OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Every Tuesday, Founder of the Week looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a business, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week is Ahmed Shalaby (LinkedIn), co-founder and sales director of 4a Nutrition, the business behind Lino Oats.

My name is Ahmed Shalaby and I’m the co-founder and sales director of 4a Nutrition, the business that provides you with Lino Oats and all its products. Our business is mainly focused on providing food with high nutritional value, such as oats.

I studied pharmacy at Modern Sciences and Arts University and had initially planned to continue in the family business, which owns a chain of pharmacies. As 4a Nutrition, we had begun with just one product, one packing machine, and four employees (myself and my co-founders). Today, we have a team of 160 employees, our own factory, and six production lines.

Eight years ago, while I was in university, my four partners and I were looking for an affordable nutritional gym product as the items available were out of our budgets. As we did our research, we were surprised that we couldn’t find affordable local options. Then we discovered oats. We were impressed to find value in oatmeal but we also struggled to find it in supermarkets. Realizing that it was considered a niche product that very little of the Egyptian market knew about, we came up with the idea of putting this wholesome product on the shelves.

As 20-something-year olds we had several advantages: We were young and without familial obligations — but the flipside was that we had no capital or experience. In fact, one of our favorite memories was that one of the founders was under 21 and had to be represented by his father when we registered the company.

We owe our success to our families; they provided us with the capital to make our business idea a reality. They also offered us a space — a desk in an office veranda — as our first official office. My father played an essential role in helping set up our business — he provided us with storage space in his pharmacies to stow our products, while another one of our family members gave us a floor in his factory to install our first production line.

Our first investor surfaced 1-2 years after we had been in business, and it was a friend of ours who was very impressed with our progress. But that was not the moment we realized we were succeeding; the turning point was when we saw our product on display at Alfa Supermarket in Maadi. I remember buying the product and taking a selfie as I held the receipt and realizing what we had accomplished.

Another sign of success was hiring more employees to join the Lino family. We realized that not only were we growing, but we were changing people’s lives; households were being supported from the salaries that we were providing, which made us very attached to our employees. We are proud to say that we still retained some of our earliest staff members who have been part of our team since we started eight years ago.

One of the difficulties we face is being our own cheerleaders. Navigating the current economic climate, aside from the daily hardships, is tough. We began our business at a very young age and we had a lot to learn. I was studying pharmacy at the onset and there were so many business and sales concepts that I learned through trial and error. We learned from the most unusual situations — one lesson I received was from the owner of a small retailer on how sales’ representatives can scam their employers.

Like all businesses, the devaluation hit us hard, but unlike much larger companies, we were able to sail through it by being adaptable — we scratched plans, reviewed others, and added some new ones to meet market demands. We made decisions such as looking for more local ingredients and exporting more to increase our USD revenue stream, among others. Today, we are exporting to the US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, Mauritius, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Palestine.

Another lesson that we learned is to always be aligned as a team and to understand the importance of a leader to keep us on track. In our business model, we each have very clear roles and responsibilities and we rely on each other to succeed. Conflicts are natural and necessary — we all know that we resolve conflicts privately by following the written policies within our business to ensure that relationships are not ruined and objectives are reached.

As an FMCG business, we would like to see some more regulation on food products, as several new market entrants are on shelves and do not have correct nutritional information on their labels. We would also love to be able to grow oats in Egypt; we currently import our product into the country. Growing oats in Egypt is possible but we still need an oat mill; the nearest ones are in South Africa and the UAE. Our vision is to have one in Egypt as we foresee that we would be providing better value and more competitive pricing for our clients, locally and internationally, if we grew and milled our own oats.

If we hadn’t started 4a Nutrition I would probably have been in the family business, which is owning and running pharmacies. Definitely following that career would have given me more time for family, but I have to accept that being a founder gives me some flexibility, which comes at the price of being available consistently and often having longer days than the average employee.

When it comes to books, my partners and I have a book club of sorts. Most of our reading is about business as many of us did not study it in university. We are currently reading Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine which we strongly recommend to others to read.

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