My Morning Routine looks each week at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions because we simply can’t help ourselves. This week’s interview is with Marc Lambert, managing director of Yellow Media (formerly Egypt Yellow Pages).

He is also the author of Marc’s Rules, which are something of a legend around these parts. Our parent company compiled the rules based on an email exchange he had with one of us years ago and made it mandatory reading for staff. You can read the one-pager here (pdf). A graphic version appears at the end of this piece.

Edited excerpts from our conversation:

Who are you? Marc Lambert, born and raised in Montreal, Canada. I came to Egypt 20 years ago on a two-year contract, loved the country, the people, and the culture and decided to make Egypt my home. My wife Gielan is Egyptian and we have two lovely daughters, Leena and Lara, aged 15 and 11, respectively.

What do you do? Yellow Pages of Canada offered me a two-year post in Egypt in 1998 to join Egypt Yellow Pages Ltd (which became Yellow Media in 2010). I joined the team in sales management, was promoted to managing director in 2001 under new private ownership, and I’ve been running the company ever since. My work routine at a macro level revolves around looking for new partnerships while nurturing established ones and — at a more routine level — I oversee the primary functions of our organization: Sales and sales support; finance; internet and development teams; and our call center.

What’s your morning routine? I’m up at 4:45am daily. I live on the west side of town and am at the gym in Maadi by 5:30am for strength training. Then I’m off to Greco for coffee, at my desk by 7:00am to clean up loose ends from the day before, followed by a top to bottom read of Enterprise, and ready for meetings by 8:00am. On weekends, I get up just as early and join friends to ride our off-road motorcycles in the desert for 3 to 4 hours. This routine is now over 15 years old.

What’s the best thing you’ve watched or read lately? I’m now on Yuval Noah Harari’s audiobook 21 Lessons for the 21st Century which is similar in content to his earlier books Sapiens and Homo Deus which were among my favorite book purchases of 2018. Also my wife and I are movie buffs, but there are too many great Netflix productions to mention.

What’s the origin story of Yellow Pages? The name “Yellow Pages” came about in 1883, when a printer in the United States working on a regular telephone directory ran out of white paper and used yellow paper instead. What was then a nickname is to this day its official brand name.

What are your revenue streams? We have three: Advertising, digital presence creation for SMEs, and data-leasing agreements. Under advertising, we do display and keyword ad sales on our platforms including YP.EG and its apps (60% of our revenue base), and we also sell advertising on Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram (20% of our revenue base). Then, we help SMEs get online cost-effectively with services including website design, video and display ad creation and media-kit building (10% of our revenue base). Our bilingual business listings database of over 450,000 companies across Egypt doesn’t just serve our YP.EG user base — our partners at Google pay for the use of our data, as do Orange’s 8000 service, Vodafone 2121 and other big players (10% of our revenue base).

What do people not understand about your business? Some still think that we are a print-only product, even though our print Yellow Pages represents less than 5% of our annual revenues.

How is your industry changing? We’re being squeezed by Google and Facebook, who have the deepest pockets and strong stakes in local and hyperlocal search and content (our core business) — they are to digital advertising businesses what Amazon is to brick and mortar retail sales. What keeps us going is our approach: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We have a deep partnership with Google, for example, that saw us become the company’s first official GMB partner (Google My Business + Google Maps), which we’re rolling out to ensure better advertiser retention.

What do you do in your time off? My family and I travel every chance we get, always aiming for something we have not experienced yet. The four of us also enjoy skiing together. I spend weekend mornings with my friends in the desert on our off-road motorcycles — it’s a culturally diverse group of adrenaline junkies. And I look for new things to eat / cook to support my plant-based and no-flesh nutrition (I don’t use the word vegan because I occasionally cheat when I travel).

What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever been given and by whom? The first thing that comes to mind: “Always live below your means and you’ll never have a financial worry.” It was life advice then, but applies to business as well — I spent my summers on my maternal grandmother’s farm. Being hardworking and financially savvy she repeated this advice to me many times. The advice didn’t mean much to me as a teenager, but it stayed with me. In almost 20 years, Egypt Yellow Pages, which is independently owned, has never borrowed a penny, does not use overdraft protection or credit and has never been recapitalized since it was purchased from Canada Yellow Pages in 2001. This is not to say that financing to generate growth is bad, of course, but there is something to be said about cash being king, particularly following events such as a revolution, FX scarcity and a massive currency devaluation.