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Thursday, 11 November 2021

My Morning Routine: Heba El Gabaly, founder of Efreshli

Heba El Gabaly, CEO and founder of Efreshli: 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 Heba El Gabaly, CEO and founder of Efreshli (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Heba El Gabaly and I’m an entrepreneur, a wife, and a mother of two teenage boys. My older son Omar is 16 while Youssef is almost 14, and we all now reside in Dubai. Back in Egypt, I was a partner at Eklego Design alongside Dina El Khachab and Hedayat Islam, but I stepped back from the business after my move. I decided to start Efreshli in 2019 as I felt that the whole world was moving online and I thought that interior design could as well. Efreshli’s concept is to offer easy, accessible, and affordable online interior design services while also acting as an e-commerce platform for local brands and designers. There’s so much furniture online and most people just need a tool to visualize how it would all look together in a cohesive space.

As CEO, my job is to set the company direction and lead my team to deliver our service to the customer at a certain standard. What this translates into on a day-to-day basis is a lot of meetings with various teams, clients, suppliers, and investors. It’s a lot of people management, and each day is different depending on the priorities.

We started with just two people and now we’re a team of 26. At the beginning of 2020, I decided that I wanted to scale the business, and that meant that I would have to seek investments. My husband Ahmed, who is an investment banker, really helped me in that regard. He helped me develop the fundraising tech, the legal setup, reaching out to contacts, basically everything. I really couldn’t have done it without him.

Receiving funding allowed us to transform Efreshli to depend more on tech. We quickly hired a team of engineers and developers to build features that make our product more efficient and scalable. Once you become a tech business, there’s a lot of pressure because the pace is very different, and you’re accountable to the investors. But it’s very exciting and it allows you to dream big.

Since I live in Dubai and the team is in Egypt, I’ve always worked remotely. When I decided to launch Efreshli, I knew I needed to start in Egypt because the market was more familiar and I had many connections there. Even if I expand to the UAE, a big part of my team will likely be in Egypt.

To manage teams remotely you have to create a culture of joint accountability. We have weekly online meetings where everyone in the company gives an update on what they’re currently working on. This makes them not just accountable to their manager, but to each other as well. It’s tricky sometimes, but if you have good people and stay organized, it works really well.

When travel restrictions were lifted, I started coming to Egypt for a week every month to work from the office and get face-to-face contact with the team. I think there has to be a minimum amount of physical interaction at work, but it definitely doesn’t have to be every day.

When I’m in Dubai, I usually wake up at 6:50am with my husband and kids. Yes, 6:50am [laughs]. We spend some time together during breakfast before I take the boys to school and head to the gym. For me the gym is as much mental as it is physical. Some people get their best ideas in the shower, but for me it’s the gym. After my workout, I quickly look at what’s happening in the world. I read Enterprise every day, honestly it’s my favorite, and I also browse the New York Times.

I’m very much a morning person and the first couple hours of the day are when I’m most productive. I usually begin work at around 9:30am and I like to start by creating a mental checklist of the most important things to get done that day and the rest of the week. Since the funding, I’ve also found that it’s really important to carve out some time to think more long-term, like the next six months. It’s really easy to drown in the day-to-day operations, but as a startup you need to always be thinking of your next initiative or you won’t move forward and grow.

Work-life balance is hard when my office is currently my dining room table [laughs]. There was a time where I would work at a restaurant, but the pandemic put a stop to that. The kids come home at around 4pm and we have lunch together, but then I usually log back on afterwards. Working from home definitely blurs the lines, but I also think it has to do with the stage Efreshli is at as a startup.

After work, my husband, younger son, and I like to watch Netflix together. Youssef has to approve what we watch [laughs], and we recently saw an anime called Fullmetal Alchemist and a food reality TV show called Baking Impossible.

I get a lot of business advice from the books and podcasts I listen to. As a startup owner, I like to look at case studies and analyze how other companies grew. A great book I read recently was No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings. My main obsession is podcasts and I listen to a ton of them while driving, cooking, or multitasking in general. My top three are How I Built This with Guy Raz, Invest like The Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, and The Tim Ferriss Show.

The thing that stuck with me most is to make sure you’re hiring the best people and then take care of them with all you have. You won’t get far by yourself, and having a good team is what will propel you forward.

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