Adham Elbedewy, head of commercial and a founding team member at Kemitt: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 Adham Elbedewy (LinkedIn), head of commercial and a founding team member at Kemitt. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m 23 years old and I’ve been working in tech for the past six years. I met the cofoundersof Kemitt — Mahmoud Fouad, Mohamed Hedayat, and Mohamed Rashwan — at a business incubator called TIEC. Together we’ve grown Kemitt to be one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces focused on furniture and home accessories in MENA.

We have over 80k products on our platform, represented by 1.5k furniture suppliers across22 categories, from pillowcases to full living rooms. We’ve been working to change how people shop for furniture online locally and we’re expanding into Saudi Arabia in February.

The commercial team I lead works on three main pillars: variety, affordability, andconvenience. We offer users thousands of options for whatever their homes may need, offering them different materials and price points. We work with larger brands such as Oriental Weavers, Nouval, and Smart Furniture, to small-and-medium manufacturers that wouldn’t usually be displayed in regular stores or online.

I usually start my day at 8:30am. The first thing I do is check my emails, messages, and thenews. I do a few home workouts in the morning to get the blood flowing, as the office is a 40-minute commute to Maadi. On the commute to work, I take calls with the team to discuss the agenda for the day or I’ll touch base with partners to arrange the day’s meetings.

While no two working days are the same, there are some things I like to keep constant. I believe it’s important to feel close to the team and to celebrate small wins. At the office, my first order of business is always getting coffee and breakfast with the team. We do a daily 10-15 minute “stand-up” meeting, during which each individual answers three questions: what did I achieve yesterday, what am I working on today, and what issues are blocking me? It keeps everyone aware of the team’s landscape and progress, and helps us track the team performance.

After our daily team meeting, I’ll check the performance metrics from the day before.There are a lot of performance dashboards to look at from the day before, from the supply side and the demand side. Then, I conduct internal meetings between 1-3pm and any external meetings will happen between 3-6pm. This is fixed across all teams to avoid clashes and ensure efficiency of workflow.

The ‘horizontal marketplace’ model has dominated e-commerce over the past couple ofyears. These are marketplaces that cover all categories such as furniture, cosmetics, appliances, and so on. Amazon, Jumia, and Noon have dominated this model. Recently, we’ve seen the rise of ‘vertical marketplaces,’ which are more focused on a single product category. In Egypt this is seen in Brantu and TFK for the fashion vertical, and Mummerz for the kids category.

No one in the region had previously adopted the vertical marketplace model for furnitureproducts. So we built Kemitt as a solution not only responding to user demand, but to meet the needs of suppliers. We enable e-commerce users to receive a comprehensive spectrum of home and furniture products and allow small-scale suppliers and manufacturers to access a huge customer base and expand their reach and scale.

The furniture industry has a larger average order value than most other industries. Ouraverage order is worth EGP 8.7k, which even surpasses the electrical appliances sector. However, retention of customers is harder in the furniture industry, which is why we work on introducing new categories such as home decor and bedding.

My favorite part of the day is the hours between 6-8pm —which I call my creative time — when I’m not busy with meetings. I’ll work on strategic projects, maybe crunch some numbers, work on model development, or look to improve the team’s workflow.

One of the shows I believe every tech entrepreneur should watch is: Working: What We Do All Day — a four-part Netflix docuseries in which the host — Barack Obama — visits three American workplaces. The series features great discussions on work in the past, present, and future. It doesn’t provide all the answers but gives all of us a lot to think about.

One book I’d like to recommend is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great LeadersInspire Everyone to Take Action. The book looks into how to create clear values in a company based on communication within the workplace. It covers how leaders inspire those in the workplace around them.

“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” This quote is the best advice I’ve been given.I was 18 at the time when I first heard it, and was just starting out in the tech ecosystem. I took part in a program run by Spark Ventures with Orascom Egypt’s Khaled Bishara, who shared the quote in one of our sessions.

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