neil: And what is it that drives you?

#00:09:02-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: What drives me is making an impact, I think you know allowing small businesses around the world to have access to software that only big businesses have access to, is what really drives me because it gives them the capability of growing their business to something that’s bigger to something they thought they could, without having to break the …

#00:09:16-1# Neil: And how do you relax when you are not working in your business?

#00:09:22-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I actually play with my kids so everything from x box, to we go swimming sometimes, we watch movies together, depending on the day, and various, with three boys basically trying to separate them from you know jumping on each other.

#00:09:38-1# Neil: And do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

#00:09:41-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Actually my mother is my entrepreneurial role model, as you can imagine, she is the ceo, the host, she gave birth to five of us, and she managed to work as a teacher, raise us well and keep us honest and she is the, my role model every day and I look up to her and she has done very very well and in my opinion, she is the number one in the world.

#00:10:05-7# Neil: What a great answer, Saeed, can we talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur? What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

# #00:10:16-4# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think knowing everything that you need to know about business when you start is probably the most difficult and the most challenging for anyone to start a business. We are never born entrepreneurs, we are never born business people and we are never born engineers, and try to figure out all the things you need to figure out to start a business, is probably the hardest journey that I have ever had. But it was a rewarding journey because I have learned a lot and I have been applying those skill sets since I was 14 years old, and did you have any difficulties that delayed you in starting your business?

#00:10 #00:11:10-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think you know, every hump in the road is a delay, in my opinion, but starting a business was straightforward, selling is very hard as you can imagine, once you learn what your customer pain is and once you have figured out their valued proposition. But these are words that I did not know about when I was young and I probably only knew about them ten years ago.

#00:11:10-1# Neil: What mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

#00:11:13-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think I made tons of mistakes, everything from not investing in the right customer, selecting the wrong customer target, you know putting money where you should not have put it in, and not having enough money when everything started working, to I remember at a young age, I started a cotton candy business, and I was at the age of 14 and I could not drive in Canada until you were 16. So I had to come up with a pretty neat idea where I had my father buy a truck and basically drive me around to deliver my product until I was 16, and then I was putting almost 2,000 clicks on the vehicle every week, basically leaving school at 3 o’clock and getting home at 12 o’clock.

#00:11:52-2# Neil: That’s a creative solution wasn’t it? Getting your dad to do it?

#00:11:54-5# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh exactly, getting my father to .. creative solution.

#00:11:58-5# Neil: And what mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

#00:12:05-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think I took on too many jobs, I had on average when I was 14, three jobs. And then when I entered university I had close to 12 different positions, either you know I did things like marking, I did things like a TA, I did you know various little positions, but I never focused on one thing. It made me a lot of money when I was young and I was able to pay off my student loan in a short period of time. But I think, you know focusing on one thing, which is what I am doing today with Simply Cast, where I am potentially putting all my eggs in one basket, but putting all my effort and it’s been a rewarding effort because it’s increased our value, tremendously compared to me you know focusing on six or seven different things, back when I was young.

#00:12:53-0# Neil: And what are some of the things you did before you started your business? that would be helpful tips for some of the listeners, who have not yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way?

#00:13:02-5# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think your best bet and it’s probably against what most people tell you, work in another business, learn as much as you can about that business, you are not trying to compete with that business but learning the way the founder works in that business and the effort and time, that they put into the business, is something that you should consider before you start your business. Owning a business is a 25-hour job, and there’s not enough time in the day. You are asleep and you are eating at work and you are thinking about work constantly, it is a roller coaster that if you truly do not believe in your commitment into that business, chances are that business will fail and 95% of businesses do fail, and it’s not because people run out of money or and so on, it’s because the commitment of the founder is no longer there and then solutions never come up.

#00:13:45-4# Neil: That’s a great answer you have given there Saeed, a good summary of what it is like to be an entrepreneur. And working on someone else’s dime, which is what someone else has described what you have talked about there, is something that a few people have suggested, it seems like a great idea that. So thank you for that, can we just talk about the entrepreneurial journey a little bit here? moving forward a bit, so when you start a business, do you think culture is important from the beginning?

#00:14:13-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: It is the most important thing, before you write your business plan is to decide what your culture will be.

#00:14:21-6# Neil: So you have done that in your business, so how can you give examples of what the culture is you have created in your business? #00:1

#00:14:25-6# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Definitely, and I think the cultural norms of Simply Cast, has come from my mother as well. My mother has always said to us at a young age, a person is always the same on the inside, it does not matter what they look like on the outside, you should treat them all the same. This is the similar opportunity and similar culture that we have created at Simply Cast, is that we do not really care what you look like, what your colour is, what your religion is, how tall you are, how short you are, or anything else in between. Female or male or anything in between as well, all we care about is that you have the same set of rules and understanding of what we are trying to do. And you are joining us in a journey to create an impact for small businesses around the world and creating the best communication platform, and all we care about at the end of the day is a simple philosophy that we came up with, a single rule at Simply Cast is that we care about one thing is to make you the best employee and the best person in the world and we are going to do everything in our power, to ensure that you succeed as a person, because if you succeed as a person, and every person succeeds at Simply Cast, Simply Cast will be successful as well. So we focus on the individual rather than focus on the company.

#00:15:34-8# Neil: That’s a good way of getting the best results that. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out would have helped you to shortcut the learning curve?

#00:15:45-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Oh definitely I think investing more in the business and focusing our effort on a single task as a group, would have been a much more, great strategy for the company where our company basically was scatter-brained early on because we had to do what we had to do building 15 channels of communication. Where we were not best at any one of them, it took us about two years before we became the number one in the marketing automation space, and today if you look around the internet world, either number two, number three, number four, but we are always in the top ten. And that’s really the focus of our team, making sure that we deliver on the value that our customers are looking for.

#00:16:33-2# Neil: And how much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business?

#00:16:37-5# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I would probably say early on it probably would have been 70% to 30% decision. Today, I would probably say it’s probably around 40/60. Where 60 is informed decision based on data, and 40% on gut.

#00:16:53-6# Neil: Yeh which is obviously in the beginning you don’t have the data, do you? So you have to rely more on your gut feeling. Is that the reason for the difference?

#00:17:00-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Correct. That’s correct.

#00:17:02-0# Neil: And what advice would you give to other business owners that may be struggling in a business?

#00:17:06-6# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think the biggest problem is as you probably already know, and the listeners of the show is we always say, ‘it’s lonely at the top.’ But I think it’s really a choice that we make, to make it lonely at the top, for me for example, I talk about a lot of things that happen in my company with a lot of different people. There is no one person that knows the full story which probably a strategy that I made, early on of the issues, so I talk to one person about pricing, I talk to another person about strategy, I talk to another person about HR. And I think I always try to go back to one or two people about the same issue, and talking about it is something that is very important and I think we need to be cognisant of talking about the issue, potentially will get your brain to think about solutions. Where keeping it in your brain and fearing the consequences of it, potentially will reduce your ability to make a better decision.

#00:18:04-8# Neil: Life is made of constant change, whether we like it or not, and some people say the only constant is change, Saeed, how do you try to keep up with change?

#00:18:16-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I basically embrace it, if we are not changing, for example the last year, I have allowed pretty much every responsibility and I do this every quarter. I give up a quarter of my responsibility to someone else in the company. And I have been doing that for the last five years of the company, and it’s been a wonderful wonderful opportunity to have every member of the team kind of take some of those responsibilities, and run with them and it allowed me to grow as a person. And with that, almost 25% of my time is always changing at all times and eventually within a year, 100% of my duties are gone. Right? so I am always embracing change as a person, and I am not taking control of anything specific, within the organisation which allows our company to grow and it also allows our employees to have constantly 25 % of their time changing as well which allows them to grow.

#00:19:07-8# Neil: So effectively, you have moved yourself from working in the business, to working at the business? is that what the effect of that is?

# #00:19:13-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh that is correct and at the end of the day if your business is growing, you should not be doing the same thing you did five years ago.

#00:19:20-9# Neil: Wow I have never heard anyone come up with that, that is a great idea.

# #00:19:25-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh and it’s something that I have adopted as a strategist myself. Because you know, if you are trying to control your company, then you are trying to control your competition to take over the market from you.

#00:19:33-6# Neil: Yeh you have to be careful though, you might work yourself out of a job. Ha ha ha.

#00:19:38-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh which is fine because if you are getting yourself out of a job, and your company is not growing, that means you are not actually doing a good thing for your company.

#00:19:48-3# Neil: Yeh absolutely. And what is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership or motivation? And can you tell us why you have chosen it?

#00:20:02-8# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh and I am going to choose this book very carefully, just because I think it’s everyone should read this book. And it’s ‘Crossing the chasm’ by Geoffrey Moore, not sure if you have heard of it before?

#00:20:11-1# Neil: Yeh, I have read it, it’s a great book.

#00:20:14-8# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yeh it’s a great book and the reason why I choose it, it’s a timeless book. It does not matter what business that you are in, it does not matter what industry you are in, and there are many books that I would read that I would recommend as well, but this one, specifically is because it provides access to you thinking strategically. And picking the right target market which is something that I did wrong early in my days, I only read that book in my university days. And I wish that I would have read it when I was younger, but it probably was not printed back then, or was not even created, by Mr Geoffrey Moore, so it’s one of those great books that once you understand how the chasm works, you could potentially could reduce your failure rate by a big percentage.

# #00:20:50-7# Neil: Yeh. I remember reading that book actually, and that concept of the chasm, I just sort of thought, that is just so obvious, why does no one ever ever talk about that? Because running a small business is not the same as running a big business, and some people will try to scale a small business, and they struggle, because they fall down in the chasm effectively don’t they?

#00:21:12-2# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Exactly and the value there is something that everybody should be aware of, just because you are in it, does not mean that every business is failing. You just need a way to get out of it very quickly, it’s think of it as you are sitting in a big hole and water is dripping at a constant rate and you know that it is going to fill up eventually because that hole can’t take any more water, the question is, how are you going to get out of it? or are you going to dig deeper to allow the water to go elsewhere? or are you going to climb out of that area? And that’s where the business is, if you kind of have a mental picture of a hole filling with constant water stream and how long it will take you. That’s really what each business person is doing on a daily basis, trying to figure out am I going to tread water? am I going to get out of this hole and maybe create another hole?

#00:21:56-3# Neil: Everyone, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time when you maybe doing other things, such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing, to choose your free audio book, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up then you will qualify. Saeed, we are now going to speculate about the future a little bit. So what one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

#00:22:31-8# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I would probably hire more people. And the reason for that is that our business really relies right now, we have scaled every part of our business in a way that is optimised and our biggest challenge is that we, our employees are taking on a lot of activities. And if we can hire more people today, knowing that we are not going to fail, potentially could help us increase the business, probably by two to three …

#00:22:55-4# Neil: And what skill if you were excellent at it, would help you the most to double your business?

#00:23:05-9# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I think our biggest skill, which I am really good at personally is selling, however not allowing each member of my team to learn that skill because it took a long time for me, it took almost ten years, to become who I am today as a sales person and an account manager. And you know, time is a precious thing, that we cannot turn every single person into that perfect selling machine and that is something that I have been working on for the last number of years to figure out the best way to allow those type of skills to be transferred to my team.

#00:23:39-7# Neil: Yeh, in five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business, after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

#00:23:53-0# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: I would like it to say that the Simply Cast team work really hard to create the best technology in the world that made an impact on how small businesses, medium businesses, are communicated with their customers, using their preferred mode of communication and if it was not for our technology which become mission critical to almost every business around the world, they would not be able to have the great customer experience and the personal engagement, that the Simply Cast Platform has given them and no other solution was able to provide the same type of service.

#00:24:23-6# Neil: Sounds good. We are now at the part of the show where you share three golden nuggets with us, so Saeed, what is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

#00:24:35-1# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: So I guess my favourite quote that I came up with a number of years ago, is that at Simply Cast we celebrate failure, and we reward success. And the reason why we have done that early on in the company is that we want innovation at Simply Cast and we want to allow every member of the team to make mistakes. If you are punished by making mistakes, chances are you are not going to innovate and chances are we are going to fall behind as an organisation. So you always celebrate failure, but when you succeed in our company, you will get rewarded, either monetary promotion or just a pat on the back. So, that is model that we have created early on, and we have stuck with and it’s been really good to us.

#00:25:18-8# Neil: It’s interesting you say that, I was talking to somebody the other day and he was saying that in his business, they have meetings, and they talk about the failures over the last period of time whether it’s a week or a couple of weeks or something like that, so it is a similar type of philosophy that is a because I think fear of failure stops you from obviously trying new things, so obviously you have to be prepared to fail to succeed.

#00:25:42-4# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: We have never fired somebody for failing at our company.

#00:25:46-6# Neil: And do you have any favourite online resources that you could share with us?

#00:25:50-5# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Yes so I think Inc.com is probably one of my favourite resources and techcrunch.com would be the other one that I read probably at least twice a week.

#00:26:00-1# Neil: And what is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

#00:26:04-7# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: You know my best advice is that ‘don’t give up’ and ‘always treat people the way you want to be treated’ so if you can combine those two, you would be a wonderful leader that almost everyone will be vying to support, and help you grow your business.

#00:26:20-6# Neil: Everyone, if you did not manage to get a note of Saeed’s favourite resource or his favourite books, you can find the links on Saeed’s show notes page, just go to theentrepreneurway.com and search for Saeed or Saeed El-Darahali in the search box. Saeed, is there anything else you would like to add about your business?

#00:26:42-3# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: No I mean it’s definitely been a great journey for us to build the business, I would like to offer every one of your listeners a free subscription to our solution, all you have to mention by email or phone is mention Saeed and we’ll actually deposit $50 dollars into your account as a thank you for Neil and his great show.

#00:27:01-7# Neil: Thank you very much for that Saeed, it’s been an honour having you on the show, Saeed, you really shared some of your experience and some of your wisdom which has been really nice to hear, so thank you very much and thanks for coming on the show.

#00:27:14-4# Saeed El-Darahali, President and CEO of Simply Cast: Thanks Neil for having me and it’s a pleasure being on your show and thanks for all the great work you are doing in the background.

#00:27:18-1# Neil: You are welcome, thank you.