Fahmi Al Shawwa, CEO of Immensa: 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 Fahmi Al Shawwa (LinkedIn), founder and CEO of Immensa. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m the CEO and founder of Immensa, which was founded almost eight years ago, and is interlinked with my story. I wanted to study engineering, but my father did not agree. I ended up studying finance, and spent four or five years working in mergers, acquisitions, and advisory, but it wasn't for me.

I decided to take some time off to reflect, and I came across 3D printers, and that was it. It really excited me what you could do with these things. You could produce anything. So I went to London Business School and Singularity University, and somewhere in Utah to take courses on additive manufacturing, design engineering, and industrial manufacturing, and came back to Dubai and decided I want to do something in this field.

When we started, we did prosthetic limbs, surgical guides, dental parts, parts for airlines, racing boats — anything you could imagine. At one point we realized we have to specialize. We decided if we want to do something that's cutting edge, we need to pick something that the region is very strong in, where they're the leaders. It was either construction or oil and gas. We figured oil and gas, we have a good chance. Nobody was doing it, so we started dabbling with that and slowly got more sucked into it after Covid-19. [Immensa currently manufactures spare parts and equipment for oil and gas manufacturers like heat exchangers and motor parts.]

There's a lot of bankruptcies happening in the 3D printing ecosystem, and a lot of it is the machine manufacturers. These guys used to fly in, tell people you can 3D print anything and everything, sell these machines, and leave. Now we’re seeing a lot of these companies go under, and I think it's cleaning up, because the value is not in the machines. It’s in the knowledge, the expertise, and what you're producing. At the same time, the acceptance and the shift of where we’re seeing 3D printing being applied is extremely exciting. We’re at the cusp of massive adoption.

My job is to support everyone [at Immensa]. Everyone who works at Immensa, I would say, is definitely intellectually smarter than I am. Each one knows much more in their field than I do — [whether it’s] the engineers, the digitalization team, the manufacturers, or the marketing guys. My role is to offer support, and if I can’t, I just stay out of the way, and push on the adoption of new technologies and trying new things.

I start my mornings by dragging myself out of bed by force — in pain and kicking and screaming — and I get myself in the car, and drive to the gym. For the first 20 minutes, I'm complaining and moaning that I'm in the gym. I finish my workout, buy my two coffees — an espresso and an americano — and head to the office. Usually the first hour is just catching up on serious work that I want to do.

The best way to explain a typical workday is very agile. The best days are the unscripted, unscheduled days. My calendar tends to be very fluid, and work tends to be extremely fluid in nature. I sit behind the desk probably two to three hours a day, and spend a couple of hours on the phone, tackling challenges, opportunities, and problems.

A constant in my week is [going to] the gym. I don't do it for health or for how I look, I just treat it as it is. If I don't go to the gym, I can't function and I just can't focus, so I go to force myself to wake up. Another constant is I typically have lunch at my desk for half an hour, just before getting on a call. The third constant in my days is I always make it a point to be home by 6:30-7pm maximum to have dinner with the kids.

On a personal level, my aim is to be the fittest I've ever been at 50, and that's for longevity. I'll be 50 next year, so I think I'm getting there.

On a professional level, I have a very big purpose in life to enable and empower others to achieve what they want to achieve. Whenever we hire someone to join the team, the first thing we do is ask, what do you want in life? What is your aim? Is it to buy a private jet, open a vineyard, climb Kilimanjaro? Give us your personal objective, not your career objective, so we can map it out and make sure that we can make your dream come true. That is sort of my bigger purpose, and why I love what I do.

I think I'm really good at balancing work with life. I'm not as structured where work is work and personal life is personal life, but weekends are weekends. I probably send an email every couple of hours, but I think balance is very important.

To switch off from work, I used to love running. It used to be my meditation. I used to go on long runs, but I can't do that anymore. Now switching off is playing with my kids. I get in on whatever they're doing, [even if that means] I jump in with a lego.

I [like to] read multiple books at the same time, but I don't think I've finished a book in quite a while. I love the Prisoners of Geography series. I found it extremely interesting.

The best advice I've gotten is stop thinking of what others are going to think. One of my mentors repeated this to me two weeks ago, and it stuck with me. The best thing is to try to do things for yourself. It’s sort of cliche, but I think it’s best to never take anything personally. Someone at the company [once] said, if you get offended or take it personal, that’s your problem — and that’s true.

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