MBA1901 Running a Business as a Person of Color

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Up as an Egyptian American, I had an interesting upbringing and just experience of life at home. My parents spoke Arabic, we had Egyptian culture at home, Egyptian music. Going to school with a name like Omar Zenholm was a little difficult for me. And in the 80s and 90s Omar was not a common name. Zenholm was a last name people couldn't pronounce. People were quite confused about where I was from. They couldn't make out what my ethnic background was. I consider myself brown. I'm a dark man and as a brown skinned person, people don't know if you are Hispanic or if you're Indian or Middle Eastern or you know, biracial or something like that. And honestly you know, because of that, because I didn't fit in because my looks and my name and my culture was something in people's faces or Something that was not easily understood off the bat. You know, my name is not Johnny Williams, and it's just kind of not a subject to talk about. It became kind of the forefront of who I was, like, my identity. To illustrate this, you know, probably the fourth or fifth question anybody would ask me if they met me was, where are you from? Anybody who's not a person of color or a minority is not asked that. And it begs the question, why is that so important to other people where I'm from? Why is that a question? And I can understand that most people, this is an innocent question. They're just interested to know, you know, you're different. Where are you from? I know that now. Growing as a grown up. But growing up, it was a bit annoying. It was kind of like, why do I have to answer these questions all the time? As a child growing up, I got teased a lot because of the fact that I look different and I come from a different background. You know, when my friends or my classmates would meet my parents, they look different, they sound different. So early on in my life, I realized I was different. And I also realized I'm not gonna please everybody. I'm not gonna fit in all the time. I'm not going to be liked. And I got used to standing out. I got just facing the fact I am different, and I got comfortable with that. And I think around age 11 to 12, I just kind of resigned to the fact that, hey, you know what? I don't really care what people think anymore because it's very exhausting trying to please people and to fit in all the time. And in a big way, this subconsciously helped me or prepared me for entrepreneurship, because part of entrepreneurship is not really worrying too much about what other people think, not worrying what people will say, what people will do, how people will react if you fail. And because I built that muscle from an early age, it helped me. It helped me in my early days of entrepreneurship, getting over failures, being okay with failing publicly, being okay with not fitting in, with putting out work that maybe is not praiseworthy at some level. And a lot of people get held back because they're so worried about what people think, what people are going to say. They don't want to put things out in the world, they don't want to create content in the world. They don't want to start their business, because what if somebody says this or that or calls me something or judges me? Those thoughts never crossed my mind because of the experience I had. Now, having said that, I've shared before that as a young entrepreneur, as somebody who tried to build a business and build businesses on the side while I was working full time until I moved into full time entrepreneurship. And growing up, I never saw entrepreneurs that look like me. You know, the successful entrepreneurs I knew were Richard Branson and Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, right? These people don't look like me. So I'm like, what kind of entrepreneur am I going to be? Like, where are my examples? Because you're going to question sometimes is it even possible for somebody who is a minority that maybe is not relatable to people because they don't look like the common person or something like that, or is not mainstream, is it possible for that person to be successful? But then I realized, you know what, maybe I could be that example one day. You know, I was pretty ambitious to say that I'll be a successful entrepreneur before I even, you know, had any success as an entrepreneur. But I thought maybe I could be that example for other people one day. And obviously along the way, along the journey, I got to see some examples that looked like me. And then I later found out that actually Steve Jobs is half Lebanese, so he's actually half Arab. So that was part of my experience as well. In terms of challenges, I'm not going to lie. There's discrimination there. It's just, it's a fact. If you look at the speaker list at any conference website in the last 10 years, you can go use the Wayback Machine or something, you'll notice that the speaker list is predominantly 80% white male. Now, I do recognize that by being a man, I actually have a better chance of being on that speaker list than a minority woman. Now, that has changed and things have improved over the years, especially recently. But some people might call it a disadvantage or a challenge. Somehow I found a way to get on stages. It forced me to be better. It forced me to better get better as a speaker, as a communicator, as a performer on stage, really. And it really forced me to ask the question, am I really not being asked to speak at these conferences or being accepted to speak at these conferences because of the color of my skin or my name or my culture? Or is it maybe you're just not good? Omar? Now, whether that was true or not, it forced me to just say, you know what? Just try to get better. Maybe you're not good enough. And that could have been possible. But the point here is that that challenge forced me to say, hey, you know what? I want to get better at public speaking. I want to get Better at performing well on stage. I invested in public speaking coaching. I in invested, I took courses, I took classes, I got voice lessons, I took small speaking engagements on, I took small conferences on. I tried to get on as many stages as possible to practice and improve my craft. And instead of saying woe to me, I said, listen, challenge or not, if you want something, go get it. And I actually learned that from my mother. My mother is one of the hardest hustlers in the world. She is super smart and doesn't take no for an answer. She's determined. She, all her life she went after what she wanted. She didn't let the fact that she was an immigrant who didn't know the language at first, who had to do her degree all over because they didn't recognize her degree from Egypt to stop her. None of these things stopped her. She had no friends, no family, nothing. She's in a new country and she found success. And she taught me, just by example, growing up in that environment, that there are no excuses. There are no excuses. If you want something, just work hard for it, go get it. You might have to work harder than the other person, but it's still no excuse. One of the things I think that I'm proud of as a person of color, as an entrepreneur of color, is I'm conscious of the fact of having a diverse team. I'm really, really a believer that a diverse team makes a great team, makes a great company, makes a great product because you're getting diverse opinions, tastes and insights and perspectives on your product, on your business that's going to help inform and really influence the world. The only way you're going to really relate to the world is if you have the world represented in your company. This is why we're super conscious of the fact that, hey, we need to make sure that our team is as diverse as possible. There's a problem if you look at your about page and everybody looks like you. I love my businesses, I love my teams. But at the end of the day, I want to look back at my career as an entrepreneur and say I did the right thing. I built the right way. I impacted the world beyond just providing a great product or service.

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To wrap up today's episode, being an entrepreneur of color to me is just the challenge of being different. And generally people are comfortable with what they know, whether that's conscious or subconscious. And that's just been my own personal experience. It's not to say that it makes it impossible for me to be successful as a business owner. No, I have a lot of opportunity and by the way, a lot of privilege that my parents provided me with a great education, with a great opportunity to grow up in the US I had two parents that really gave me some great values and some great insights growing up. I cannot complain. But the world does need diversity. It needs to be more diverse. It needs to embrace that diversity. And if I can help that effort by being a successful entrepreneur of color, I'm proud of that, no matter what challenges I face because of that. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I know this was a little bit of a different type of episode, but sometimes we need perspective in business and that's one of the biggest lessons or takeaways you can have a broader perspective. If you love the podcast, make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat and get the next episode automatically. Also, by hitting subscribe, you get access to all our archived episodes over 1900 business lessons. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes being a minority is quite funny, actually. Early on in my career when I would get voicemails from clients or even video messages, if they've never met me or saw me or heard me or spoke to me, they would assume I'm a non native speaker. They assume that I don't speak English well. They would send me them really funny messages or videos of them talking really slowly and they'd get so surprised when I would reply and be like, you know, I'm a native English speaker. I can, I can understand you, don't worry. And I always see that as, you know, just a bit humorous. I know that it comes from a good place. They're trying to make sure that they are understood. I don't think it's a mean thing or anything like that, but I find that sometimes there's a little bit of laughter that comes along with those challenges. So I think that it's important as entrepreneurs, as leaders, to always have as much as possible the best opinion of other people. And if they're not the best of people. Let them prove you otherwise, but don't assume. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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