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 Muhammad Nagi (LinkedIn), cofounder of MQR and currently the managing director of MQR/Greek Campus, which recently merged into one entity.

My name is Muhammad Nagi, and I’m the cofounder of MQR and most recently, the managing director of MQR/Greek Campus. My co-founders and I started MQR in 2012, while I was still in university, because we couldn’t find a place where we could properly work. Back then, we didn’t know that this was called a coworking space. The aim was to not only provide a place to work, but also to help people meet each other and build a community.

We spent about 3-4 years educating ourselves and the market about what a coworking space is. We had to differentiate between it and other existing spaces, like tutoring centers, libraries, and cafes. This gave us a chance to properly understand the industry and also become part of the rise of entrepreneurship back in the day. In 2017, we decided to pivot because it became very difficult to scale and even to raise funding.

We became a real estate management company. This means that instead of opening our own spaces, we partnered with real estate developers and individual landlords to convert their existing, unutilized spaces into work spaces and operate these for them. This made us asset-light, more cashflow-efficient and allowed us to scale faster. Today, we operate 12 spaces across Egypt, with a strong focus on building communities, and most recently merged with the Greek Campus, which is a significant milestone for us. In industries that are not easily scalable, consolidations are very important, in my opinion, and it comes at the right time for both entities.

I can’t say that I gave up anything to be an entrepreneur because my co-founders and I created this business out of passion and we did not put too much pressure on ourselves in our first years.As a founding team, we were adamant to take things slow and build a solid footing without rushing, which helped me learn a lot along the way. Of course, in terms of social life, my circles changed and maybe I gave up some financial security. I remember at the beginning of our journey, the only money that would be left over would be the EGP 600 that we would make from the cafeteria in our first coworking space, which then had to be divided among all the co-founders.

While covid was one of the toughest times for our business, it also worked in our favor.Our model was and still largely is based on physical interaction and events, and during the pandemic, we had to close our doors for three months. However, during lockdown, everyone understood what “remote work” was and realized that they needed places to work from that had the proper infrastructure in place. We even opened new segments, like passes for companies that enabled employees to work from our spaces to avoid overcrowding their office buildings in response to social distancing measures.

My advice to anyone starting a business would be to just start. I see a lot of people with great ideas, but they often waste time by not taking the decision to actually start implementing them. Others take a very long time to research and prepare the idea. While this is important, your initial product, pricing, and business model will probably change based on how the market reacts to your idea. So, don’t waste too much time on intricate planning. A quick start and flexibility are crucial for any business.

The main KPIs I look at every day are our topline and occupancy rates. Other than that, I look at functional KPIs, customer and team satisfaction, and capex returns to our landlords.

For advice, I turn to my co-founders, Abdelqader Ahmed and Sherif Ashraf first. I feel that we have really grown together.After them, I turnto my mentor Tamer Azer, partner at Shorooq Ventures, who has been with us since we decided to scale up, and is our first investor and main supporter. For strategic issues, I talk to Eslam Elsaadany, our strategy consultant, to validate our direction from time to time.

As MQR, we raised a small amount of money, but other than that we bootstrapped the company from the ground up. The main investors were Cairo Angels (now Acasia Group) and Alex Angels. During covid, we carried out a capital increase with both of them as existing investors, and added a few more angel investors.

Our plan now is to continue building communities and expand. After the merge with the Greek Campus, we want to focus on leveraging our momentum and expand even more across Cairo and Egypt, while also building a new value proposition for a new segment.

My parents and wife are very supportive of my career choice. At the beginning, my parents saw MQR as a side project, as opposed to a main source of income. But over the years, they’ve seen it grow, and so they’re completely on board now. For a while, I wasn’t able to balance between work, my family, my wife, and my two daughters, but I’ve managed to create a system and routine that works for me and them. However, I owe everything to my wife and daughters for bearing with me.

The last great thing I watched was WeCrashed, which revolves around the WeWork story.For me, I was impressed by it because it was so real to me. What WeWork founder Adam Neuman was building was very similar to what we were trying to do. It helped me heavily reflect internally on our team, because every one of us was watching it. We were able to draw comparisons and differences between our and WeWork’s story, which was very intense for us. One of the main takeaways we reached was that Adam Neuman was growing and scaling at a very fast rate, while we were set on taking it slow and building a solid model. The show is very useful for anyone who wants to build a company.

In my freetime, I play sports and Fantasy Football. I’m a huge football fan (I cheer for Al Ahly, Real Madrid and Manchester United), but I spend a lot of time on building my Fantasy Football team. We even host a team- and community-wide Fantasy League, which I’ve won twice in a row in the past years.

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