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 Mohamed Eid, founder and general manager of ElevateEgypt.

My name is Eid, and I’m the founder and general manager of Elevate Egypt, a fitness and rehab services company that bridges the gap between fitness and healthcare. While I started out as a mobile network planning engineer, I began my coaching career teaching soccer to kids before I joined a fitness center part-time.

During my time there, I saw a demand for personalized training in group settings. I noticed that clients often opted for personal training because they felt that the group sessions didn’t provide enough individual attention from the coaches. I implemented that knowledge into my classes and saw how much people enjoyed attending them, so I launched Elevate to revolutionize the way people train in group sessions. A coach shouldn’t just be there to count your reps, a coach should be an educator specialized in rehabilitation.

I worked in the fitness industry for five years before going out on my own, which gave me a lot of insight about the market. I was familiar with the pricing, the trends, the demand, and what was being offered by competitors.

I felt success from day-one — but I realized that Elevate was successful when we became one of the most visited fitness centers in West Cairo after just seven months of operation. I believe that there’s a big difference between feeling successful and feeling fulfilled. In the early days of my career, my work with clients was mostly related to aesthetics — I was successful, but I wasn’t necessarily proud of my work. I found my passion in helping people live a pain-free life.Helping my clients improve their quality of life through personal training and rehabilitation is what fulfills me on a professional level.

One of the things that makes Elevate different is that we’re more interested in health and longevity than aesthetics. We customize our training sessions for people who have physical issues. We’re more interested in helping someone regain the ability to navigate stairs on their own than just people who want to break personal training records. We want our sessions to work towards making people live well outside of the gym.

We choose to build coaches, not just hire them — which differentiates us from our competition. Our criteria are very strict for who we allow on our team, which is unfortunately not standard practice. Instead of hiring people who have gotten a weekend or two-week certificate, we make sure that everyone on our team is serious about being educated, which is why our coaches are some of the most certified in the Middle East.

And while this gives us an edge over our competitors, the entry barrier is one thing I’d like to change about the industry. In Egypt, coaches who have complete control over the physical wellbeing of their clients don’t need an official license to be hired. The bar needs to be way higher, and we’ve implemented that at Elevate. This is obviously slowing down our team and business growth, but I believe that this is the way to create a sustainable business. It’s not about maximizing your returns as quickly as possible, it’s about building an establishment that people trust with their health.

One bad coach can hurt the whole industry. When someone has a negative experience with a trainer at any fitness center, they become skeptical of the industry as a whole. At the end of the day, people are investing their time, money, and health into this experience, which are some of the most valuable things you can invest.

You can’t strengthen the human body without being knowledgeable about it. That’s why our coaches undergo a vigorous educational program where they study functional anatomy, physiology, and kinesiology. They study for nine hours a week for nine months, take monthly exams, and have to score higher than 75% to pass. They learn pretty much everything you need to know before handling someone’s joints and heart rate.

Within five years, I hope to see Elevate as the destination for building coaches in the Middle East. I want us to be accredited by an official association to be able to certify coaches in the region, to attract people who are serious about coaching. I want institutions to prefer hiring people accredited by us because they know that the education they’ve received is more than they would get anywhere else.

To do that, I need to put in a lot of work, but just as importantly, I need to recharge around the people I love. I don’t spend as much time with them as I would like, so I try my best to make sure that I focus all my energy on them when I do. I make it a point to spend time on Thursdays with my wife, Fridays with her parents, and Saturdays with my mother. These days are sacred to me, and no matter what is going on professionally, this is time I do not compromise.

If I could, I would tell my younger self, and budding entrepreneurs, to take faster decisions, even if they’re not all in the right direction. It’s faster to make a mistake and correct your path accordingly than agonize over a decision for months — not growing is dying. Try to separate how you’re doing from how your business is doing. Entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster, and it would be better for them mentally to detach how they feel from what the business is going through. I would also tell them that just because someone is successful doesn’t mean that they know what they’re doing all the time — don’t worry about having to have everything figured out.

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