MBA1799 Let’s Talk About Diversity and Your Business

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show because a better business begins with you at your best every single day with our daily 10 minute business.

Lessons for the real world.

I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode we're going to discuss diversity and your business in the business world. Recently, this has been a hot topic. Many companies these days are taking a close look at how diverse their team is. Some companies are getting caught up in controversy and others are holding themselves accountable publicly like Wistia, who are publicly displaying their diversity statistics or demographics for their company and admitting they got work to do. What does this mean for your business, no matter how big or small it is? Because even if you're a solopreneur, one day you're going to make a hire or two or three, and the values and the principles your business is based on will reflect when you make those first hires. Now I'm going to approach today's topic from a different angle. I'm not going to try to convince anybody here that it's the right thing to do or it's your moral obligation to have a diverse team. I'm here to show you that actually a diverse team makes a better product, makes a better business, and is actually good for business. I'm going to give you real world examples from my own business as well as others from time to time. It's my job as the host of the show to have some tough conversations so that we all can get better in the process. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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If you go to your about page and you look at all your team members photos and if everybody looks like you, there's a problem. We're not even going to go into the topics of diversity in terms of being fair and just doing the right thing. I'm not here to be your moral compass. I'm actually here to show you and convince you that having diversity in your team is actually going to help your bottom line. It's actually going to help you bring in more money. Nobody is actually talking about this from this point of view and this is why I wanted to approach this topic in this way. I often go to pitch nights at startup communities, startup hubs and co working spaces. I love to hear about new business ideas, investment opportunities, learn about what are the up and coming entrepreneurs coming up with. It's a great energy to be a part of. And every new business, every new startup wants to change the world. They want to make a dent in the universe. They want to make a huge impact on the globe, on everybody, across all continents. And then I look at their founding team, whether it's you know, three, four, five people and everybody looks the same how are you going to make an impact on the world if the world is not represented in your team? How do you know what the world wants? How do you know what the world needs, what problems they have, how they think, how they behave, how they buy? How will you mold your brand? So it's a global brand. One of the easiest ways to do that is to have a diverse team. If you want to make an impact on the world, you have to understand the world. This is why I'm a big advocate of travel, and this is why I believe travel is one of the best educations you can buy. But you can't constantly be traveling, especially in today's day and age. But you can hire people that are from different parts of the world or have different backgrounds. They could be local to your country, even. They could be local to your state. But because of their backgrounds, whether they're a Hispanic American or an Egyptian Australian or a Nigerian Canadian. The point here is that when you diversify a team, you're also getting the background and the knowledge of different cultures from different types of people, different types of communities. This helps you build a better product, a better business, a better service. Because no matter how niche your product is, there's going to be a diverse cultural mix in that niche. Even if your niche is beginner snowboarders over 40, very niche, you're going to get beginner snowboards over 40 that come from different cultural backgrounds. And when you can do that effectively, you produce a more diverse, more relatable brand and product, which makes you highly competitive. I can't tell you how many customers have come to my software company, Webinar Ninja, have come as a customer and have told me, I've left Company X because of the culture that they portray. I don't feel included in that community. I don't feel represented, and that the product's for me. I've read these emails, I've seen these tweets. And it's not some sort of magic formula of diversity that we came up with where we're like, everybody needs to, you know, dump all their cultural understanding and information and knowledge into our knowledge base. No, it's just the mere fact that every. We have a diverse team across different departments that help us influence the product just through their own insights and their own opinions and just what they say in product meetings, their input impacts the product we create. Now, I'm going to tell you up front that I was highly conscious of this when I was building my own team. And that just comes from my own experience as an entrepreneur. As I was growing and getting more confident as an entrepreneur, getting better and better at this craft, at this profession, one of the things that really me when I was early on in my journey is that I had no examples of successful entrepreneurs that looked like me, that were like me. My parents immigrated from Egypt to the us I was born and raised in the us. I grew up as a minority. I'm a person of color. I'm technically, you know, an Arab American. So growing up, all my examples of successful entrepreneurs looked like Richard Branson. I never saw anybody that looked like me make it in business, at least in public. Maybe they did, and I didn't know about them. And one day I said to myself, maybe I can be that example. It can't be impossible, right? And of course today we see many examples of people of color that are very, very successful in business. Arab Americans, Indian Americans, we have lots of examples. But part of my journey was that I was very conscious of, as I was building a team, is that I want to have a diverse team because I want to make sure that different cultures input are influencing my product. Because I already knew, I already felt that my own cultural understandings, my own background helped with my own product. So I thought it can only help if I added more diversity in my team. Let me give you an example. When you're creating any kind of product, you have to create some sort of UX user experience. Whether it's a software, whether you're creating a course, whether you're just building your own website. You need to be able to communicate to the public what your product does. Many people just say, hey, that makes sense to me. Looks great, let's roll with it. But because my parents were immigrants and English wasn't their first language, I'm highly sensitive to the fact that, hey, not everybody speaks English as their first language. They might understand certain phrasing or certain words. How can I sell people on my product even if English is not their first language? I'm sensitive to the fact that if I want to appeal to the world and I'm making all these inside cultural jokes that only people from New York understand, it's not going to really bode really well. It's not going to really resonate with many people. So that's just a small example of what diversity can do for your brand. Understanding that, hey, there are other people that have different understandings, different perspectives. How can I make sure that they feel included? We're not just talking about representing different cultures with an image of an Asian person on My website and an image of an African American. Yes, that is important. But what's more important is, is understanding their needs, their wants and addressing them through your product and through your experience. And my ability to do that just multiplies every time I make a hire. So, for example, if you go to webinarninja.com about, you'll see our team. And we are proudly very diverse people from around the world. We have people from India and the Philippines and Italy and the UK and Spain and the US and Australia and Belarus. And I can keep going. But the point here is, is that I am interested in finding great talent from different parts of the world. Because people, no matter where they are in the world, they have a unique experience when they grow up, when they are educated. And that impacts their opinions and their thoughts and their tastes. And having that thrown in the pot helps us tremendously. Now, how does this help our bottom line? Well, because we can appeal to so many people around the world and not just English speaking countries. Over the last seven years of Webinar Ninja's existence, we went from our customer base being 100% from the US to roughly 51% US. The rest is the rest of the world. Europe, Asia, South America. And that's directly because we have a diverse team, because we have those inputs. Mind you, I'm not actively marketing in these parts of the world. I'm not trying to conquer the South American market and doing specifically targeted ads to them. No, this is all word of mouth because of our branding, because of the product itself, because we understand that if it's dead easy to use, it doesn't matter what language you speak, you can figure it out. But it's not just about language. It's also about culture and identity. We create a product that is for business owners. They use webinars to sell their products and services to deliver their training. So it's important for those people, no matter where they are, feel represented that this company has my back, that people like me are part of their team. This is why we're so proud to continually grow a diverse team. This takes effort, though. It's not easy. And I want to share with you some of the things that we do to actively grow that kind of team.

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When you're.

Trying to grow a diverse team, you really need to make more of an effort. That's just the bottom line. You have to cast a wider net and you have to be willing to go through a lot of applications. And what we do is we do a filtration system with an application form. So when people fill out this form, it actually kind of self filters them. So we're trying to find top talent just like everybody else. Experienced, highly skilled people with great attitude. But if somebody can contribute to our team in a different way culturally and add to our own team culture and product in a unique way, that's a plus for us. That is something that is hard to find and yet really can't buy. It's an inside insight. It's a perspective that's really priceless. Now I have a remote team, so everybody works remotely, so this allows me to hire people around the world. We work mostly asynchronously, so time zones are not much of an issue. We meet all together once a month for all hands meeting, but other than that we have department meetings that are weekly and this just makes it so much easier for us as a team. Now if you have a local team, this still can happen. It doesn't mean that you have to hire from across the world, but you can hire people that are local, that have different backgrounds, that have different perspectives, that have different cultural understandings. Trust me, it's going to help you build a better product, a better service and it will organically build your business. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show and thanks for hearing my perspective on this topic. If this was helpful at all, let me know. Leave us an Apple Podcast rating and Review I'd love to hear what you think. Share this episode with your friends and family. If you think it made you think and unlike other people, think Before I go, I want to leave you with this. As an entrepreneur, you have immense power. You are an employer. You are somebody that can really shape the world. Like seriously impact the world by what you build, by who you serve. This is an honor. But it's also a responsibility. At the end of the day, when I hang them up and I retire, I want to be proud of the years I put into my businesses. I want to be proud of what I built and who I impacted through my product and my business. But also who I impacted, who were a part of my team. This is why this means so much to me. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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