I'm Felicity Hannah and today on Business Daily the latest episode in our Million by
Thirty series, CEO and founder of EMPWR, Ally Salama tells us how he hit that million landmark
before his thirtieth birthday, and what he’s learned on the way.
This is sweat equity that you’re building.
i.e., so other people don't have shareholders equity.
You have that, that means that it's your own skin in the game.
Ally's company makes content that aims to improve mental health awareness in the
Middle East.
He has experienced clinical depression himself.
The podcast Ally presents 'Empathy Always Wins’ has had millions of downloads, and
EMPWR is valued at more than a million dollars.
The moment you can step your foot off the engine and things are still running, that's
when you know ‘oh God, you do have a business now’.
That's Ali Salama on Million by Thirty.
I started my chat with Ally by asking him to define himself and tell me what really
makes him tick.
I think I am a social artist-preneur.
I'm an artist at heart, I’m an entrepreneur by profession.
I really care about people living the best quality of life that they can.
I really feel for young people who don't have access to mental health support or wellbeing
support, and for me, I am an athlete.
My spirit is the spirit of, I would say, an athlete.
I always was raised in a swimming pool up to the age of thirteen, training around
nine times a week and I've always been shouted at, ‘Yalla Batal!’, like, ‘let's go,
champ!’, all that stuff.
So I've always had that mentality where waking up at five in the morning, training with people
who are now making world record in their own respective sports, and that allowed me to
today be someone who feels that this is my duty and my responsibility to do what I'm
doing, and I find that finding deep, meaningful connections is what drives my spirit and soul
forward and I'm really not interested in anything other than that, because I guess what you
win in private, you wear publicly.
Ally is Egyptian but grew up partly in Dubai.
I come from a very privileged background.
So, I went to a good school.
I mean the fact that I am Egyptian, and I speak this quality level of English, I completely
understand their privilege.
But I also always say that this is a responsibility which is a really big factor behind
the drive that I have.
I think that privilege is going to a school that the president's grandson was, knowing
a lot of people in that upper class in a country that represents the quarter of the Arab world.
He went to university in Canada, which is when his difficulties with his own mental
health began.
I've always been travelling around, and I definitely think that the hardest thing I
struggle with, per se, is stability.
So, I always knew that those four years were going to be years, I wanted
to study in Toronto and start any entrepreneurial venture, and I actually studied entrepreneurship
at Ryerson University.
Ryerson’s Entrepreneurship Institute was my selected university.
I really wanted to do that entrepreneurial programme there.
They had the best entrepreneurship school I knew.
What was it about entrepreneurship that attracted you rather than, say, studying to be a doctor
or an accountant or anything else?
Look, I really did not like school.
I think my dad and my mom, they’re academic.
I had no way out of school, so if I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I had to look at a
degree that allowed me to not do any exams, so that was the degree and that was it.
What was it like moving across the world at quite a young age?
It was scary.
It was really scary.
I remember, you know, spending my eighteenth birthday and nineteenth and twentieth and
twenty-first, like, literally, in my own condo.
I did not make friends.
It was not easy there, and I always feared something.
I always feared that those classmates knew that I had this place downtown, you know,
my spot would be the party spot, so I turned into this incredibly studious, when I say
studious, I mean bookworm type of guy, that just completely read so much.
I found my heroes in books, and I just didn't know what I want, and I think that I kept
reading and understanding what I, I always wanted
to be successful, but I just didn't know what that meant.
I did not go to residents or ‘res’, as people say, because I told my mum that why
spend X amount of pounds or dollars on renting or getting somewhere where you could just,
if you have a down payment, this would save you so much money on the return in X amount
of years.
So, I always had that mindset, you when I was sixteen.
So, they bought it, but the psychological cost of that was something I didn't know,
in advance, in hindsight, that I wouldn't be able to bear.
So, it was while you were at university in Toronto, that's when your mental health began
to suffer.
Was that the first time you'd experienced that?
Yeah.
I think that the scariest thing was when I started looking at myself in the mirror, and
just for the first time I hated what I saw, and I think that it's so hard for people to
have a dark cloud not leaving them.
I was just out of it, like physically it just wore, like you could see it so visibly, and
that's when my parents and I decided that the only way to just deal with it is to is
to walk through it.
And that was a very scary journey for me and the only thing that got me through was the
thought that if I get through, which I didn't believe I could get through, which is why
I do what I do, cause mental illness is a very irrational disease.
You actually don’t want to get better when you’re that depressed or that that
ill.
It's not like a physical disease.
That was the hardest part of my life.
I feel like, you know, people really feel happy and accomplished when they get a degree.
For me, the happiest thing I felt was just seeing my mum and dad Just smile.
That was it.
I only did that for them.
But Ally’s business journey and route to hitting a Million by Thirty really began with
a chance encounter on a twenty-six-hour train ride to
watch Egypt play Uruguay at the 2018 Russia World Cup.
This taste of success spurred Ally on to do something he's seriously passionate about.
So, when I got this experience in media, I was like there's no way I'm just going to
do this in media because I've always wanted to do something in mental health.
So, I was like, ‘what's the easiest way to tackle the challenge that I'm facing?’,
and that was launching a WordPress magazine, and it was the first ever of its kind, the
Middle East's mental health magazine, or the first mental health magazine in the Middle
East and it was just solely to talk about the cultural challenges that aren’t ever
spoken about when you go on like Psych Daily or Psychology Today or whatever, because our
voices aren't heard.
Like our cultural nuances, our family dynamics, our relationship dynamics, and that was where
it all started.
And I think like three weeks after, there was the Harvard Arab Conference and that's
where EMPWR’s fate changed.
I met the World Federation for Mental Health president-elect at the time, now he is the
president, and he invited me like two months after to The
World Health Organisation and ever since then, the UN came after, MIT, Harvard, and we switched
the magazine into a podcast network because I had major issues monetising it.
Whoa!
How is everyone doing today?
My name is Ally Salama, thank you so much, guys, for listening to Empathy Always Wins.
It is honestly an honour and pleasure to connect with you every week.
Today's episode, I am extremely excited for because there are three things that we discuss
on this podcast, self-care, youth leadership and entrepreneurship, and today's topic falls
under self-care.
How can I set boundaries?
I started by editing eight shows out by myself and generating revenue that allowed me to
hire full-time audio editor and before today, we've already made a million downloads in
six months.
So that's how it started out.
I found my biggest strength and I just kept focusing on it, and I didn't know that it
would just, I mean, it took a lot, I remember, took a lot to edit those.
The stress, the nights that I was managing people from the other side of the world in
Lebanon, in Saudi while I was in Toronto, sometimes nine hours' difference.
It was just a mess, but I knew that it was going to be six months before things started
to get better, and it actually did.
I was very calculated with that risk.
He now employs a decent sized team based mostly in the Middle East and he’s told me he's
finding real fulfilment.
For me now, when I do the work that I do, I know that we’re employing eighteen people,
many of them in Lebanon in a country with an economic crisis.
I know that we're doing actively, we're starting with impact from within before it is without.
So that really makes me wake up every day with such a big heart
and also, a bigger drive to just really provide young people with access.
I hope you won't mind me saying you're very young.
To have a team of of eighteen people kind of relying on you for their livelihoods, what's
that like?
It's a privilege.
It's an absolute honour.
I almost feel like I've always wanted to be a father, you know?
And by having this responsibility, the way the team is, the way we hang out every day
on slack and on channels that we can.
Remote work changed our lives, right.
So, I don't know.
I just feel very good, to be honest, I feel very good, but I don't think I would do anything
else.
Like I just feel that this was exactly what I was meant to do.
For the first time, for these last few months, Ally started taking a pay cheque himself.
I started to feel comfortable with our numbers, you know and when you don't pay yourself,
typically as a start-up founder, it's because you know this is sweat equity that you're
building, i.e., the valuation of a company is all derived by your effort, your time,
so other people don't have shareholders equity.
You have that.
That means that it's your own skin in the game and sometimes the company cannot afford
that.
I mean, I'm very aggressive on growth.
So instead of paying myself.
I could have hired maybe two or three people in
Egypt, and that's what I did.
Until I felt that you're at a pace where, no, I can take a breath, I can be happy, and
this is a pace where I just received an investment, and that's about time, and that meant that
I'm comfortable with where we're at.
Being very aggressive on growth and getting bigger numbers and running a bigger business
is great, but also setting a boundary, and this is something that I emphasise a lot at
EMPWR, I encourage anyone listening to us out there to do the same.
Because if we don't know when enough is enough, we will never get enough,
and we will never be satisfied.
So, knowing that from my therapy, from being very conscious on how obsessive I am about
a lot of things, I also know that can be a detriment in my growth.
So, I ‘ve almost had to set a boundary and I've reached that this month, yeah.
Can you tell me, can you put some numbers on it?
Can you tell me what investment and growth you’re seeing?
Yeah, so like, you know, when we reached a point where, right now
we are perhaps valued at more than a million dollars, that every month we’re making more
than a hundred and twenty thousand downloads, that the team has had a capacity of sixty
per cent, like we're not overstretched, we’ re doing well.
So, Ally, you can afford to give yourself and still take on more, and not need to hire
more, and that's when I was like, wow.
That's a sign of relief right there and it's a sign of growth.
So when you're starting out, you’re like almost
weighing everything, okay, 'do I need more here?’, ‘am I going to spend?’
But like at some time, it starts to kind of be a little bit easier for you when you are
people that are delegated everything, and the moment you can step your foot off the
engine and things are still running, that's when you know, oh God, you do have a business
now.
I always dreamt of, you know, things way bigger than numbers.
I think the numbers were just validation that what I was thinking of was on the right track.
But you know, I have a goal of hitting a billion, or like, impacting
a billion people with EMPWR.
So, the million was amazing, you know to everyone listening, hitting a million, making a million,
that's great, but that's all like the by-product.
What's your advice for a young person in Egypt, for example, who wants to start a business,
maybe wants to move into a media business like yours, and kind of needs to find their
goal, their ambition, what it is they want to do?
I think my only advice would be try to really know your strengths.
Social media has made everyone want the same thing.
Literally, I want to be an influencer.
I want to be a label.
And I think that people are so unique in their capabilities, that sometimes we need to take
a step back and realise what are we really good at.
Am I the best writer?
Am I the best producer?
Am I the best speaker?
Am I the best...
Cause at times, we need to know what we can offer to really build the right team
and know what's missing from us, like no matter how good I think I am at one thing, I know
exactly what I'm the worst in others.
So, for anyone listening to us, I would definitely start by seeing your strengths out, and see
how you can really add value to other people who need that strength.
Because that allows you to be confident, that allows you to go out there and put yourself
out there and create the results that other people can't because other people haven't
done that exercise.
For me, I knew that was speaking, from day one, which
is why I turned the magazine, which was an editorial job, but I absolutely did not enjoy
at all into a podcasting job, which was something I was really good at, speaking, because I
just focused on that strength and I think the power of partnerships, the power of understanding
yourself, accepting vulnerability and leading despite being vulnerable, I think that's the
key to any twenty first century leader of success.
Do you think somebody without your social privileges could achieve what you've achieved?
Absolutely.
Why do I say that?
It's because I had many opportunities to receive funds from so many people.
Millions, actually.
I let each and every single one of those offers go away because I wanted my brand, the brand
that I built from a laptop connection, from my education, which anyone can get in the
world, they apply and they pursue what they love,
I wanted that internet connection to make that change.
No one built my brand on LinkedIn.
No one built my brand on Instagram, and energy never lies.
If you really love what you do, when you lead with passion in your energy, if you focus
on that, it's infectious.
That's Ally Salama, podcaster, entrepreneur and mental health advocate, and I’ll let
him end this episode of Million by Thirty on Business Daily.
What I really experienced from an illness, or a disorder was the most horrific experience
of my life, and I knew that if I could turn that around I could be whoever I wanted to
be.
And that's the same thing I want to echo to anyone else out there listening.
If you can turn your worst nightmare into something that you can look back at, you too
can be the most magnificent thing you can ever be.
I'm Felicity Hannah and this programme was produced by Rory Claydon.
If you enjoyed it you can find more episodes on BBC Sounds, or wherever you usually get
your podcasts.