Jeremy Weisz 18:26
I want to talk about some of those takeaways. I know you don’t remember the 70 pages in full. But I’d love to talk about what were some of the takeaways from those conversations of the cost, structuring pricing. But we before we get to that is I want to know how did you discover EO?
Faizan Syed 18:48
When I got into launching that TV channel, friend of mine, and I just relocated to Karachi. So even though I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, again, this is not the capital, but it’s the biggest city in the country that’s about 25 million people. It’s a huge city. It’s like New York City, but in that part of the world, with a whole different set of challenges. Even though I grew up there, I came back as an outsider. And everyone looked at me as an outsider. They’re like, oh, he’s not from here, even though I’m from that, because they’re like, oh, you’ve spent 12 years in America, you have no idea how business is done here. So as I was navigating through that, I realized that they were right. I had no idea how business is done there. And what I’ve learned in America over 12 years, I need to throw out the door. And I was struggling with that concept. And so a friend of mine is like, look, you’re now co-founder in this business, the businesses of a certain scale. You need to join EO because you will learn through the forum, how people navigate through personal work and family challenges. And this is going to be the best way for you to learn and network and get to know people and so on. And so you got to push me into it. And the rest is history.
Jeremy Weisz 20:00
What did you have to throw out the door? We’ll talk about what some of the differences between the US and Karachi are in Pakistan.
Faizan Syed 20:11
So I wouldn’t say it’s specific, I would say it’s the Western world versus the Eastern world. Right. So there’s certain principal business differences. And then within the Eastern markets, developing versus slightly more developed. Right. So let’s see, Saudi is a more developed market in terms of GDP per capita, if you look at the numbers, right, so if GDP per capita and Saudis, let’s say, north of $30,000, Pakistan and Egypt are about Pakistan’s about $1,500, Egypt is, let’s say about $2,800. Right? So it’s a big difference. Some behaviors are the same in Saudi and Egypt and Pakistan and India. But some behaviors are completely different in a market with a very low GDP per capita. Right? For example, what is the same? The same is people love holidays? There’s a lot of downtime, right? And you’re not used to that, you know, living in North America, where everyone’s gung-ho, gung-ho all the time. There’s brief periods of slowness, like the summer or let’s say, the winter holiday season, otherwise, it’s always on, right. An 8 am call will start at 8 am. Over there, an 8 am call is a suggestion. Right? If someone says they’re going to be in your office at 9 am, then they’re not going to be in your office at nine. If you’re in Egypt, they’ll show up at 10 and they’re early. If you’re in Pakistan, and they show up at 9: 45, they’re early. Right, Saudi Riyadh, Jeddah, so it’s funny Saudi Riyadh, 9 am means 9 am. But Jeddah. 9 pm means about 9:30, 9:45. So now, it’s just the small differences, right? How people value other people’s time. That was the first big lesson, holidays. Number three is work is always a second priority for most people. It’s not the number one priority. Right? So how do you motivate people differently to make it the number one priority. In the Pakistan market or any price sensitive or any market with low GDP per capita pricing is the number one driver. It’s not service quality, it’s not service delivery. It is pricing. Right? So you have to solve for pricing. And so you suddenly started looking at, okay, what service quality if no one’s looking at, and if everyone’s solving for price, then are we really commoditized? Are we a commoditized service? And if we’re commoditized service, are we being measured against the same parameters? But that’s not the case either. So then the fourth thing is relationship is everything. There’s a Arabic word for it Wasta, Wasta means my connection, right? That is big. If you come with the right connect, if you come with the right reference, you don’t have a foot in the door, you basically shut the door behind you. Right. So that’s a big one, sometimes merit will be put aside, if the wasta’s, right, because the person bringing you on board is saying, you know what, I know I can hold him accountable, because he’s my friend’s friend. And that’s way more valuable to me than the fact that they want NFEs and whatever. So these are just some of the differences, I think, and oh, yes, the client expects you to always be on. And when I say always be on, I mean, I understand that in all markets. And I understand I came from a banking background. And, that was a given, but here, always on means, midnight 11 pm 1 am. If the clients up, you better be up. There’s no concept of you know what, I understand that you have a life at home. So these are just some of the differences I observed.
Jeremy Weisz 23:53
Talk about motivating people. Right? You said work is a second priority. What are some of the things that you do with your team, and we’ll get to the I want to get from the work-from-home versus in-the-office discussion. But you mentioned, it’s really important on thinking about motivating people, because it’s really a second priority. What are some of the things that you think about and do when it comes to that?
Faizan Syed 24:24
So motivating, look, I’ll give you a current example. Over the last 12 months, the Pakistan market has become extremely I would say extremely interesting in terms of pricing. So if anyone’s looking for a delivery center, an offshore delivery center, I think there is no better market than Pakistan right now. Because it’s experienced 60% currency devaluation, but at the same time, it’s not experienced a 60% increase in salaries, right. Which means the market is very price-effective at this point, which also means that everyone in the market is extremely salary-sensitive. Right? So if they see a 5% increase or a 10% increase in salary table jump. So how do you keep them motivated to stay on your team? It’s very hard. Because if a person comes and says, You know what my costs have gone up 60%. But my wages have only gone up 20%, I need to make up the differential of 40%. And I’m not able to afford to pay for my kids schooling or my parents health and education. You have nothing left for them to say, right, because they are unable to meet their day-to-day expenses. So even if you wanted to motivate them, even if they are aligned with your vision, and they think this is the best place to work, they are unable to sustain their life. Right. So you have to let them go, is what I’ve realized, let them go, let them experience that work environment. And they are willing to put up with greater challenges in a work environment as long as the compensation is met. Now, what you do is the best talent, you stay in touch with them, because at some point in time, they will either recognize that you know what, there is a cost differential, and I’m willing to pay that difference. For a better work environment, something about much more passionate about. And we as a business, hopefully over that time, are able to up-skill enough that we can afford that new salary structure of theirs. And so you leave that door open with them so that they can come back. That way, you’re not really losing the person forever, you’re momentarily allowing them to shift to solve their life issues, and then potentially come back if they need to, when things are a little bit more stable for them and for you as a business you can afford them. So that I find is one way the other thing is training. We’re big on training, we’re huge on training, we’re doing training constantly, we’re up-skilling and upscaling people and I think one of the biggest motivating factors is I mean, I consider our East River to be a training ground or let’s say, a university, for people who want to move from a digital career onto a multinational, I think we have the highest number of people coming out of a digital agency going to Unilever, in Pakistan, so for me, that is sort of, let’s say, a star, it’s a badge for us, because we’re doing something right that a global multinational feels that our talent is suitable for them. And we use that as a tool for recruiting saying that, hey, listen, come on board. If a couple of years later, this is not the place we look at where our people have exited and gone. So it’s a great onboarding Tool. And it’s a great motivating tool for people in the company who say, like, you know what, if I work hard enough here, I will definitely be recruited by global multinational. We have people at TikTok, we have people at Meta, Google and so on.
Jeremy Weisz 28:00
Talk about your thoughts on work from home versus the office. And I know that your thoughts have flip-flopped. And they go back and forth from before till now.
Faizan Syed 28:15
It’s been a struggle, I’ve always been a proponent of measuring outcomes based on success, rather than so for us pay for success. Don’t pay us for the hours. And similarly, I want to think of that with my teams. You know what we’re paying you something we’re paying for a salary, here’s what we need solved. You want to get this done in one hour, you want to get this done in 10, you want to get this done at home, in a coffee shop or in the office. Honestly, we don’t care. Now, in theory, that makes sense. But when you layer in the following factors in a developing market, so for example, homes are smaller. Most people live in joint-family homes. So there’s always this parents around, there’s kids around, they might even a brother and his kids around. Right. So now how do you have a quiet space to get work done? Right, where you can deliver success. Then secondly, we have a lot of power outages. Right? Some neighborhoods have more power outages than other neighborhoods. Does the team member live in a neighborhood with a lot of power outages or not? If so, do they have backup power? If not, then what do you do? Because every time you’re on a call, and if there’s an outage and there’s no backup power, you’re just not able to deliver that service quality. Right? The third thing is fine, you have no power outages you live most people don’t live alone. You live in an environment where you can get this time and space. Are you able to maintain a good schedule because our market is a slightly late starting market? Right. So people come in the digital space or in the agency space? People getting to work is between 10 and 11. The time an agency or any agency is at its full swing is post-noon. Staying on to, let’s say, post 8 am. So if you’re having early morning client calls and you’re home, are you going to make that call? Are you going to be available in case you didn’t make that call and answer your phone so that you actually jump on the call? Right. So we went back and forth on this. And then of course, if you’re working from home, and a client calls you and says, hey, listen, not Zoom, I need you in, come to meet me, are you going to be able to take that ride across to meet them because transport got expensive fuel prices increase, they doubled in the last year, year and a half. And so now everyone thinks twice before they get on to their own private transport get around. So all of these things factor in which make work from home extremely variable, and makes work from home, a concept that is never going to give you the same return that it does in a developed market. So can work from home work in a developing market. mind at this point, we ran it for three years, Tuesdays and Thursdays we fixed work from home don’t come in, we still had half the office coming in. Why? Because of the reasons I mentioned, they thought that they were better off coming into the office. And finally, there was one big reason some people just wanted to get out of the house and not be stuck at home with their joint families, they just needed a place to get away. And so they preferred coming in. So keeping all these factors in mind, just two weeks ago, we shut down work from home and said, You know what we’re done. We’re not doing it. This is on-seat gig, you need to be here to deliver service. And that’s how we’re going to take it forward. And if we’re down the road, going to consider it only if we can tackle some of the variables personal lives alone doesn’t have power outages, we can provide them transportation. And if we can take away the variables, then fine, we might consider another work from home model. But for now we’re not.
Jeremy Weisz 32:01
Yeah, it sounds like though the staff, a lot of that was I mean, I’m gonna say fully driven by the staff, but they were on board with that they wanted that. And they were yearning for that. And it seemed like an easy choice. But people are all things pointed to let’s just come in the office right at that point. I’d love to talk a little more about what you do as a company. And you did some really cool work we mentioned Mondelez, and Oreo. What are some of the things you did there?
Faizan Syed 32:38
So one of the things we’re most proud of is right when we started off as an agency. We had a strong creative dream, my head of business development, who helped me kick off this business. His name was Shaham, his name is Shaham. And he went on to delivery hero to one of their local companies that they bought just a year ago. But he built a fantastic creative team, even at the onset, and we did a project for Oreo and we call it Storeo. And what we did is we took the Oreo cookie, animated in 3d, and made four different characters. Right. And so the story premise was Oreo cookies save a kid’s day. And season one was how the kid left his lunchbox behind on his way to school and the cookies kind of jumped out of the lunch box and help walk that lunch box all the way to school. It was like a Toy Story meets all your animation. And it did really well. We ended up doing about two seasons of it. Until Oreo said, we cannot animate characters. It was so well received that we got published as an agency in Oreos global newsletter that went to all of its global affiliates around the world. And that was a great win for us and a great achievement within our first year as an agency. Another thing that we did for Pizza Hut was Pizza Hut struggled with its return on ad spend. And they were doing about 4X. And they came to us and said, look, you need to double this for us. And that’s a minimum requirement. And so I sat with the team we did some brainstorming came out and said you know what, we’ll double it for you. But if we take it above that is a bonus or an incentive for us. They’re like, oh, no agency has ever asked for that as they okay, we want a bonus or an incentive if it’s above double. If it’s below double fine. This is the retainer above double we want. Let’s see if we hit anything above eight. We want this if we hit anything above 10 we want this if we hit anything above 12x we want this. So I think they got a lot of that, yeah, sure, put in the contract. Great. We averaged 11 as a return on ad spend frequently hitting above 12 and I just thought that the way we tackled in the way the team took this assignment on I think it even blew away the client and sometimes when you leave the client speechless. It’s a lot of fun. Because they don’t expect to see that kind of return. And it’s a win-win for both, right? They’re making money, they’re selling more pizzas. And we’re making a bonus. So that was a big win for us on the media side, one on the SEO side. Again, this was learning from me, right? I didn’t know. I didn’t know the power of SEO, we had an SEO team. And I oftentimes, like lines with a guy is just okay, you’re optimizing words, like, what value is there, right, I get it, you’re gonna appear on top of the searches, but quantify that value for me, please. We did SEO work for dollars, which is basically the General Electric for home appliances. It’s a Turkish company that runs operations in that market. And in a 12-month period, we increased organic traffic and sales on the website by over 100%, just because of SEO. And I saw the tangible impact that running an effective SEO campaign had on an electronics manufacturer. And I was like, wow, I had no idea that SEO can be more promising than paid media. Plus, it’s more cost-effective because your retainer is lower than paid media, and you’re not spending media money, and it’s all organic traffic coming from search. So I thought that was a learning for me, right? I mean, obviously, we deliver it to the client, but I learned something from that. And I learned about SEO there. And finally, I think the most interesting one was when in 2020, October, we do PR as well, corporate PR and we provide that service to our clients. In 2020, October, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the time went on, and made a negative statement about Muslims around the world. And so what happened in the Pakistan market is that retailers started banning the sale of French products, which includes L’Oreal, which includes our brand, Lu. Lu was basically the name of the brand, the Mondelez had required. It was originally a French brand, and was selling biscuits, basically, the nine brands that were talked about, and everyone knew them as new in our local market. 70% sales declined in one month, that was a huge hit for them. And so I personally had to go to religious colors, show them this is not French company, this is American, as like, I realize I’m creating a problem for later on. But at least it’s solving. But they’re not French, they’re American, can you please create shorts and reels talking about how this ban is wrong, and it’s affecting workers working in the country, it is affecting revenue generation tax generation. And please create those rules, and let’s share them with your communities. We got these religious leaders to create reels, we posted them on their Facebook groups, we amplify those reels, we wrote articles in newspapers. And then we created an ad, the first campaign that TikTok ran in the country about how this is an American company employing thousands of people generating millions in taxes, and that this should not happen. We reversed the sale decline of 70% down 10% within two months. So it’s a huge win for us. And again, I’ve never done something like this before. So is an achievement, you have to think on your feet. But it was unbelievable.
Jeremy Weisz 38:30
What about with Coach, do some work with Coach.
Faizan Syed 38:33
Coach in Saudi. So we’ve just picked that up in Saudi and that is giving us access into the Saudi market. And now what’s interesting in the Saudi market is it behaves completely differently. You would think that Facebook is big everywhere, but not in Saudi 30 million is there pop 33 million, let’s say roughly is a population 99% 98% is data and 4G penetration. And roughly the same number of let’s say TikTok, is about let’s see 28 million ballpark users of TikTok snap is about between 25, 28 Facebook is less than 12 million Meta. So Facebook advertising does not work there. You have to be on Snap and you have to be on TikTok. And so what we’re learning is that it because you have to be on Snap and TikTok. You will run campaigns on them. But when you run campaigns on TikTok, you suddenly see a lot of bot traffic coming out of Singapore in different markets, right. So it’s extremely challenging for us to figure out what the right platform is because yes, there is a lot of users on these two platforms. But advertising on those two platforms does not yield the kind of results or traffic that is authentic traffic that yields conversions. So we’re kind of learning through this process, because in other markets in store, it’s Meta, it’s Facebook, it’s Google, here, this is a challenge. Which platform gives you the best audience . And again, the funny thing is the local market, I went extraordinary out in Jeddah, the top digital marketeers where like, there are no experts in digital marketing in this market. So, if you guys are talking like this, you’re the only ones talking about this. For me, that was a learning that I was like, wow, this is such a huge market such a huge opportunity. There’s no top experts here. Unbelievable. And the second thing, language, Arabic searches in Arabic optimization and Arabic, English does not work as effectively as Arabic. So English works on certain things, but not another thing. And so taking all of these learnings sifting through them and applying them, I think is something that’s really, really interesting for us at this point in time, because that market is going to explode in the next five years, just the way they are positioning themselves, the way they’re scaling. I mean, that is going to be the hub of all economic activity in the region in the next five to 10 years.
Jeremy Weisz 41:06
Faizan, first of all, thank you, thanks for sharing your journey. It’s pretty remarkable. And I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people to check out eastriverdigital.com to learn more. You also have a podcast that people can check out on YouTube, DigiTales. We have some notable people in the region that you featured so people can check that out, as well. I’d love to hear your favorite resources. It could be books, it could be podcasts, it could be audiobooks, it could be software, what are your favorite resources that you go to and recommend to other business owners?
Faizan Syed 41:58
So I love this question. And I’m totally borrowing it for my podcast. I think, for me, I discovered Audible in COVID. And I haven’t looked back, I was never a book reader just because I could never finish a book. And it was really annoying for me. And I discovered that audible makes it a lot easier for me to consume the content. And I’m able to finish one book a month now. And it’s been fantastic to me. In terms of resources…
Jeremy Weisz 42:30
Are there favorite Audible books that you’d recommend?
Faizan Syed 42:34
Yes, I really enjoyed this book I discovered it’s called The Book of Joy. It’s a conversation between Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. And it talks about the barriers to joy in a person’s life, and how to, and then it can overcome those and how you overcome those barriers. And then it talks about attaining a state of joy and happiness and how to stay in that state. And I think that’s a great book, it’s a great read. And you can read a chapter by chapter, you can read the whole thing, I highly recommend that. I also read The Surrender Experiment. This is a book by Michael Singer if I got it right. He had The Untethered Soul, which is first but Surrender Experiment was a second book. And the reason this book was interesting is because here’s a guy who was very inward-driven about meditation, happiness, who ended up building a billion-dollar company, his journey in building that company, and then almost losing all of it when he sold it to WebMD. And I think it’s a great story for a lot of us entrepreneurs who go through these ups and downs, and to recognize how do you manage through the downs, even when you’ve had tremendous success behind you? How I Built This is a podcast by Guy Raz on NPR. I love it. And I think that was the inspiration behind me starting Digitales for our market, because I was like, this is a great podcast, because it’s so US focused. What if we did this with entrepreneurs with successful people in our market? And that was honestly the source of inspiration for that. What else is there? I have recently started dabbling with ChatGPT. The jury’s still out on what I think about it. I’m a little confused by what AI is going to do to our digital space, and what value we will continue creating for our clients on the media front and the creative front. So no opinion yet still playing with it. During COVID, we went and experimented with all of the tools like Slack and Basecamp and Trello, and I think there was one more we Asana, JIRA and I think Trello is the one we’ve settled with. I’m a fan of that. It puts everything in front of all team members you always are aware of who’s got what on their plate, strongly recommend that. And yeah, I would say that’s about it. Strava another app, it’s become a favorite for me. Tracks your workouts. So it’s basically a social platform for your workouts and people you work out with. So you’re constantly looking at who’s doing what, who’s doing a run where, who’s doing a bike where, and then you’re kind of motivating each other during that.
Jeremy Weisz 45:29
I love that, I’m gonna check out, several people have mentioned The Surrender Experiment, and I haven’t checked it out yet. So I have to do and then The Book of Joy I love, one of my favorites is The Art of Happiness, which is also Howard Cutler in the Dalai Lama. So I’m gonna have to check out The Book of Joy as well. And Faizan, I just want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey, your lessons. Everyone check out more episodes of the podcast, check out eastriverdigital.com. Thanks, Faizan. Thanks, everyone.
