Mostafa El Beltagy, co-founder and CEO of Nawy: 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 Mostafa El Baltagy (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Mostafa El Beltagy. Beyond my job title, I am someone who’s very keen to help the tech startup ecosystem in Egypt. I sit on the board of a number of startups, and I help mentor a lot of other young entrepreneurs.

Nawy was born out of a problem I faced personally. After moving back to Egypt after some time living abroad, I wanted to invest in real estate. I went to my cousin — who is one of the co-founders of the company and who was working in real estate at the time — to ask him where I should buy. At the time, he recommended New Giza — and he never really gave me a concrete reason why, he just told me to trust him.

That’s when I realized that there’s a problem with this market. As a consumer, you’re making one of your biggest investments with little-to-no data about what’s going on. In my case, I was lucky to have someone who I was sure was looking out for me and my interests — most people aren’t so lucky. The question became, how can I as a consumer get transparency. That was the vision from which the company started.

We collected the information ourselves from 200+ developers across Egypt, and listed all their inventory comprehensively so that, as a consumer, you could actually compare between different units and developments. In addition, when consumers reach out to our property consultants and sales agents, they’re equally incentivized to sell you property anywhere. As a result, most brokerages will close with 20-30 developers a year — we close with over 100.

For our next product, we realized that the properties that sell the fastest are the ones that are delivered the soonest. So we asked, why is it that no one is buying existing properties? The reason is that there’s no payment plan for existing properties. We realized that this doesn’t make sense, and wanted to address this by creating a product that makes buying resale properties with a payment plan almost as easy as buying a new build property from a developer.

The next product we launched, Nawy Shares, was built to address the problem of getting access to more customers looking to invest in the market. The question was, how do we bring this number from 1 mn people to 15 mn people? The way to do that was through fractionalization. We built an investment product that allows people to invest in real estate through Nawy Shares, and we’re now working with the Financial Regulatory Authority to fit it under a regulatory framework.

Our last line of business that’s currently in progress is our B2B business — dubbed Nawy Partners — which gives brokerages access to the inventory of all developers in one place. It’s about enabling and solving the problems of the brokerage ecosystem by aggregating all the information in one place.

Generally, I wake up around the same time my kids go to school. So I’m up by 7:30am-ish. I spend about 30-45 minutes going through social media, news, EnterpriseAM, and checking the business’ numbers from the previous day. I leave my house 30-45 minutes later, and spend my commute getting on calls, following up on things, and getting a headstart on my day.

My role is about maintaining the vision of the company. My time is mostly spent working on building new things, rather than operating different aspects of our business that have become independent and fully operational. This, along with investor relations and ensuring that the company has the right amount of funds, is where the bulk of my time goes.

Mondays are when I schedule all my weekly reviews. There are no breaks, no lunches, it keeps going until the day is over. All the other days of the week depend on what’s going on at a given time, and there’s really no consistency there. I usually leave the office by 6:30-7pm, and I like to be home before my kids’ bedtime so that I can put them to bed. Then sometimes, I’ll have to get on calls after that.

Putting my kids to sleep is the biggest constant in my day — but I also like to switch off by around 10pm if there are no calls, which is time I usually spend with my wife or watching Netflix before we relax and crash.

When it comes to being organized, I generally believe that the more basic your approach, the better. It’s all about being tied to your priorities — and my to-do-list actually reflects those priorities. I’m very conscious about what I allow onto my calendar, because I would otherwise be dragged into things that aren’t necessarily adding the most value.

On a professional level, I aim to continue what we’re doing with Nawy, continue to grow our business lines in Egypt and expand into other markets in the coming years. When I eventually leave the day-to-day hustle behind, I’d love to spend time giving back. I want to be even more active in helping young entrepreneurs with their businesses, and I want to spend more time focusing on philanthropy — mainly in education.

If you do something you like, your work is your life. I don’t believe that someone should be working in order to facilitate life — we spend too much time at work to not want to do what we’re doing. The bigger balance is between family, health, and work. I do prioritize spending time with my family, especially Saturdays, and I try to make the time I spend with my family as high-quality as it can be.

When reacting to an adverse situation, my mom used to say “I’m dealing with God, so I’m going to do these specific things.” It never made sense to me at the time, but what I’ve learned from that is that you deal with your own ethical and moral compass irrespective of how other people are acting.

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