Sherif El Sayad, chairman of Tredco El Sayad Group: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Sherif El Sayad (LinkedIn), chairman of Tredco El Sayad Group.

My name is Sherif El Sayad and I’m the chairman of Tredco El Sayad Group. We started business in 1935 with commercial activities and then began our manufacturing journey in 1985 with our first factory in the automotive feeding industry. We make car seats and interior trims for cars that are manufactured in Egypt. In 2000, we started our home appliances factory for refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, gas cookers, water dispensers. I’ve been in the business since 2000 till this moment, and right now I’m chairman of the group, so I handle our three factories.

We’ve recently set up a micro-mobility business, Glide. Micro-mobility is any transportation means that’s used for one or two persons — we’re talking about electric motorcycles, electric scooters, electric bicycles. It’s becoming very trendy now in Europe because of the price of the cars and the price of running a car on fuel, plus, most people who commute for work are only commuting by themselves or with one other person. I’m sure that in Egypt, maybe North Africa, and also in the GCC, this trend will pick up very soon.

With our micro-mobility products, we’re trying to add a twist, not just copying products from China or Europe. We add something that suits our culture, our type of streets, and how people want to move. In Egypt, people don’t really like bicycles because the weather gets hot and you don’t want to arrive at work sweaty. So, people prefer something electric-powered. We take these ideas and try to modify them to be more adaptive to our culture.

I’m at a critical point in my career. I’ve been managing all the details and all the operations for the past 24 years — I’m a mechanical engineering graduate, so I often find myself in the factories. However, I’ve realized I can’t continue this style of micromanagement and overseeing every last detail. I have to change my management style if I want to be able to realize my dreams of expanding our factories and product line.

I decided to look into corporate governance, the separation of management from ownership. I started studying the idea of corporate governance a few months ago and I’m taking it very seriously. I want to take some courses in it and I’ve already hired some consultants to see how we can approach this, so that I will no longer be involved in the day-to-day operations. We want to hire a CEO, have a board of directors.

I want to free myself up so I have more time for strategic planning, innovation, and creation. In the case of Glide, it’s all about finding creative and innovative solutions, which is tricky to achieve when I am occupied with the daily operations and details of the business.

All our products are electric products — we aren’t going into traditional fuel cars. My dream is for all six or seven of our factories to run on solar power by 2030. Our refrigerator factory is already 50% powered by solar panels. There are lots of complications and challenges, but I’m trying to find a way to reach this dream.

I’m not a member of the 5am club. I tried several times, but I’ve found that I’m a night owl. I usually wake up around 8:30am. I spend 10-15 minutes checking the news and social media before starting my day and Enterprise is at the top of my list. Everyday, I head to the factory in Tenth of Ramadan City and I usually stay late until around 7:30pm.

More than half of the day is internal meetings with the management team and the other half is external meetings. I don’t only limit myself to the top management. I oversee the production lines almost every day, I sit with the sales team, the quality team, the operations team, and the human resources team — though as I mentioned earlier, I’m trying to change that now.

I have two constants in my day. The first is to review and write up my to-do list on my phone. The second is that I try to avoid taking phone calls during the day. Sometimes people will call you for a question and spend 10 to 15 minutes just talking. So I’ll drop them a message letting them know I’ll call them back at 7pm instead. Throughout the day, I write the list with the names of people I need to call, and I get back to them on my drive home from work, because it’s an hour-long commute.

My experience with having a work-life balance? I’m postponing that balance till I reach my career objectives. I spend a lot of time at work, even sometimes on the weekends or I have meetings in the evening. I’m not a TV person, so I don’t spend my time watching movies or series, and I’m not very much into sports — though I’ll play padel once a week because we have courts next to my house. I prefer to spend quality time with the family. Whenever I’m home, I’m sitting with them, or I’ll take them out on weekends. I make sure that on Friday or Saturday that we have breakfast all together, the whole family. No phones are allowed — that’s important. I also try not to lose the connection with my friends and social life. I like to go out with my friends once or twice a week for a nice dinner or coffee.

I’m in Dubai at the moment as I’m trying to expand Glide’s business in the GCC, whether that’s a small micro-mobility manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia or Dubai. That would be my dream. As for our goals on the home appliances side of things, I’m always trying to add more products. We currently have five products, and we’ll be adding another factory for gas cookers very soon, probably this year.

My dream is to set up what I call a realizator, which I want to be a kind of hub for transforming brilliant concepts into sellable products. I want to depend on the creativity and innovation of the Egyptian youth, where these young people would be like partners in this product. They have brilliant ideas, but for most of them, they don’t have the means — the funds or the factory, or someone to take care of their idea or their concept — to turn these into sellable products. It’s a very fresh idea that I’ve been working on for around two months, and the details aren’t very clear yet. I’m speaking to advisors to see how we can put this into practice.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is still one of the best books for anyone who wants to start their investment journey. It’s very straightforward and direct, but it’s full of ideas. It changed my life when it comes to investment.

The motto that I go by? Passion is your greatest asset. I’m very passionate about my work, being creative in the business, creating new products, and innovating. If this passion runs dry in whatever I’m doing, I stop it immediately, even if this would cost me money or cost me losing something. So this is what I live by. Love what you do, or do what you love.

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