Rayhan Aleem, co-founder and CEO of Tax Star: 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 Rayhan Aleem (LinkedIn), CEO and co-founder of Tax Star. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I'm Rayhan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Tax Star, one of the UAE's first AI-powered corporate tax software. I'm born and raised in the UK, where I worked for hedge funds and asset managers out there and I used to run their finance departments and I moved my family and myself to the UAE back in 2016.

This was at the time when VAT was being introduced, and I decided to set up an accounting firm out here called Alpha Pro Partners. I grew that over the last five to seven years. We're now at 300 customers, and we've got 50 staff worldwide.

Then, corporate tax was announced in the UAE. For me, it wasn't about offering an additional service, but about creating a product. The reason for that is that for corporate tax, you need a system to do the calculations, and you need to do it in a controlled environment.

The state of play right now is that the way corporate tax is implemented keeps changing, and some of the rules are just not solidified at the moment, so there's a lot of companies that still don't know or understand the rules properly. What we did is we've created a calculation engine, so we can look after the calculation side.

We're trying to replace the spreadsheet, because doing this on an AI-powered system is a lot more productive and less error-prone. We also allow companies who have multiple subsidiaries, for example, to track their deadlines. Corporate tax also requires you to keep your data for a minimum of seven years, which means that if the supporting calculations are in different places — email, WhatsApp, paper, etc — your life will be much more difficult come audit time when you need to pull up all your documentation.

Our goal is to make accountants superhuman. The accountant is the only person that knows all of your financial affairs. AI is not going to necessarily take away their jobs, but it can make them more productive. Accounting involves a lot of manual processes, but there's also value-added things that they can do like provide advice.

The more an accountant becomes the advisor, the more indispensable they become to their client or their employer, because they can use the information they have and interpret it into real value-added tasks. So we empower them to be better advisors, and to save time.

We also have e-invoicing coming up next year for the UAE. We’re looking to go global, so we’re working on a product to launch in Saudi Arabia next year and then in Europe. We want to be part of the Dubai story where we're exporting out and not just importing in products.

I usually start my day with prayers, spend a bit of time with the family and have my coffee. I’m admittedly a workaholic. I am an entrepreneur, but I used to be an accountant myself, and that’s a big change, so part of my day includes learning.

I structure my weeks rather than my days, so Mondays and Fridays usually consist of a lot of internal meetings. This allows us to see what's going on with the different departments and what's the plan for the rest of the week, and then on Fridays, catch up on what's happened and what we need to focus on. In between, it's going to be marketing, sales, and business development type activities. I sit in with the marketing team, with influential people in the industry, and I have a podcast — Alphapreneurs — so I also work on that.

There’s usually a theme with every quarter, so the next few months, for example, we’re focused on sales and marketing ahead of the 30 September corporate tax deadline. Before that we were fundraising.

Sleep is important, and I exercise a lot — at least four or five times a week, doing different things like gym, football, and cycling. You can kind of compare entrepreneurs to performance athletes. They have to rest and take care of their bodies. I think as an entrepreneur, although you're working for long hours and there's a lot of burnout and stress, if your body is fit, it helps your mind stay fit. There are also periods where I don’t do anything because I need that time to reflect and think about what's going on. So

One thing I do everyday is I make sure there's some sort of touchpoint with the family. Ultimately, we're working hard, because we are building a legacy for them, so whether it's having a morning coffee with my wife, dropping my kids off at school, or seeing them before they go to sleep, I always make sure I do something that then I can make an impact.

We’re going for a seed round later this year. We've raised around USD 300k so far, and we’ve got another USD 300k in commitments, and are looking to raise another USD 750k to USD 1 mn once we finish this sales cycle.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. In London, I used to commute to work and I was able to read on the tube, but in Dubai, I drive a lot so I’ve switched to audiobooks. Never Eat Alone is a good one. It's about business development and building relationships. Outliers is another really good one, and I also really enjoyed Outlive by Peter Attia and Atomic Habits.

The best piece of advice I’ve received was given by my mom, and that was to always have unconditional positive regard for the other person. Always see people from a glass half full point of view rather than a glass half empty. That's helped my mental health and carried over to my work, because if you're thinking positively about other people, you have less negative thoughts, and it helps boost your energy levels, which is important for a CEO.

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