Assem Memon, co-founder and managing director of AdMazad: 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 Assem Memon (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Assem Memon and I currently lead AdMazad as managing director. I’m a firm believer in the art of building organizations that have purpose and impact and that has been my driver during my 16-year career so far. I graduated from McMaster University in Canada with a degree in economics and worked with student activity for a year before moving back to Egypt for a bit. While in Egypt, I dipped my toes in my first entrepreneurial effort with a company that was aiming to build a product similar to Google Maps — it failed, but it was fun. I then decided to take on corporate life and I went back to Canada where I spent five years in IBM. From there it was The Netherlands, where I did my MBA at Erasmus University.

I moved back to Egypt in 2011 because I wanted to be part of the change I was seeing and joined a political party as deputy managing director. I was tasked with institutional capacity-building which is basically designing and building sustainable organizations from the bottom up. It was a rewarding experience that allowed me to experience Egypt from a different perspective, beyond the Cairo bubble.

I started AdMazad seven years ago alongside friends. AdMazad is basically an out-of-home media aggregator platform that aims to simplify how brands consume this medium. We saw that there was a mismatch in the supply and demand of billboards that was fueled by the economic environment and appetite for investments so we thought, “how do we package this excess inventory in a way that makes it attractive?” We built profiles for over 4k billboards in Cairo and Sahel where we assess how many cars pass by it, for how many seconds, the angle of viewership, and other useful metrics.

We aim to make sense out of the unquantifiable world of billboard marketing and help brands on their planning side. Over the years, we also developed an admetric business which offers pre and post-campaign analysis by providing brands with competitive dashboards, performance analysis, and more that allow them to assess how to launch the campaign as well as how successful it was after completion compared to peers. Everything is data-driven nowadays and using this data, we’re able to marry the information we have with people’s spending habits so that brands have more insight into how to allocate their budgets.

The pandemic was very challenging for our business. We track utilization of ad space across Cairo and pre-covid it was usually around 80-85% but during peak lockdown it went all the way down to 45%. We spent that time building the analytic side of our business and thinking of future ventures to take on.

We’ll soon be launching a financing solution for SMEs to be able to afford billboard advertising. If you’re a smaller business with low liquidity, you might see billboards as a long-term commitment that requires a bulk sum of financing up front. But we’re looking to offer a product that would allow SMEs to pay off billboard costs in installments and we’re hoping to deliver on it in 2022.

Out-of-home media and social media go hand-in-hand. There are studies that suggest that consumers are 90% more likely to engage with a digital campaign if they saw it outside of their home. Both serve different purposes, but they’re complimentary. Billboards raise brand awareness while social media helps close the sale.

As for me, I’m an early riser, especially since I have two young children. Karim joined us six months ago while Rasheed turns three in January. I get up at 6am and put Karim in his stroller to take him with me on my morning jog. We then have a family breakfast and try to get everyone out the door by 8:30am. Most mornings are very rushed [laughs].

I’m a news junkie and I get my local news fix from Enterprise. I also listen to news podcasts in the car, especially those from the Financial Times and BBC.

A normal day at work includes a lot of firefighting [laughs]. I start by checking in with the team and seeing if I need to talk with any clients about ongoing operations. It’s a struggle sometimes to allocate time equally between working on the day-to-day versus strategic long-term planning. I try to spend a day every week looking at the bigger picture and planning future projects.

Work-life balance depends on the stage you’re in. At every stage in your life there will be conflicting priorities all vying for your attention. It’s like that wheel of life where there’s family, health, wealth, career, etc. It’s important to know what needs more time at every stage. In my case, I made a conscious decision when my kids were born that I wanted to be involved in their day to day. The pandemic helped in that sense as it gave me more time to be at home with them. I know that giving more time to my family has come at the expense of other things, but at this stage I think that is what is necessary. But it’s ever changing and with new phases of my life, I could allocate time differently… which is also okay.

I’m currently reading a trilogy called The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. It’s an originally-Chinese series that is part philosophical, part drama, and part sci-fi. It looks at how humanity is dealing with the threat of an alien invasion that will take 100 years from now.

Meanwhile, I’m rewatching Seinfeld for the sixth time [laughs]. I’m also planning on rewatching The West Wing. At this point, these shows act as background noise to whatever I’m doing.

The best piece of advice I’ve been given is that a take it or leave it attitude doesn’t get you far. You might not get everything you want, but there’s often a compromise that will make things work. I try to apply this on both a professional and personal level and it helps me feel grounded and pragmatic.