Raouf Tawfik, general manager of El Gouna: 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 just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Raouf Tawfik, general manager of El Gouna, a self-contained resort town on the Red Sea that boasts some of Egypt’s most beautiful beaches and amenities.

My name is Raouf Tawfik. I’ve been married for six years, and my wife and I have two beautiful girls. The eldest is almost four, and we also have a new addition to the family who’s just seven months old. I trained as an engineer, then worked in finance for 16 years before assuming the management of one of Africa's largest dairy farms in 2016. Earlier this year, I moved to El Gouna to take on a new challenge.

I’m the general manager of El Gouna, which is one of the most beautiful resort towns in the world. I lead the town’s management team, and collectively we’re responsible for ensuring that anyone who comes to El Gouna, whether a visitor or a resident, has a relaxing experience. We want everyone to truly live out our motto of experiencing “life as it should be.”

As you can imagine, mornings in El Gouna are quite spectacular. I wake up early everyday, usually around 6.30-7 am, and have a coffee while reading Enterprise, then I head out for a quick workout. I spend the rest of the morning with my family before going to work; quality time with the family is so important. Recently, I also added windsurfing to the mix. It’s a hobby I let slide for about 20 years, but being on the water in the early morning and then heading to work afterwards completely changes the mood of the day.

When it comes to work, no one day is like the next. My team and I run a town, and this of course means handling the issues and surprises that arise when you have groups of people living together. Whether it’s managing security, the marina, the hospital, retail areas, or the school, we always do our best to make sure that everything is running smoothly. We also need to be responsive when it comes to addressing any issues that El Gouna residents might have and solving problems as they come up (which inevitably happens).

El Gouna has become a hub for prominent events which require a lot of logistical organization,including the El Gouna Film Festival, the El Gouna Squash International Open and the El Gouna Half Marathon, to name but a few. So an increasing amount of time is spent planning and executing these high-profile events, to make sure they go off without a hitch. The shorter-term intensive planning and rapid execution needed to run big events is quite a different thing to the regular planning and maintenance of El Gouna that we undertake on a continuous basis.

With so many things to think about, finding ways to switch off can be a challenge. Like many people, I find good Netflix shows to be one of the best ways of doing this. It’s great to disconnect for an hour or two after a long day at work. I recently watched a great miniseries called What/If, which is a thriller made in the US starring Renee Zellweger. I was stuck on a delayed flight to the UK and ended up watching seven out of the 10 episodes all at once. It’s one of the best new series I’ve seen lately — dark, compelling, and thought provoking. The other show that I really enjoy watching is Bns, which is all about power play in the world of New York high finance. It’s fast paced and looks at an industry I’m very familiar with.

El Gouna was founded 30 years ago by Samih Sawiris, who is a visionary. What many people saw as being just plain desert, he saw as an opening to develop something remarkable. In terms of its development, El Gouna started out as just a hotel, a marina, and a few villas, but it has since grown to become something entirely different. Now it’s a town with over 20k residents, 19 hotels with over 2.7k rooms in total, and over 3.5k delivered homes. It also has three schools, a university, hospital, airport, and two world-class marinas, which are home to over 350 yachts and more than 100 eateries around town.

El Gouna really offers something unmatched, which I believe is a blend of simplicity and sophistication. It’s difficult not to speak in clichés when you try to describe the place, so I don’t want to talk too much about the weather or the beauty of the Red Sea — although it’s difficult not to feel these things when you come here. There is honestly something about El Gouna that feels magical. We also pride ourselves on having a multicultural and open-minded community living and working here. These people were essential in developing the town’s unique identity.

People often don’t understand that our business is multidimensional. We are not a real estate developer; we are an urban developer. We build towns and communities, and this makes us very different from other players in the market. We don’t want to sell you a house — we want you to live out an experience and a lifestyle. To do that, it’s important to provide the necessary enablers, including easy ways to set up a business, good education and healthcare systems, and an overall family-friendly environment that is different to what you’ll find anywhere else in the world.

The force that will create the most change in this industry? Mortgages. Need I say more?

The best piece of business advice I’ve ever been given is that it’s always about people, people, people. Having the right team in place will get you to the moon. When it comes to management — which is, of course, a notoriously difficult skill to master — it’s very important to try to focus on people’s strengths rather than their weaknesses. You need to try to harness the different strengths of individual team members for the benefit of the team as a whole. This entails a mixture of motivation and discipline, but you will always get further with people if you focus on maximizing their strengths rather than chastising them for their weaknesses. Another very important piece of advice, from a big-picture perspective, is that you live and die by your cash flows — so always keep an eye on them.