How I Grew: Fatimah Abbouchi, Founder and CEO of Agile Management Office

Kathy (host):
Hi there and welcome back to Help! My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina.

Kathy (host):
Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different than others, and believe it or not, it has been more than a year since this podcast started and I just I can’t believe it. And in honor of that, we are kicking off our exciting new series called How They Did It. Every few weeks we’re going to feature CEOs, leaders and founders who have successfully grown their businesses. We’ll hear their stories, and of course we’ll ask how they did it, how they’re prepared, what specific steps they took, and what advice can they give to help the rest of us stay on top of our growing businesses.

Kathy (host):
And a quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discuss, and each one has its own blog post as well. You can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode’s show notes.

Kathy (host):
Our guest today is Fatimah Abbouchi. She is a Founder and CEO of Agile Management Office, a high-powered boutique project management agency after leaving the corporate world in 2016 and starting her. Fatimah has landed high-profile global clients and shown them how they can enhance agile delivery methodologies with flexible governance, allowing them to hit their targets. Fatimah shares her success story, tips, and resources you can apply to your company, and she’s also going to be sharing other valuable insights on how she has grown her. Join us.

Kathy (host):
Welcome to the show Fatimah.

Fatimah (guest):
Thank you, Kathy. Thanks for having me.

Kathy (host):
Thanks for being here. I am super excited about this conversation because this is going to be a little bit different than what we usually do. And this is going to be a part of our new series that we started, How They Did It, and I’m super excited about this because you run a successful project management boutique consulting company, and you started this business back in 2016 and you left your corporate world. I’m someone who’s done the same, and I’m always curious to hear what made you leave the corporate world in the first place?

Fatimah (guest):
First of all, thanks for having me, and hopefully there’ll be a lot of value that we get out of this conversation for your listeners. I think for me this is, there was a couple of things in it. There was a pivotal moment that was sort of a decision point, which was why 2016 happened, but before that, just sort of going back a few steps, I had spent almost now, 20 years in the corporate career and sort of climbing the corporate ladder and trying to do all of those things that you want to do, usually when you’re young and entrepreneurial.

Fatimah (guest):
I spent a lot of time in environments where I felt that there was situations where maybe they weren’t necessarily treated fairly. Sort of being involved in being bullied and things like that through corporate and finding people, brushing it under the carpet, etc so there was no accountability, and also there was some challenges around having people that would actually sort of listen to both in that situation and then even when we were doing some of the project management stuff home, I came off the back of the most successful program for a big four bank here. And as a result of that, you would expect that all of the learnings from that would naturally transition to other areas of the organization. That’s what I would do in a business.

Fatimah (guest):
Unfortunately, just because of politics and other things like that, they just weren’t paying attention to myself and others in the team at the time. I was working closely with a number of very senior managers and collectively we were trying to promote change within the organization and sort of bigger management just didn’t want to listen to us. So I said to myself, “If I leave and come back as a consultant. Maybe they’ll pay attention.” And coincidentally, or maybe intentionally later on, I’ve been back to that organization as a consultant and they have listened, but they wouldn’t listen when I was in there as one of them.

Fatimah (guest):
So it was really about taking the opportunity to be autonomous in the way that I was working and actually work with collaborative mindset and a collaborative team that would enable us to really experiment, be agile in our agility, and actually try new things. And I just wasn’t getting that in corporate, so I felt like it was time to move on.

Kathy (host):
You’re not the first person who said that. I’ve heard so many stories where employees have great ideas about how to change the corporate structure, like change the corporate, how people are doing things, and they’re just not being taken seriously. But when the consultant comes in, when you actually paid 5, 4, 10 times the price that you would for an employee, people actually start listening.

Fatimah (guest):
A hundred percent. And that was case in point for what I experienced, as well as others, of course. It just seemed, unless you were in the right position in the hierarchy or structure, and I was reasonably sort of high towards the end of my corporate sort of full-time career but they didn’t.

Fatimah (guest):
And one of the challenges also was, as you just pointed out, I have seen organizations bring in very large consulting firms that have charged five times or 10 times as much as what their employees with a little bit of coaching, could actually do maybe 60 or 70% off. So I think organizations need to listen and pay a bit more attention, I think, to their staff.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So you left the corporate world and you started the company. How were those first years for you? And I can relate to this because when you leave the corporate world, you’re really good at what you do. There’s a core skill set that you have. But then when you run a business, it’s a very different type of environment because you’re also responsible for sales, you’re responsible for marketing, you’re responsible for management of other people, if you have other employees, other people helping you. You become a business owner. You’re not just the expert in what you’re good at, but there are other areas as well. How is that transition for you?

Fatimah (guest):
So I think it’s probably worth mentioning that I experimented with business four years prior and I sort of was playing around with this idea that I wanted to take my big corporate learnings and apply them to small businesses.

Fatimah (guest):
Now, needless to say, I was also doing a number of other things, trying to run a fence and facilitating dance classes and making baby clothes, like just, there was so many things I was trying whilst also maintaining a full-time job. And so I got the opportunity to learn a lot from experimenting but not really risking my day job basically. I was doing work on the weekends and after hours at the time.

Fatimah (guest):
So by the time 2016 came and I decided to take the plunge, the big decision was first and foremost not being listened to. But secondly, we had through word of mouth, people had heard in an very large federal government agency the work that we had done, and so they actually sort sought us out to come and help them.

Fatimah (guest):
And so the first, literally, the first few months, we had secured a large tender. And so we had to get serious really quickly because we had to start formalizing this business and start focusing on getting the finances right. Focusing on what we’re going to do for marketing after this particular engagement. How our processes were going to work. The good news is as part of the work that I do day to day, in my corporate career, it’s about project management. It’s about effectiveness, it’s about efficiency. It’s about making sure many projects and multimillions of dollars of projects are run as effectively as possible with the right sort of office support, if you like, from a project management office perspective. So I’ve had a bit of a head start on that and I used the learnings from that and my career to actually start building out the framework and the foundations to grow the business.

Kathy (host):
That’s fabulous, that having that background and processes and I always say it’s the processes that save the business. Really, once you have that done, it’s so easy to onboard new people and off-board if you don’t need that type of help. So let’s dive more into these processes in your business. How did that look like when you first started and how did that evolve throughout the growth of the business?

Fatimah (guest):
So first and foremost, the biggest starting point for us beyond the experimental years, I would call it. We had to work out how we took basically a piece of work that was going to be a tender. Now, I’d never done a tender before at that time, so I had to figure out how do we process tender so we needed sales processes. So I actually spent a lot of time researching, speaking to different people that are have been involved in that space, and starting to pull the pieces together just like we would in project, breaking down the work and starting to figure out what exactly was essential for us to be able to get the submission of the tender over the line and then to be able to support if we were successful and we had a really good chance at the time just based on the feedback we’d had.

Fatimah (guest):
So sales and the execution of the sales process and writing tenders was something that I had to spend considerable amount of time getting my head around. I will say that since then, it’s been a good six years. We’ve done dozens of tenders, some of which we’ve won, and some which we’ve not, that we’ve learnt through that process. So sales was the first and foremost most important part.

Fatimah (guest):
And then it was about making sure that we had the right foundations to execute if we were successful. And so that involved not only understanding how we were going to take the sale, the win, which we did get, but actually put it into practice and what sort of resources we need. So we needed to start thinking about our processes to onboard and off-board. We needed to start thinking about how we were going to pay people.

Fatimah (guest):
Now, for a long time, I was so scared of the concept of payroll because it didn’t make sense to me because I’d always been a career contractor, that I avoided hiring people who needed to be PAYG payroll.

Kathy (host):
Yeah.

Fatimah (guest):
I actually chose to go for contractors instead, which in Australia was like just easier. Now I regret that decision because I know that it was just as easy just having the right financial support on board, which I do have now.

Fatimah (guest):
So really, it was about starting to unpack. We need to onboard the team, then we need to execute the projects. And then once we were delivering on the projects, it was about how do we maintain that customer service beyond that? How do we make sure that we can now in parallel to delivering that market, to be able to bring engagement and awareness to other work opportunities as well? Because one tender is not going to support a growing business. And so we started to break it down and work on things in an incremental way.

Kathy (host):
And you mentioned having the right financial support, especially in terms of the payroll. How did that look like for you? Did you hire a bookkeeper? Did you hire an accountant? Did you have an outside payroll company? How did that look like?

Fatimah (guest):
So firstly, we, when I started experimenting the four years prior, I started through the advice of people that I’d work with. We’ve started an Excel spreadsheet like most people do, and started to use an automated spreadsheet to start calculating my super and my past payments and all these sorts of different activity statement things that needed to happen.

Fatimah (guest):
So I spent a lot of time on government websites to research and understand what were the requirements, what I was called at the time, as a sole trader, before moving into an actual business before now into a proprietary limited company, which I believe is similar to an LLC for you guys.

Fatimah (guest):
So I started basically with a manual process in Excel, and then I realized that when I started having more than one paying customer that I needed to move into a software program. At the time, I looked around for feedback, was part of a lot of business groups and seeing people talk about a product, which you may know, it’s called Xero. Leading small business software and decided to try to set that up myself. So I did attempt it and I think I did an okay job at the time, moving just from a sole trader to sort of a business.

Fatimah (guest):
I actually did find an accountant who I used very sparingly just because of cost pressures at the time. But one of the things that was really important is as we evolved the business a couple of years on, we then hired a bookkeeping firm. And interestingly, when they did a review of the way that we’d set up the software platform, they realized there was quite a lot of things in it that maybe weren’t set up properly. And as a result of fixing those problems and working with a professional, we ended up finding sort of about four or $5,000 in revenue that I didn’t know I had, that I could actually claim back. So it paid itself in dividends by bringing on the professionals, but I obviously took a little bit of time for me to get that.

Fatimah (guest):
And then now we’ve been using that platform and have expanded and we’ve linked that to our CRM now and so with all the work we do with really large corporates, we’ve now got solid financial and accounting processes, systems, tools, and frameworks and experts working with us, including two accountants and a bookkeeper who work with us from time to time.

Kathy (host):
Yeah. And it’s a work in progress. Like I always say to my clients too, a room wasn’t built at a day. It does take time and effort to make it right. And having a framework really helps with that as well. So now that you have all of these in the business, how is it like when you look at your financial statements, how is it when comparing to previous years, is it better? Are you getting the type of information that you need? How do you make financial decisions now versus before when you didn’t have these people in the business?

Fatimah (guest):
So before it was pretty much majority, the work we were doing or I was doing was a personal services income. It was myself. So decisions was how much money did I want to take home that week, and anything I spent beyond that was all, again, we just reduce how much money I was earning. As an independent contractor, that was quite a sort of tough decision to try to think of how we would invest my own money and have less holidays and do all those things. But when I started adding employees and sort of, we started doing some recruitment activities and doing some large tenders and some other projects, it obviously made it a lot more of a bigger decision, something that involved a lot of financial data.

Fatimah (guest):
So we would look at sort of looking at margins. We would look at our expenses on a monthly basis. I remember scouring line by line our financial monthly reports that we receive and made sure that not coming from a financially savvy background and not really being great at maths in high school, I actually made sure that I understood all of the data in our financial statements that we were receiving from bookkeeping and accounting team and made sure I understood that to a point where I could use that information to then be able to make informed decisions and questions that I would want to ask. Sometimes I’d ask the same question two or three times just to really make sure I’m clear on why something means particular thing within the spreadsheet.

Fatimah (guest):
We also then supplemented that knowledge of round that process and made sure that we also were continuously improving how and where we were spending money. So for example, we spent a lot financial in marketing, and that’s really helped our brand over the last six years. But also there’s been times where I’ve had to spend more on wages because we needed to bring in a spec specialized skill set like a recent hire is a head of strategy that we’ve been working with for some really large client works as well.

Fatimah (guest):
So using the sort of financial reporting and processes that we receive and our profit and loss statements and all of those things, we actually use that data then to make decisions and not just at the time but also thinking about things, 12 months in advance and beyond that as well.

Kathy (host):
I would love it if you could just a couple of questions or a couple of things that you look at in your financial statements that are really relevant to you and why did you exactly pick those? I would love if you could give us some examples.

Fatimah (guest):
Yeah, so one of the things that sort of keeps standing out. I don’t know the terminology they use, but we’ve been building IP and trademarking, practices and processes and frameworks and all of these sorts of things, and there was a line item in our statements that referred to sort of retained IP or intellectual property of some sort.

Fatimah (guest):
Now, at the time, I was really not sure how the value against that line item had been growing and where it had been coming from. So I remember having a conversation with the accountant, just try to understand and unpack a little bit more around where that line had been coming from. And then obviously it was a very lengthy explanation, which I won’t get into. That was one of the things that caught, really caught my attention.

Fatimah (guest):
The other one that also caught my attention was also we realized that we had different revenue stream. So we have recruitment, we do consulting, we do advisory work. There’s lots of different revenue streams and it was really hard for me to work out where to invest more financial, energy, time, etc., in without understanding what revenue stream was making us, I guess the most profit.

Fatimah (guest):
So I then challenged the simple line item of sales and we broke that up into sales, other sales recruitment sales, workshops, etc and that really helped to change the way that we perceive our revenue and also being able to use that information to make better decisions.

Fatimah (guest):
But they’re things that if you don’t ask your bookkeeper or your accountant, they just stay there and you just assume that they’re correct. But you need to challenge these things sometimes to make sure you’re aware of what’s going on in your financial statements.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, you bring a very good point about making sure that the chart of accounts are you using, is very specific to you, to your business, and it’s giving you the information that you really need to see what’s happening in the business. And this is a perfect example of just having a lump sum of sales. It’s great. It goes up and down, but you are not really getting the information. Where is it coming from? Is it coming from consulting? Is it coming from advisory? What type of thing is it? So yeah, having that breaking down into different accounts where it’s like little buckets, it’s so valuable. And I love that you bring that example up because that is one of the first thing when I see that with my clients, when I see just the sales we need to start drilling this down. Now you, we can start looking at expenses against those sales. We can start looking at your margins. I mean, there’s so much stuff that you can do with that information, but you have to have it broken down to what makes sense for you and for your business.

Kathy (host):
So I, I love this example a hundred percent. And you also talked about hiring people and being really nervous about having people in payroll. And this is not unusual at all, but I do want to ask you, like now, when you are hiring people, are you going through a sort of like a financial forecast that you have in the business? How do you make those type of decisions now?

Fatimah (guest):
So the benefit that I have is coming from a large corporate background and being involved in large multimillion-dollar programs. I’ve been used to managing resource profiles that have hundreds of resources in them, people starting and stopping at different times, people from different currencies, different countries, people, different skill sets, coming from consultancies, recruit contractors, permanent. All of that. So I had a really good exposure to that and worked quite closely with our corporate finance departments and HR and supply chain procurement, etc.

Fatimah (guest):
So that just led to us having more refined processes in the business, which we have now. So we have workforce management as a capability in our business, and it is something that I spend a lot of time on. So we have a clear view of what we call the core team. And though that team sort of usually sort of the similar size at all times, and we scale up with contractors or consultants depending on what the need is for clients. And many times those contractors and consultants are people we work with regularly as opposed to sort of just brand new people because we have quite a close-knit culture and team sort of collaborative way of working.

Fatimah (guest):
So we have a workforce management process, we have a core team, and then we scale up and down based on a couple of factors. One is client needs. So if we bring in on a new project or a new engagement, what does that look like? What do we need? And we start factoring in how we going to move resources around to support them.

Fatimah (guest):
And then secondly, it’s also what are the products and or services that we are working on within the business? On the business. Sorry, in the business. Not on the business. And actually, sorry, other way around, you know what I’m saying? Basically working in that space and thinking about what is it that we need to develop or further to grow our business.

Fatimah (guest):
So for example, at the moment we’re working on some product development activity. Now, our team has experience in project management and we’ve touched products, but are we as expert as products as we are at projects? No. So we’ve brought in a product person. Do we need them full-time? No. We have the advisory services of a product expert, but we actually leverage our own core team who are experts in executing projects to then develop and apply the recommendations that have come from our product expert and vice versa.

Fatimah (guest):
So it’s a very cohesive process. We’re very comfortable with where, what our capabilities and skills are, and we know where our skills are not there, and where we can, we bring in the experts to make sure we get the best outcome for ourselves and for our customers.

Kathy (host):
Where do you go and find these experts? Do you look for, like on a job site, do you go to your network and ask for recommendations? Where do you find these type of experts when you need them?

Fatimah (guest):
So there’s a number of different sources, but first and foremost, it’s through our network. And that is what I find, as part of the recruitment work we do with clients, we have had really good success rate, and that’s because we recruit from within our network people. We built relationships with over the last 20 years, etc. So that’s the number one, first point of call.

Fatimah (guest):
Then it’s through conversations with people in our network. So are we having a conversation with someone about a project? And then they’ll mention that they know that John Smith or Sally’s looking for an opportunity. And so we then include them to what we call the merit pool. And the merit pool is basically a list of people who have been validated, verified, reference checked, etc., and we can invite them to participate in projects as soon as we get engagements. It streamlines your onboarding process end to end.

Fatimah (guest):
And then, beyond that, we obviously use platforms like LinkedIn where we advertise for jobs, so we also. We use Seek, which is another big one that we use as well. It’s very similar to Indeed. And then also there’s a few other sort of platforms here and there where we are looking for freelancers online that we might use, like Upwork for example.

Fatimah (guest):
So really it’s blended, but networking is the first point and almost all of the work that we’ve done, we’ve had on shore. So most of our team are actually dedicated full-time working with us. We’re very little out outsource work. Have had it in the past from time to time, but we find that working together collaboratively, ideally in person, makes a lot of difference. Though we’ve had people that have worked with us in team members in Serbia, Denmark, and New Zealand as well.

Kathy (host):
Yeah. And sometimes there’s also a benefit too, like working around the clock. If they’re on a different time zone, they can do the project while you’re asleep and doing other things. I mean, there is certain benefits to that as well or maybe if you need someone who has that specific like culture knowledge as well, so there’s benefit to it.

Kathy (host):
Before we start a recording, you mentioned that you actually completely bootstrap the company to seven figures. That’s also another thing that I’m fascinated about and I want to hear more about like, how did you manage to do that? Did you keep a very close tab on your cash inflows and outflows? What are some of the things that you think allowed you to get to the bootstrapping so that you were able to do this and bring the company to seven figures? I’m really interested in like, how did you manage to do that.

Fatimah (guest):
Probably worth noting that at the early days of the business, I had a plan for where I’m going and where I’m taking it and I still have that plan and it’s evolved over time. But one of the reasons why we didn’t really go and seek any funding, despite other people doing it and recommending it is I really didn’t know where to start or what that looked like or how that worked. And also, I’m really specific in the way I like to run things so that we can have the same level of quality and whatnot and have, bringing in external funding I know will change the dynamics of the business. So that was part of the reason why we didn’t do it at the beginning.

Fatimah (guest):
And then as we evolved, one of the things I realized is the only way to grow a business by self-funding is through bringing on additional headcount that could be supporting the revenue stream that we had. So looking at different parts of revenue beyond just myself initially being the consultant to starting to bring on additional team members.

Fatimah (guest):
So we started looking at multiple passive revenue streams and also recurring revenue streams that we could look at investing in. So recruitment was one that really did help us to grow the business. We also started creating products that people could purchase. We then started creating smaller services that small to medium businesses could leverage outside of the bigger, very large corporate big T1, and T2 business types structures. So we started to think about all of the different types of paths to revenue that we could take.

Fatimah (guest):
And then what I would do is I would forego significant profit through that to actually reinvest it in the business. And that includes my own day-to-day rates. I would, reduce that by a percentage and then reinvest that in the business. So it was all about reinvesting every sort of dollar that we got into the people that were building the business for the future, and also finding additional revenue streams.

Fatimah (guest):
And also doing something that I call sort of pairing. So when working with a customer on a particular, so let’s say consulting engagement to help them with sort of statement to work or a project or whatever it might be, we’d say we can also provide you the resources to then deliver that long term. So then we would start bringing in contractors or permanent headcount and obviously seek revenue from that perspective.

Fatimah (guest):
So for me, it was forced choice, to begin with. And ever since then, I’ve not really sort of opened my door to funding or revenue or anything like that because I think I’m having too much fun just having control over how we are running this and having the experimentation and having someone tell me what to do. And I think that’s really helped.

Fatimah (guest):
So hopefully maybe that’ll change in future, but for now it’s been a good decision because we don’t have a huge debt over our head that we have to pay off and the pressure that comes from VC funding or investors, etc but who knows that may change.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, you’re right. I mean, tempting it is to have an investor in the business. Having someone have a stake in the business is always one of the most expensive way to fund the business because you lose that a hundred percent control that you have over it, and you have to provide statements, you have to provide the rationale “Why you doing things you’re doing”, so you lose a little bit of control of your business. So it’s a balancing act, right? Do I need the money or can I figure this out on my own? So it’s really kudos to you that you were able to figure this out. Question for you, regarding the productizing, the sum of parts of your business, how did that work out for you and what exactly did you productize?

Fatimah (guest):
A core part of our business and the sort of concept of it from 2016, when we first started, was we, I, say we, but I originally, but my team has helped evolve it. I developed a way of doing things that I believed would be more effective, more efficient, and agile in terms of agility for businesses. And that was a way of doing anything project, program, or portfolio related that brought in the focus of governance as well, but it was flexible and adaptable.

Fatimah (guest):
So I have come up with a method called the AMO Way method. Now, it is something that we are sort of now starting to package up in a better way, whereas for the last six years we’ve been testing and trying and applying. . We’ve applied the process that we use for that product. Initially, internally, we worked with a major university in Denmark to approve the concept works with students, which it did. We used it in a really large second-largest supermarket chain here and received the honors for sort of the high, most successful project and all of these other awards wins.

Fatimah (guest):
And then we started applying it in small and medium businesses to see if they could. And now that we’ve done that, we’re so confident with the way that we’ve developed our process and our framework, that we’re turning that into a product and that product, the AMO Way method model, if you like, is a product that we are now bringing together and underpinning it by what we call our core capabilities.

Fatimah (guest):
The core capabilities is, if you think about, for example, in the finance space, it might be bookkeeping as a capability, but in our world at project management, it might be project cost management. And so we are packaging up all of these products, these capabilities, and we want to then now be able to use those by offering them to clients so they can apply them themselves.

Fatimah (guest):
So we are actually taking what we’ve learned works really well and now putting it into a proposition that clients can access, hopefully self-serve, and then also leverage our advisory or delivery if they want some additional support to execute that in, if their business is medium to large, for example. So they’re two sort of main products.

Fatimah (guest):
And then beyond that we’ve also got our thought leadership, big rock content pieces. Some of these are not products that we are charging for, but they are very much go a long way in driving awareness around what we do. And that’s something that we tend to do maybe one or two pieces a year. And we’ve got one coming out at the moment around agility and banking as an example. .

Fatimah (guest):
So really just looking at what the market is asking for at a particular time, but leveraging. Now proven and tested with our AMO Way and our capability in box models. And now we’re working at how to productize that in a way that it can be self-sufficient, which for the most of part of six years has been us executing, but now we’re flipping that on its head and that’s where the product expertise is coming in to help us do that.

Kathy (host):
And is that something that you are seeing going even more into the future, that you’re going to be more towards a productized version of the company?

Fatimah (guest):
Yeah, absolutely. So we are hoping that the AMO Way model, as well as the capability of Box or Chi for sure going to be something that grows in use for organizations that can then use it themselves. So beyond the small group of companies, 20, 20, 25 companies we’ve worked with, we want to double, triple, quadruple that, but we can’t do that on our own. So what we want is for people eventually to become practitioners of this model and actually be able to apply that themselves in their organizations and get the results that we’ve been getting because they’ve followed a proof and model for success.

Fatimah (guest):
So I think over time that’ll become something that we will end up doing, and we’re hoping to evolve our partnerships as well with some of the universities to further inform the next generation of project leaders in a model that is agnostic of, all of the really great methodologies out there, but it’s about bringing together and being really pragmatic for how we execute change, and that’s what the a AMO Way model is about.

Kathy (host):
That’s absolutely fantastic and I can see the benefits for small businesses, big businesses, large businesses. It’s across the board. The name of this podcast is Help! My Business is Growing, and we recognize that businesses have these growing type of pains as they grow. What do you think was one of the biggest growing pains for you in the past? What is it now as you are at the stage that you are?

Fatimah (guest):
So a really good question actually. I can definitely say what’s now, but thinking about in the past, I think I, I go back to the sort of financial landscape of things. So when we sort of started getting more serious, we really needed to create the right framework around the way we managed our account, process, accounts payables, pay receipt, all of that.

Fatimah (guest):
For the very long time, I was responsible for that until we brought in the expertise and expert help. That is where I’ve invested beyond marketing the most money because the accounting costs and bookkeeping costs, but they’ve really helped to make sure we’re meeting all of the regulatory requirements and the legal requirements and all of that sort of stuff.

Fatimah (guest):
So that’s something you can’t get wrong. And that was a really big eye-opener for me because coming from a background of where I came from and my sort of secondary college years, maths was not my strong point and I really struggled to begin with that. So that’s probably what was one of the biggest challenges for us.

Fatimah (guest):
And then obviously finding ways to bring people on board that were not always contractors. So learning about payroll processes and what that actually meant versus what I predicted that, sorry, what I thought that it meant actually was wrong. So that was probably a big challenging and pivotal turning point for us now.

Fatimah (guest):
We’re in a little bit of a different boat because we have gotten to a good point from a revenue perspective, but it’s not, it’s all well and good to get to that point, but now it’s about sustainment. We need to sustain that and sustain the growth. So this is where we are looking beyond what we did well for the last six years.

Fatimah (guest):
There’s only one piece of the puzzle. Now we need to look at what do we add to what we’ve done well, the things that work really well, we expedite and grow. And then things that maybe aren’t working so well, we decide to pause or stop. And this is why we’re working with a head of strategy and ex-Garner executive who’s a head of strategy to help just guide that conversation moving forward. And one of those things is really differentiating between what we can offer practitioners in the market versus businesses and that’s something that for a very long time it was a little bit blurred and now we’re just working to refine that.

Fatimah (guest):
So I would say that sort of clarity around customer segmentation, evolving our processes around the strategy work that we are doing and working at how to sustain our revenue moving forward. So we don’t have dips in the business as we’ve had in the past, as we’ve been growing. It’d be probably the core things.

Kathy (host):
And where do you see the company, ideally in five years? Where would you like to?

Fatimah (guest):
So this sort of vision that I’ve had is that we get to a point where the AMO Way model and the capability in a box solution is being used in a significant number of companies. I’m thinking 200 companies at least within the next five years. And it is something that people can use and uplift their own capabilities without having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in consulting fees. And that’s because that’s what I needed when I was growing up, going through my small business.

Fatimah (guest):
So that’s one part of it. And that is where we need to bring a model in place where we can create partnerships and licensing and have practitioners who can all leverage, use and own in this model, that’s continuously and perpetually evolving. It’s not a set-and-forget type of thing. So I’m definitely keen on that.

Fatimah (guest):
And then the second thing is, as we grow the business and focus on doing that really well, I hope that it’ll get to a point where, on a personal note, I spend a lot of time in the mental health space and one of my life goals maybe, and I, in five years probably 15 or 20 is actually to build a mental health retreat. So everything I’m doing in the corporate business now, and maybe we bring on partners in future, is to help effectively realize a dream, to build a mental health retreat for those suffering from anxiety and depression.

Fatimah (guest):
So that’s sort of where the personal goal is. And then the business goal is to see the AMO way model and the capability of box solution in as many businesses as possible. We’ve proven results the way that we’ve been able to get in the last six years.

Kathy (host):
That’s a fabulous goal. And what got you into this mental health space? Is there like a personal passion of yours? What got you into that?

Fatimah (guest):
I’ve had generalized anxiety for most of my adult life, which is part the reason. And then beyond that, I’ve also got significant members of the family that have anxiety or depression or both, or have had it at points in time. So I was surrounded by it.

Fatimah (guest):
But for me, the biggest point. That was really most important is I don’t want mental health, anxiety, or depression, for example, particularly anxiety, which I can talk to a lot more closely to be something that holds people back. So I’ve been trying to demonstrate that you can have a corporate career, you can grow a business, you can hold down jobs and still be managing and dealing with a mental health disorder, such as anxiety, which is in my case, what I have.

Fatimah (guest):
So I’m hoping that I’ve been proving that over the last 20 years, and I want to continue to do that, but because I know that there is a lot more people out there could benefit from just the learnings I’ve had from working with psychologists and counselors and things like that. I want to expand that and give people more opportunity to get what I call recovery and recovery for them could be.

Fatimah (guest):
For my sister, it was getting to the mailbox, the front of her house for a period of time. For others it might be just, waking up. Others, it might be traveling around the world, which was one of my fears a few years ago. So yeah, that’s a real big passion for me from a family perspective. And then also the desire to see, again, more people helped. And I think I could do that with the idea of evolving beyond what we are already doing today, day to day into something bigger.

Kathy (host):
We’ve talked about your business and bootstrapping into seven figures and having all these fabulous processes and dreams about where the business should be. How do you take care of your mental health? Because that is so much pressure on you in terms of developing the business, running it. Now, you have all these people in your business. You’re responsible for them. You’re responsible for the livelihood. How do you manage your mental health in that space?

Fatimah (guest):
It’s a really good question and I always sort of, it’s probably one of the common ones to get asked. So I think part of also working for myself means that I get to set my boundaries and I get to choose when I work, how I work and when I don’t want to work. So there are days where I may not feel like working.

Fatimah (guest):
For example, I was recently had a bit of a virus, so I decided for the last three weekends I wasn’t going to work and I didn’t. And that’s very different to me working the previous weekends, which is quite normal for me. I do a lot of work on making sure that I continuously spend time. I see a psychologist regularly, I have ever since I was 17 years old. And that really helps to unpack situations that create anxiety and understand where they’ve come from so that they don’t continue to impact life. I also do a lot of the things that you would expect around. I use sleep stories and, I do some meditation, not as much as I should. Obviously, exercise is a big part. I could be doing more of that as well and spending time with family and friends.

Fatimah (guest):
So one of my rules is I never prioritize work over family and friends, or function. So I never miss a function just for work. Doesn’t matter what deadline we’ve got coming up. I take the time to make sure I get sunlight whenever I can. Of course. And I also to take time off and not be judging myself if I decide that I want to spend half a day doing nothing or if I want a day off, etc.

Fatimah (guest):
So for me personally, that’s what I do. The stress of the business and everything in the last few years, particularly with the Covid environment, has absolutely elevated the levels of stress beyond what’s ever been in my life. And that is because I thankfully was able to keep my staff employed through Covid, but that just meant we would obviously have to sacrifice other things like profit, but knowing that we’re talking and being open about it and being really supported by my husband as well has made a big difference. But just not judging yourself and being too hard and making the effort to actually try to resolve anything that is causing you that anxiety.

Kathy (host):
At the end of the day, it’s, you can only do so much and you have to give yourself a break.

Fatimah (guest):
A hundred percent.

Kathy (host):
And I always also say, your mind is the most valuable asset when you’re running the business because if that goes, there’s not much you have left. That and health.

Fatimah (guest):
A hundred percent. You’ve gotta set boundaries and they have to be strict boundaries. I’m going to start this time, finish this time. You can’t just start at 7:00 AM and then work until 7:00 PM every single day of the week because you will get burnt out. Seeing that firsthand. So I refuse to get into that situation.

Fatimah (guest):
And then the other thing that has a lot of value is planning. Planning has been absolutely critical for me from day one. And that is planning like knowing what’s coming up so you don’t get to a point where you’ve got a day left on a tender and you’ve 40 hours of work left and you just can’t afford that time.

Fatimah (guest):
So planning quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, I can quite clearly tell you what’s my day look like today. What have I got on and I know exactly what clients I need to respond to, etc., etc., That will go a long way to minimizing the stress, but also being flexible that it may change, but have a plan to start with and then go from there.

Kathy (host):
And I think one of the most anxiety-provoking for me is if I come into the office and I’m like, what do I work on today? It’s the worst feeling because it feels like you have to work on everything and you know that nothing’s going to get done because when you work on everything, you work on nothing.

Fatimah (guest):
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And it takes a really long time for people to realize that. I know it did for me. I know that I have an advantage because I have to do planning of really large-scale projects and programs in corporate. So you have no choice but to meet reporting deadlines and to submit something to finance and all of that jazz, but you’ve gotta put those similar boundaries in your business as well.

Fatimah (guest):
So for example, one of the things that I heavily recommend is scheduling things. So we schedule content days rather than waiting to get around to doing marketing content. No, we have a content day and we have a three weekly marketing planning meeting for what’s coming up in the newsletter and what we’re going to do in the month ahead. We have sales meeting each week. What are the leads we need to follow up with and why hasn’t this lead responded? We have product meetings, so we have lots of meetings that blocked into the diary and that forces the conversation around what we need to do to progress those streams or those functions better. And that goes a long way rather than just relying on, us thinking, and remembering because you get busy and things fall by the wayside.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening and I really appreciate you sharing your journey with us. It’s been an absolute fabulous conversation.

Fatimah (guest):
No thank you and thanks for the invitation. Hopefully, your listeners get some value out of it today.

Kathy (host):
And before we go, if you could please let us know. Where can the listeners find you?

Fatimah (guest):
Definitely LinkedIn. Just search my name on LinkedIn would be the first place. And then also you can go to our website, which is www.agilemanagementoffice.com. All one word.

Kathy (host):
Awesome. And all of these will actually be in the show notes as well, so you can go take a look at them and click on it and you can find her. Thank you so much.

Fatimah (guest):
Thank you.