Omar Sultani, managing director and head of Middle East and Central Asia at Polen Capital: 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 Omar Sultani (LinkedIn), managing director and head of Middle East and Central Asia at Polen Capital. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Omar Sultani. I have been in finance for quite a long time. I graduated from university in 2000, and although I had studied biology, I ended up working for a bank in Boston. When this bank was hiring me, they asked me how I was going to shift from biology to finance, and the answer I gave them was, look, I’ve studied statistical analysis, I know how to do regressions — it’s the same thing finance people do, but from a different perspective. They hired me as a treasury analyst.

I got hired just before the market fell out, so I've been through multiple cycles throughout my career — the tech bubble burst, the global financial crisis, and covid-19.

I have been with Polen for about eight months. I joined last year to help build out their business in the Middle East. Prior to joining Polen, I worked for another asset manager for 18 years and I ran the Middle East business for them for about a decade, so I've been in the region working out of the DIFC for over 10 years.

There are three major reasons [behind our choice of Abu Dhabi for Polen Capital’s office]. Polen has always been a firm that has invested in growth. What’s been going on in Abu Dhabi and the UAE in general has been phenomenal. Abu Dhabi is growing — not just their financial center and from the perspective that it is the “capital of capital,” but also in terms of its long term vision, [backed up by expansions of] regulation, innovation, and the facilities.

There was also a beautiful synergy with ADGM, and they facilitated the opening of our office very quickly. Even for our employees, it's just a great place to live. When we polled our Polen employees, it ranked very high as a potential destination where people would relocate to for a bunch of reasons, including safety, the tax regime, the weather, and its location. It’s centrally located as well, so we have access to Asia, Europe, and of course, our clients in the region.

Something I've been experiencing and observing for the last decade is that interest in traditional listed products, like long-only listed equity or publicly traded fixed income is fading, so those programs at the pension funds and the sovereign wealth funds are shrinking. The beneficiaries of that are the alternatives books, so more illiquid assets like private credit, private equity, and hedge funds, etc.

The focus on private credit has been the case in the Middle East and the US and Europe, where a lot of money is flowing into that asset class. The problem when that happens is too many USDs chasing too few transactions. The reason private credit gained popularity is it became an alternative to banks where private lenders are now offering companies loans at more attractive terms than some banks, but they demand higher returns. But when there’s a lot of players trying to do that, yields are compressed, and that’s what has been happening [in some markets], like the US midmarket space. I think that's a bit concerning, and the quality of transactions is probably going to diminish.

So where else can investors find yield? We recently launched a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) equity product, which is an illiquid alternative credit product that is [getting some interest] since they are still delivering double-digit yields.

We're a growth equity and credit specialist, and we’ve been doing private credit investing for over 20 years. We haven’t launched it yet, but we’ve been discussing the launch of a GCC private credit strategy. There aren’t too many doing that right now. We don't want to come and fundraise and take money back to the US, we think we're going to be much more successful and build more partnerships if we can keep assets here in the region.

We already have existing clients in the region despite just recently launching the office. We currently manage north of USD 2 bn across the GCC, so I've been meeting all the existing clients and figuring out what we can do to improve in the region. I also travel fairly extensively throughout the GCC to visit with other clients and prospective investors and to share views on the markets.

I try to wake up around 5am for the Fajr prayer, which I think is a great way to just start the day. It’s very calming. I teach yoga here in Dubai at a class every Saturday, and I’ve been practicing for 17 years. At a yoga retreat, someone recommended the book The Artist’s Way, which recommended the practice of writing your morning pages. So every morning, I try to write my morning pages — I have this A5 notebook and I fill up three pages every day.

I have two young kids, so once they wake up, they barge in and there’s a lot of energy. Then I usually go to the gym around 6:30am and do an hour-long workout. I also try to do contrast therapy three days a week. I’m a big believer in taking care of this vehicle we live in; I think Warren Buffet said it best when he said, if you were told that the car you own right now is the only car you’ll ever have, how are you going to treat the car? Your body is an even better vehicle and it’s the only one you’re going to have.

By 7:30am, I get home and walk my kids to school, and then it’s 8am and my workday starts.

I definitely believe in work-life balance. When I joined my previous firm, my first manager sat me down and said: you have very strict office hours, so I want you here on time at 7am — don’t come too early — and I want you out at 4pm, and whatever you do at work stays at work. He thought of it in a way that, if you’re not wrapping up your work during your office hours, you’re doing something wrong. I had an 18-year career there, and most people there end up staying for a really long time, because it’s very important to have that balance.

In the evenings, I like to play music and spend time with my kids. I try to eliminate screentime and just listen to boring podcasts — the more boring the better, because it will help me sleep. I listen to this history podcast called Fall of Civilizations. I also try to read one book each week, and one that I recently finished was The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. It’s a wonderful book, and it really aligns with a philosophy that I have on investing, which goes back to the biology side of my education, and it’s that we’re very adaptive and have a fight or flight instinct that can be very bad for investing. Investment is about discipline.

I would love to see this Abu Dhabi office become the largest office outside of our head office in the US. We have a pretty sizable office in London, but our CEO Stan Moss’ aspiration is that Abu Dhabi becomes our largest international office. I’d love to hire great talent to make that happen.

The best piece of advice I received goes back to this notion of what my initial manager told me, which was, if you can, leave the work at the office and do not bring it home with you.

Tags: