Mohamed Aboul Naga, co-founder and CCO of Halan: 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 Mohamed Aboul Naga, co-founder and CCO of Halan. Best known for their adverts promoting tuktuk and motorcycle ridesharing, Halan is an international on-demand delivery startup operating in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia.

I am the co-founder and chief commercial officer of Halan. I mainly work with the sales, business development, and operations departments, with a team of seven people, managing about 230 overall. Halan’s services fall under five verticals: Ride hailing, bill payment, B2B delivery (restaurants to home), peer-to-peer delivery, and commerce (product financing).

I start my workday from home at around 10am, with 10-15 minute calls with each of my team members. From 12:30-2:30pm, we hold vertical calls to analyze the performance of a different vertical each day. Tuesdays are dedicated to discussing how the five verticals are functioning together. I usually take a 30-minute break afterwards. As of last week, I started heading back to the office at around 3:30pm, where I stay until 6pm.

Our business supports other people staying at home, so it’s impossible for us to fully shut down, but we’ve reduced our [in-office] operations as much as we can and implemented health safety and hygiene measures.

We take social distancing seriously. Halan implemented hygiene and sanitization measures and told our teams to work from home before the government announced restrictions. WFH is very hard though, especially for our sales teams, for whom work is target- and commission-based. Sales and business development really needs to be done on the ground with some form of personal interaction. WFH is much easier for our engineering, tech, data science, and business intelligence teams, but we do hope to have 30% of our people back in the office in a month.

I find WFH personally challenging. I prefer meeting and speaking to new people over remaining home all the time. I’m a salesman by nature and I feel a little restricted at the moment. I also find I have sharper fluctuations in productivity.

It’s not easy to tune out noise and distractions at home, but I’m adapting. I’ve isolated a part of my house and made it my home office, with my computer and documents. I recently bought noise canceling software called Krisp. And I’ve been using Halan for errands, paying some bills with it the other day, and relying on it for grocery and pharmacy orders. I try to use our services often to make sure they’re working well.

Within the company, we’re optimistic about the future. Some of our products have been hit much harder than others. Our B2B services, for example, are performing far better than before the covid-19 crisis and we’ve managed to launch our P2P services amid the turmoil. I’ve been working a lot on upselling — selling new services to existing clients — because it's difficult to make new agreements. Budgets are on hold right now, and so it's hard to get clients to make new financial commitments. Generally, people are feeling the strain of this difficult time and they need a lot of reassurance and support.

Our recently-launched automated reporting system is helping us understand what’s working well and what isn’t. This is a digitized system that measures KPIs and target goals, and automatically notifies owners when targets are not met. It gives us more data on our operations, which has been particularly valuable since we started social distancing.

What am I doing for myself in this period? I would usually go to the gym at night, so now I exercise for 30 minutes every night before going to bed.

I’ve just rewatched House of Cards, I liked it a lot the first time around and I just feel like it's very politically relevant. I’m also watching two Ramadan comedies, El Le3ba and Rijalat Al-Bayt. The Brave Ones on YouTube, which profiles the lives of entrepreneurs, is a recent find that I’m learning a lot from.

I like to read about a different entrepreneur every week, and this week it’s Reid Hoffman.

My previous work as Careem’s regional director helped with my WFH transition. Having offices in four countries made online communications over Zoom and Slack essential, so the transition to managing teams from a distance has been straightforward.

I really miss praying taraweeh in Ramadan and I miss traveling. I want to eat with older family members without the fear of potentially harming them.