Ben Kaplan 00:00
Hey, this is TOP CEO the show about CEOs making tough decisions featuring CEOs from startups, scale ups and fortune 500 enterprises. TOP CEO is a business school case study, telling the story behind the story, and what you can learn from it from those who have faced the fire. And come out the other side. Welcome to the TOP CEO podcast.
Abeer Raza 00:30
I feel like everything that I touched can turn into gold. And then suddenly everything starts failing. And you're like, what?
00:39
Imagine you're the CEO of TekRevol, a technology service company that's been skyrocketing up the Inc 5000 list. You specialize in mobile app development. And your business model is the epitome of modern entrepreneurial success. Sales are soaring, nearing a million dollars a month, and you've expanded your services to include video production, PR and marketing. You built an empire that spans from Houston to Dubai, and life is good. But then the ground beneath you starts to shake. So
Abeer Raza 01:16
I was like, hey, that's okay. It's just a happens. It's just a month or two months, and then it became three months. And then suddenly, I was like, Yeah, this is not changing. Inflation
The Detective 01:26
rears its ugly head, the economy takes a nosedive. And your revenue plummets from $900,000 a month to 1,090,000. In a matter of weeks, clients are tightening their belts, pulling contracts, and your once thriving business is gasping for air.
Abeer Raza 01:46
We were prepared for the good times, not for the bad times. And then we're not getting any new and clients and the old clients are not converting. So it
01:55
was to make matters worse, the rise of AI and changes in Google's algorithm are pushing you further down the rabbit hole, you're caught in a storm. And there's no easy way out.
Abeer Raza 02:08
I left everything else that we were doing and just barricaded myself literally moved my back to the office. And I was like, I'm just living here for however long it takes for us to get on it. So
The Detective 02:18
what do you do? How do you pivot? How do you adapt and survive in a world that's rapidly changing? This is the story of Abeer Raza founder of TekRevol. And this is The Reckoning.
Ben Kaplan 02:34
Abeer take me through the thinking behind where the company is right now and how you got to this place to set a little context, you are a fast growing company, you're part of the inc 5000, you had, you know, sales that were approaching a million dollars a month, your technology services company, among other things, developing mobile apps. And suddenly, with everything was happening with inflation, the economy, suddenly, you felt the pain of that all at once fairly recently, take us through kind of where you're at. And when you started realizing there was a problem.
Abeer Raza 03:08
So I think for for most entrepreneurs, there's this issue where you're not able to stop growing, you know, especially I remember when we went to inc 5000. And we were the 620/4, fastest growing company with Adriene 24% growth in three years. And I was I was sort of looking around, I was like my co founder was our CTO and I serve as a CMO. We don't have a CEO, we kind of divide responsibility between nuts each other. So we were looking around the room and we were like, Why are we 600? You know, whatever. There's companies, at least in my part, like he was super happy. And I was like, kind of depressed. So I was like, how do we get to the number one spot. And so what followed was crazy amount of, you know, non thinking investment, not thought through in terms of the downside of things. So we started to kind of capitalize on everything that we could potentially do in terms of scalability. And we had been doing that since the time you started. Because you always want to kind of keep experimenting and kind of keep changing things and keep growing the company. We're now 300 People plus and we started from like 1000 or investment six years ago. So you can sort of see the growth that we've had without any investor from outside assist profits being reinvested and reinvested and reinvested. So it was a compounding effect. One was that, you know, we just kept growing more businesses and trying to scale other products and services that you could add to the umbrella of services that we already offer. So we have several brands like video production media company, a marketing company, a PR company, so we just kept on building more and more to create an ecosystem around it. And then we sort of expanded location wise as well. We started from Houston, new start to Miami, California, DC, Dubai. We had like staff present in these locations and then COVID Hit we had to contract with because, you know, it's bedtime for everybody, I guess. And then we started growing again, because after COVID, there was a huge boom, right? When we started to scale back up again, we didn't really, you know, sort of look at the downside, or what could potentially happen. And that happened, whatever could potentially happen started happening at the start of this year. It's
Ben Kaplan 05:18
a cool success story. I mean, you're growing fast, you start this between the two co founders really, you grow, and you keep growing. And as you grow, you get more ambitious with growing or, you know, you're ranked here on the Inc 5000 list, you want to get higher on that list. So you start looking for ways to grow more, and you probably activate more business lines, more activities, you're trying to, you know, offer more services to your customer base, and it keeps growing. But then it also at the same time, you're investing a lot in that growth. But it makes you more vulnerable to different macro economic conditions, which starts to happen this year. And specifically, that you're doing a lot of technology services for clients that might not be essential services that are good to have in boom times. But in tougher times, those might get cut, is that what you start to experience this year, because
Abeer Raza 06:10
most of our services, Integra will start with like a $50,000 price tag. So it's a large investment in for an entrepreneur or business to meet towards their future. And most companies, they start to look at how do we sort of centralize in what we already have, instead of looking at other avenues growth. So we start facing that and to injury, charge up comes along and makes the whole process super aggressive in terms of, you know, the competition that we face from other players in the industry. And then additionally, you know, the hot topic these days is just AI and not mobile development and things like that. And there has been a lot of change in terms of how development can be done cheaper, you know, things can be sort of automated, or you can actually, you know, create a lot of content, a lot of blogs, articles, things like that. So Google sort of starts to bring its own policy in terms of search engines and stuff. So we get a hit from that. So we're kind of blindsided quite badly, in terms of our traffic getting here in terms of the clients not having investments where they're pulling their contracts. So I think for the past two months, it's taught me a lot of humility, honestly, like, you know, we're, it felt like everything that I touched could turn into gold, and then suddenly, everything starts failing. And you're like, what, and our cost has grown exponentially, because we were prepared for the good times, not for the bad times. So a very good a very good thing, like, you know, sort of squeezed on both ends. And then we're not seeing any new appliance and the old science are not converting, so it was fine. There's
Ben Kaplan 07:46
a few different issues there. So one is just the clients doing belt tightening. What did that look like in terms of revenue? I mean, I heard when we were talking before, you mentioned like you went from something like 900,000 a month in revenue to 90,000 a month revenue. So 10%, did that happen overnight? Or did you get sort of indications or just suddenly, people are cutting back on the type of development that you're doing?
Abeer Raza 08:08
It was pretty drastic, like from 50%. To not I mean, I think till last month, or the month before that, it was 10%. Last month, it was about 30%. And this one for projecting to get to 70%, or for reward during the 5000 days.
Ben Kaplan 08:26
So you saw reduce, and then what did you try to do to combat that? Did you try to say like, what's going on? Or talk to the sales team? Or is our pricing wrong? How did you respond to that?
Abeer Raza 08:37
I think for the longest period of time, I was complacent, complacent in the sense that I was more focused on other areas. We also launched a venture fund on the side that started taking on startups and products that we fund in. So we were invested in that fund as well. So I was like, Hey, it's okay. It's just a, you know, it happens like it's just a month or two months, and then it became three months. And then suddenly, I was like, Yeah, this is not changing. We need to pivot. And I think the biggest defining moment was when I looked at the marketing data, and I realized that this isn't going away anytime soon. And then so I left everything else that we were doing, and just, you know, sort of barricaded myself, literally moved my back to the office. And I was like, I'm just living here for however long it takes for us to get out. It's. So my founder and myself are generally doing like 1214 hour shifts every day. Yeah, now we're sort of doubling down on everything and sort of scaling up again.
Ben Kaplan 09:33
So one thing was the sales coming in, how much of that was influenced by I know, you said, it sounds like you do a good amount of SEO, you're getting organic traffic from Google. How much was impacted by that? I mean, the Google algorithm can change but also Google is increasingly delivering more like direct results where they don't have to necessarily visit your site and sort of the open AI chat GPT trend starts leading itself there that maybe it's less SEO driven. What was the impact of that? Were you just getting less leads? or was it just that the leads you were getting just the harder to convert less dollar values? What were you experiencing?
Abeer Raza 10:06
It was both. But that's what it said, right? Like, the first indication, which was the harder to convert was that, hey, we have the leads, we can convert them who just need to figure out how right so we choose the process, we've tried to, you know, button that up, we try to add more collateral and sort of divide the pipeline or different stages, and all those things that you would generally do to kind of make squeeze out as much juice as you can out of the leads that you have. The second part, which was more of the awakening, for me, was that there's no point, we don't have anything in the backlog. So that's what really sort of led me towards figuring out how we can sort of pivot from there. And by all intents purposes we already have, but yeah, it was it was kind of interesting.
Ben Kaplan 10:52
What is the factor of the interest in AI? Was it just that more of the leaves were like, help us use AI develop applications, including AI, and it was just changing, because that was the hot topic. And then once you go the AI route, now you have very fierce competitors, lots of coming in, because it's like the most invested space there is right now. Which super ramped up competition, is that what you experienced?
Abeer Raza 11:14
Yeah, I think the larger players like Microsoft, and Google and Tesla, and all the other companies have their own sort of take on AI and their own sort of entrenched positions. So I think for our smaller clients is starting to become like, you know, these companies are already really big. And now they have, I mean, they can pretty much control everything with the way AI is and sort of how it can create more opportunities for them to grow. So there is no point in us trying to compete in that space. And then additionally, the smaller sort of startups that were using AI to kind of get themselves ranked higher and sort of started getting more acquisitions started scaling even faster. So I think the mid tier clients that we used to get that were sort of looking long term, and then sort of looking at how this could be a viable investment in the five years timeframe, or 10 years timeframe, they just managed, because at the end of the day, it's things that are moving super fast, and you're getting squeezed from both ends. So, you know, I would assume one of the sort of driving factors. And then like I said, economy was a very huge impact as well. But more so than the shifting trends of customer in interest. We were impacted a lot from a standpoint of our rankings in general, because I mean, until Google's new update came up, there were companies using AI for you know, blogging, and article submission and off page and on page and things like that, that would like drastically propelled them beyond us over we were in the top 10 In terms of the highest searched company, and app boatmen. So it was, you know, that was that was the bigger sort of thread,
Ben Kaplan 12:54
I see, you mean, just people that were just supercharging, and could use it effectively to generate a lot of content that would help an SEO. And Google wasn't quite sophisticated enough to realize its generated content, yet. There's other tests, you can do other things. So they were getting a kind of an unfair advantage you felt in being able to harness that and use that to improve their SEO rank.
Abeer Raza 13:15
Yeah, I mean, because it's not just a blog, right? Like, you can do a lot with tragic beginning in terms of like, even doing a podcast, for example, right? So we were more sort of focused on quality in terms of, you know, human written stuff and all that. And we were sort of resistant towards, you know, AI, and that were drastically against us. I mean, right now, I'll give an example. One of the things that we did was completely revamped our business development efforts, where we started scraping data off votes, strips that we would use from zoominfo in sort of other places, in terms of intent, and all those things. And then li like connecting that, through OpenGraph that charge up to you to kind of get introduction, emails written up with like, contact show sort of sounding emails. And there's some other stuff that we did in SEO, and I can talk more through that as well. But what I realized was that that is what companies are already doing. And that was, you know, changing the name early, right. I mean, you would be able to write maybe five or 10 contextual emails in a day, well researched emails. Now you could do 100 200. Actually, there's no limit to that. So there's companies that are completely beating us in the dust with these approaches. So we need to kind of we need to figure out what to do to pivot.
The Detective 14:32
Take revel found itself at a crossroads. The rise of AI in the changing landscape of the tech industry has intensified competition to a boiling point. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Tesla were dominating the AI space, leaving little room for smaller players, tech rebels, mid tier clients were getting squeezed out questioning the viability of long term investments in technology. But that's not all. The company was also grappling with the impact of economic downturns and shifts in customer interests. They were losing their SEO rankings to competitors who were leveraging AI for content generation, putting them at a significant disadvantage. And let's not forget the internal struggles. TekRevol was juggling multiple side projects and lacked a laser focused strategy, diluting their core business efforts. So what happens when you're backed into a corner Facing insurmountable challenges? Do you throw in the towel? Or do you come out swinging?
Ben Kaplan 15:44
As you started realizing, like, Hey, this is urgent, I'm moving my bed to the office. We're taking long shifts, how did you start to think about the pivot? What were the steps you took? Was it think about new markets? Was it pivot services to more I know, you've done things in the restaurant industry, for instance, where you could provide essential services that are not nice to have that are essential that can help you weather the storm, did you think about diversifying offerings? So you weren't too concentrated in any one sector? Or type? How did you think about it,
Abeer Raza 16:15
I think there was quite a few things that we did that weren't really necessarily done during the time. And I could talk through both of these things. One was that we diversified early on in the business. So even though that kind of affected us in terms of, you know, the cost aspect, but that started to show it's, there's a universal sort of term that we use for the economy in the Middle East. And I'll kind of start with that the middle east economy always catches up to the US economy five years later. So the sort of economic downturn that we were seeing the US it was the opposite in the Middle East, our leads were just flowing in, like, you know, I would say that, you know, we would probably get 8x or 10x, the amount of leads that we would get in the US and the Middle East. And that was a trend that was going on. So we just figured out how to button down our business development efforts here to start converting more sales. Because the sort of mindset there is very different. So we had to kind of figure out what to work on and added the team there to kind of offer the services very specific to that market. So that revenue starts flowing in. So if we're looking at 10% offer sort of the initial sales have used to have now it was about 40%. Because 30% was now coming from release. So that was one thing that we did a really sort of free focus our efforts there to kind of get that scaled up. And then additionally, like I mentioned the AI side. So when we realized that this was not going away, we really started to get super focused on on how can we introduce AI in every part of our service line. So we introduced that into the Walkman. So we started doing code, using AI techniques to kind of refactor it for us to kind of deliver the end product faster at a cheaper cost. And we started giving that cost back to our customers, we were able to reduce our cost and sort of compete more in the market. As a CMO I can I can talk very specific marketing. One of the cool things that we did, I really loved it was our Off Page strategy. So initially used to take RSU guys about three to four hours to do research, and then do article submissions, because they have to reach out to every website that our competitor was already ranked on. And then you know, send them a custom email saying that hey, you know, yada, yada, yada, their article, and we want to have ourselves listed there are competitors listed this here, but we have a more refreshed article war, etc. So what we did was we used a script on AI to kind of start to capture all the opportunities that our competitors are missing, which includes links that are disavowed or dormant or you know, links that are not updated and things like that. So we start creating that list. We use another script to pull in the email addresses of those people also have those websites and blogs that are that we need to reach out to. So we started to get all that in one place. And then we use chat GPT to crawl to their website and tell us what are the opportunities and what things can we should have mentioned in their email. Then you push that data into HubSpot, and then you create a new workflow in HubSpot that would allow us to automatically follow up on those points that we just mentioned. And then, I mean, our Off Page blew up like I mean, I'm talking about from three articles submission towards 30 article submissions in a day. So that started to have a drastic effect on our sort of rankings and things like that started picking up and the leaves start increasing a lot as well. And then we started using charge up in our business development cases. So where we would spend like three, four days researching every single business case that we would get and try to suggest to the client, this is what you should what you should do charge it really helps out those drastically in terms of making that time like two hours is sort of like two three days. What
Ben Kaplan 19:50
is your recommendation for other entrepreneurs? Everyone says AI is going to generative AI is gonna be transformative, but we sort of don't know where to get start where to focus our time. on how to get actual ROI from it, as opposed to just like playing around with chat GPT, what is your recommendation?
Abeer Raza 20:05
Why do you go to Gob just to get started, like, there is no point in waiting, like everybody's already there, di definitely creates a threat for most companies out there for most entrepreneurs out there. But it also creates an immeasurable number of opportunities. Like, for example, let's say your PR business and your your core business is to, you know, do these podcasts and stuff influencers or people that want to sort of get their personal branding outside the door of what you could potentially do is run a program on one particular industry, find out the top player in that space in terms of the mentions on Google Trends, pull that information, pull that data, then pull it another data in terms of volume of different keywords in terms of what they're trying to signify themselves of what they're trying to push themselves as in terms of the biggest fear of the market. And then you have potentially, let's say, one against 10, right, like one is a biggest competitor, you can email 10 People saying that, hey, we see that this guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, is is, you know, ranked on these words, and you know, has such such a sort of filiation. He's gotten himself listed already. These are the volumes that he's getting out of these places for his clients and his engagement, we can get you that on that on those places, if you just give us a shot. And these are the potential areas that we can actually get to. And this is all like done through AI. So you literally don't have to do anything like just press a button, and it's done. So just from that angle. So we introduced an AI service for our clients, actually, to figure out what are areas that we can automate? And what are the areas that we can actually take off of their current staffs, that is monotonous, that is a distributor do so we started to see a huge boom in that particular sector as well. So if you go to Chick fil a.com, and search, our AI service, you can actually go through, I mean, it's already there in the market, dia as a service IaaS. So that is what we're trying to do with all our products and the service that we provide are clients
Ben Kaplan 22:02
focusing on the restaurant sector, how did that fit into the overall strategy? Why was that important? I mean, I think you've taken us through, you know, you're getting back to 40% of pre disrupted revenue levels. Maybe this part, it sounds like you've backup to what 50 or 60, or 70%, as you've improved your SEO, how do you get all the way back? What does restaurant sector provide as part of that mix of pivots that you have to do?
Abeer Raza 22:27
So I think the restaurant Trotter started hearing COVID Surprisingly enough, because for us, we saw how the restaurant service pretty much closed down all across the world. And we saw technology take a very, very central role in bringing it back to the level that it once saw. It is still kind of struggling. So you know where you see, a huge issue is where you also see opportunities. So we saw a huge opportunity there. First expanding to and, you know, coming from Karachi, Oxon, I understand that the service sector of Karachi is very, very geared towards the, you know, the restaurant industry as a whole. And it's a large market for us to kind of scale in, and it is also a test market for us, if we can scale it here, then you can easily sort of scale it in the Middle East, and then in the US as well. And there already are companies like toast and square that are huge players, like you know, once worth $100 billion, the other ones worth 250. And the market is, you know, worth over a trillion dollar. So we did see a lot of potential in terms of scalability in this space. So we started working on the product during COVID. And he's just started to come out of his post pedo stage. And the approach that we've taken has allowed us to really centralize ourselves as a very, very big player, this market, even though we're just coming up to the outs, I mean, we just got out of post Vida like a month ago. And we have about 18 or 20 contracts already, you know, locked in with customers in just two months. A couple of things that we did the really fun for me as an as an entrepreneurs and experiment. We started a community around restaurant businesses, where we would use like sessions or events in our own cafeteria, which is pretty large. So we're bringing restaurant owners, we'd bring an influencer in the restaurant industry, put them on the stage and be like, What do you think about technology and the restaurant space, and they were start to reiterate like, you know, what, potentially we can use. So we get a lot of insight from that. And additionally, they will start doing door services automatically, just because we've given this as a platform to talk about it and we're not selling to them. We're not saying anything about servizi or what we're trying to do. So they were sorry, endorsing it by themselves. And we actually create we could we would take like snippets and things like that we started you know, putting putting that on social media and stuff. And then underlying and this was the The core thing that I'm interested in, I was very inspired with how HubSpot grew as a marketing platform where they use knowledge leadership to really sort of break into that space of Salesforce and other players that were already entrenched. They would do like courses and and, you know, certifications and things like that. And suddenly, you had marketers putting their tags there on LinkedIn everywhere else. This is where we started to do with servizi. Because we saw that the restaurant industry in Buxton is very sort of fluid in the sense that it's dependent on the resources or their labor class. And they don't have anything being offered to them in terms of certification or knowledge or things like that. And there's no comparison. Like if I leave on a server and leave this restaurant, I have nothing to back me up, except for I work for this restaurant. So we started empowering those people through the community where we use the leadership to kind of tell them that servizi is the best in class. And then we started giving them certification and things like that, that helped us build connections within the restaurant industry. We start getting us clients, we have no marketing strategy apart from this and you're starting to get ton of influence.
26:09
Picture this, take revel on the brink facing a storm of challenges that could have been their undoing. But did they falter? No, they transformed. And let me tell you how. First, they shattered geographical boundaries. Forget the US the Middle East was where the action was. They tailored their services and boosts revenue from the region skyrocketed from a mere 10% to a jaw dropping 40. But wait, there's more. Ai wasn't just a buzzword. It was a game changer. From refactoring code to supercharging. Their SEO AI became their secret weapon. article submissions. They went from a sluggish three a day to a staggering 30. That's 10 fold. And then the restaurant industry, when others saw a sinking ship, TekRevol saw an untapped goldmine. One month out beta, they already got 20 contracts in the bag. But the real kicker knowledge leadership, they empowered the unsung heroes of the restaurant world, offering them certifications and courses. So what's the takeaway? Take revel didn't just weather the storm. They became the storm. They turn challenges into launchpads. Setting the stage for a future that's not just about survival. It's about conquering new frontiers. But one question remains, what of the future?
Ben Kaplan 27:40
Where are things right now? How much? Are you back to pre disruption revenues? And what is your outlook look like for the future to not only get back to where you were, but also increase and grow and scale from there?
Abeer Raza 27:54
That's a very difficult question. So it's very stressful to be in a situation that we thought we'd left back, like I mean, you know, our accounts are flush, we had enough capital to invest in other ventures and stuff. And it's slowly and gradually, the noose keeps getting tighter around your neck. And then you're like, you're just there. Now you just have to, like, somehow grab on to whatever survival that you can, and then hope to survive long enough to which you can come back to where you were, and then go from there. Right. So it's not about going back to square one. It's square minus eight 90% or something. It's difficult. It's stressful. The way I see this is, it's a test. It's a very humbling experience. Because on one side, it will be nice to have success throughout and keep growing. But on the other side, what if this had come to us when we were $100 million company? Or, you know, a close? I mean, my goal is to get to a billion dollar, right, which is why the SAS platform, which is why the other sort of ecosystem products and services. So what if we were so close to that and this app, and the downside from that would be drastic. So if it happens right now, it just shows us that we need to be more mindful of macroeconomic factors. And we need to bake that into the different startups that we create and always have a risk aversion strategy place where our outflow is always controlled in terms of how much are we willing to put out? So yeah, I think in terms of the future case, I know for fighter we're gonna get artifort because we already have the you know metrics to prove that we're starting to change strides and things are starting to improve I can like if I you know, very winner, the marketing side like I could talk through about like ads, every running and sequences on different stages of the business development process, like a customer that's on the contract stage is only seeing things that are related to contract everywhere on search engines and social media and everywhere else. I can talk about retargeting their dream Incorporated, which you never had before I can talk about the different assets that we have in place which were never there before. So we're a lot stronger than we started. And that's starting to show the effects. So by all intents purposes, not only are we going to get where we were before, but we will be probably 10 extant in the next, I would say three years. That's the target. How
Ben Kaplan 30:16
has that impacted the relationship between you and your co founder? How you view opportunities and challenges now? Does it make you more risk averse? Or does it make you want to take bolder bets?
Abeer Raza 30:29
Oh, these questions just keep getting better? Well, it was, it was challenging to start with, I think from a sailor considering that most of this happened on sales and marketing, I completely take the blame. So I was like, Hey, this is my fault. I've been involved in a lot of things which I shouldn't have, we should have doubled down on what we were doing. So we just got to fix this. And he was, he's always been very supportive to an extent where I sometimes refer to him as my second wife. You know, so he was he was like, How can I help? You know, what do we what can I do? So he started getting more involved in marketing as well. And some of the sort of, you know, automation things that we did, obviously, from his team, because he's the CTO. So we we kind of synergized quite a lot more than we were before their marketing was siloed. From production and sort of tech, we're now is integrated, where we have a project manager running like new opportunities and new approaches that we're taking one throne, the tech side, where the performance marketing team kind of has a direct line reporting towards others excited as well. So yeah, we've kind of fix some of the gaps that were existing before, I think it's made us a lot more stronger in terms of relationship wise, the question that you asked, and then additionally, in terms of bets that we are making, I think we're taking bolder bets in our current business line. Like we just invested a lot of money, getting, you know, the enterprise version of HubSpot and some of the other tools that we need to kind of automate and make things more streamlined on the marketing and sales end. So we're making bolder beds in terms of our current business, because we understand that we need a bold move to kind of pivot from where we were at before and we need to go farther than we were.
Ben Kaplan 32:13
Final thing is, for any entrepreneur dealing with a similar challenge, saying that like, hey, things are going great. And suddenly it isn't, or, Hey, we're used to always being in a growth mode, right? Were you always used to always seeing our graphs going up? And to the right, or, wow, I thought this was just, you know, maybe a blip in our overall story. But oh, no, suddenly, this seems more serious. What is your final advice to them on how to get through something similar to what you've faced during this past year.
Abeer Raza 32:44
So I think there's no computer saved from this, we already saw their Airbnb came to the point where it was almost bankrupt, right? During COVID, we saw matter to take a deep hit, we saw Google lose, like, you know, 100 billion or something firms, its valuation when charge came out, there is no company that safe from, you know, factors outside of your own control. And I would say that there are two things. One is that you can keep on worrying about things that are outside of your span of control, because then you're just gonna become the target and not really do anything, because there's so much that's out there that is going to beat you down and be like, okay, the future just looks like shirt, like global warming is gonna, you know, kill all of us whatever age so you don't get into that trap, right, like control the things you can control, ignore the things you can, however, and this is something that I've learned very recently, when there's macroeconomic factors that would directly impact you, that you think is going to impact your long term, assume that's going to impact your next month, what would you do differently? You know, how would you change the way you're doing things? And then I'm not saying that 100% Focus on pivoting or anything like against were 300 people, it's hard to pivot when you're like, you know, you're focused on one thing and focus completely, but set aside 20% of your time, or 10, personnel, whatever you can afford, and put it in your calendar and start having those discussions around. Worst case scenario, what are we going to do? Like, how is this gonna change for us? And it's a process when you have to pivot in a month's time, then you put in those 14 hours and you become stressed, you have to take several steps back. You don't want to be in that situation. You have to always be planning ahead. I think good entrepreneurs. I'm not one of them, I guess, think ahead, they really understand and just start taking action from day one instead of waiting till the water is up your throat or whatever.
34:40
Imagine being at the helm of a thriving tech company, only to find yourself in a whirlpool of challenges that threaten to sink the ship, TekRevol faced just a plummeting SEO ranking, fierce competition in the AI space and a shifting economic landscape that left them gasping for air But did they drown? Far from it? They pivoted and how diversifying into the booming Middle East Market, embracing AI to supercharge every facet of their business, and even venturing into the restaurant industry. TekRevol didn't just adapt, they evolve. They turn challenges into stepping stones, transforming their business model to not just survive, but thrive. And the future. That's not a question mark. But an exclamation point. A B Arousa sees a 10x growth on the horizon, fortified by lessons learned and a newfound resilience. So what's next for TekRevol? The journey ahead is not just about recovery. It's about revolutionising the tech space. One bold move at a time. And with that is case closed
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