Success is rarely about hacks or shortcuts. The real game-changer is a mindset built to weather the storms of building, growing, and even letting go of your business.
In this episode, Omar Zenhom, founder of WebinarNinja and host of The $100 MBA Show, shares raw truths behind his decade-long entrepreneurial journey. From bootstrapping his software company to a successful exit and navigating the challenges of running a top-ranked podcast, Omar’s insights reveal what it really takes to thrive as a business owner.
Omar shares the strategies that helped him keep moving forward even when the odds were stacked against him. Along the way, you’ll also learn how to set yourself apart in a competitive landscape, embrace consistency as your greatest asset, and build a business that lasts.
If you’re an emerging entrepreneur hungry for insights or a seasoned business owner planning an exit strategy, this episode delivers hard-earned wisdom and actionable takeaways to inspire you and help you thrive.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Meet Omar Zenhom (00:03)
- Podcasting as a way to blend Omar’s love for teaching and his fresh take on business (00:51)
- The power of daily reps in podcasting (05:01)
- The three metrics every podcaster should track (08:17)
- The one thing that can grow your podcast (13:46)
- Why you must learn to choose your pain and stick with it (22:26)
- Why instant gratification won’t get you far (26:41)
- What’s next for a founder who’s not done growing (33:27)
- Omar’s free resource to help entrepreneurs track their KPIs and stay profitable (38:31)
RESOURCES
FREE RESOURCE: Business Essentials Template Pack
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
QUOTES
“One of the things that I’ve taken out of being a podcaster is that it’s a constant experiment. That’s the way that we look at it in our business — it’s a constant experiment.” – Samantha Riley
“The problem I think a lot of people have is they don’t want to choose — they don’t want to choose what they’re going to work on. Because you got to pick and stick, you got to stick on and try to work at it and try to get better at it. And once you quit, you’re going to start all over somewhere else.” – Omar Zenhom
“You gotta choose your pain. You gotta choose, ‘What can I do for the next 10 years that I’m happy to suffer through?’ That’s really the bottom line.” – Omar Zenhom
“That’s the thing about entrepreneurship in general — you have to be okay with delaying gratification. You gotta be okay with not knowing when the result will come, and just choose something that you’re happy to do and that you’re okay with enduring the pain.” – Omar Zenhom
“I think that so many people are missing out on the elation of achieving something great because they’re choosing instant gratification.” – Samantha Riley
“It’s very important for you to understand that you are working on yourself while you’re working on your business. You’re going to be able to utilise those skills, but at the same time, that’s just a vehicle. It’s a means to an end.” – Omar Zenhom
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ABOUT OMAR ZENHOM
Omar is the founder and host of the Apple’s Best of 2014 podcast, The $100 MBA Show. With over 200 million downloads and more than 2,400 episodes, The $100 MBA Show is ranked as a top business podcast in over 30 countries.
Omar Zenhom is also the founder of WebinarNinja, a leading webinar software for business owners. Since its inception in 2014, over three million people have attended webinars on WebinarNinja, which was named one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in 2018. In 2024, WebinarNinja was acquired by ProProfs.
WHERE TO FIND OMAR ZENHOM
- Website: https://omarzenhom.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/omarzenhom/
- Podcast: The $100 MBA Show
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
Facebook: Samantha Riley
Instagram: @thesamriley
LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:03
Welcome to the show, Omar, it’s great to have you here. You are the founder of WebinarNinja, which has just been acquired, which I think is super awesome, and also the host of the $100 MBA Show, which has done amazing things. You’ve managed to hit number one in Australia, in business podcast, which is just phenomenal. I saw a post saying that you hit 3 million downloads a month recently. I don’t even think I’ve hit 3 million downloads total. So I think that’s super amazing. I’d love to know what was it that made you start a podcast when your main business was a SaaS company?
Omar Zenhom 0:51
Good question, Samantha, thanks for having me first of all, and to answer your question, I started the podcast while we were still kind of in beta with WebinarNinja, so I launched, I pre-sold WebinarNinja in April, and the podcast launched in August. And this is 2014 and I was in a time of my life where I was just trying to make something work. I was trying to kick up as much dust as possible, and I was doing a bunch of experiments, WebinarNinja and the 100 MBA Show was one of them. None, either one didn’t take off immediately, like I would say, WebinarNinja took some time to kind of get some traction, but I guess once, they both kind of got traction at the same time, and it’s kind of hard to let go of either one. And I love the podcast. It’s kind of very dear to me, because I’ve been a teacher all my life. I was an educator for 10 years. I have a master’s in education. I taught, you know, five classes a day, five days a week in the classroom. So for me, it was something I can share with the world and help people build their business through my teaching skills. So it was kind of happenstance. Honestly, I just was working on both, and I wasn’t sure which one was going to do well, so I just kept on doing both.
Samantha Riley 2:16
What, and this might, you might not even remember this, because we’re going back to 2014 here. Were there any other things that you thought, maybe a podcast, maybe something else, like, what was it that made you land on a podcast?
Omar Zenhom 2:32
We went to a conference in 2014, January 2014 called New Media Expos in Vegas. The conference doesn’t exist anymore, but that conference was like an eye opener for us. We met a lot of our heroes at the time. We met some interesting creators, podcasters who were just getting started at the time. You know, Amy Porterfield and Lewis Howes. I met, funny enough, Nathan Barry from ConvertKit. He was just getting started then, and we were just inspired. At the time, podcasting was like a theme of that event. And we thought, oh, podcasting sounds interesting. We listen to a lot of podcasts, and we love podcasting, and I love learning languages. Nicole loves learning languages. My co-founder and wife, and one of our favorite podcasts were Coffee Break French, Coffee Break Spanish, these type of language learning podcasts. And we thought this is very interesting, how you can go in and learn a bit of a new language every single day with short form episodes. And I thought, no one’s really doing this with business. Everybody’s kind of either doing conversations or they’re doing, you know, maybe banter between hosts and things like that. But no one was really going in and teaching a specific lesson. And I thought that was in my wheelhouse, because that was my experience as a teacher. So I thought, okay, let’s see if this works.
Samantha Riley 4:01
I remember back in 2014 what podcasting was like, because I also started my first podcast back then, because I went to a conference, and Pat Flynn and Chris Tucker were there talking about podcasting. And obviously Pat Flynn is one of, you know, has been around for a while with that, with his Smart Passive Income Podcast. And I distinctly remember that the buzz at the time was the, you know, the little iTunes button on your iPhone is going to be a native, you know, app on, you know, now is the time to go. It was super big back then. And man, podcasting has changed so much since then. But that was definitely the time of the buzz of podcasting. It was well, 11 years ago now. You’re running daily episodes, and have been since then. What inspired you to do a daily episode? Because it’s one thing to do a podcast. It’s a whole nother decision to run a daily podcast.
Omar Zenhom 5:01
I did it for two reasons. I did it because I believe that in order for you to gain traction in business, to gain traction in anything you’re working on, you need momentum. You need to be able to build upon skills over and over and over, and once a week, twice a week might not be enough. You need enough information that you can implement and keep moving forward every single day, especially when you’re getting started. A lot of people don’t understand how intense you need to work in the beginning of your business just to get momentum, to get the ball rolling down the hill. Once you start, you know, building and scaling and hiring a team, and being able to kind of scale your business, then you could start to ease up a little bit because you have, you’re able to leverage other people’s labor and other people’s time, but in the beginning, it’s just you, and you need to make it happen. So I really believed in trying to stack as much momentum as possible for the listener with daily. The other reason why I did it is for myself. I needed more reps. I was horrible. I can’t listen to my first 100 episodes. It’s just, it’s cringe worthy. But they say if you don’t have cringe worthy work, you’ve started too late. So I really wanted to get as many reps as possible into doing this podcasting thing, getting on the mic, speaking, and really refining my craft as a podcaster, as a member of the media, really, and I was trying to take as seriously as possible so that I can get better quickly.
Samantha Riley 6:29
I love that. Is there any time over the course of that 11 years where you’re like, Okay, I’ve done the reps. I’m really happy with what I’m doing. I’ll step back to, you know, 1, 2, 3, episodes a week, like, what is, what has come up for you in that time? Because I think all of us have that, you know, let’s do the work, and then at some point you’re like, Oh, this is getting really hard.
Omar Zenhom 6:54
So we were daily all until 2017. We stepped back for a year doing it once a week, because I had a very intense time growing WebinarNinja, the software company I built. It was an intense growth period where we’re hiring a lot and we’re building and I had to really give my team what they needed. I need to be able to lead my team. And it was, it was a tough trade off. I didn’t want to let go the podcast. So I thought, you know, I’ll do it once a week, see how it goes. We did it for a year. We went back to daily in 2018 and then around, I would say, 18 months ago, we made a decision to maybe invest a little bit more into each episode, and we adjust it to three days a week. So we’re three days a week now, especially because now we do our episodes on video as well. So we’re a channel on YouTube as well. So we’re trying to work on the quality of each episode and try to deliver as much value as possible in each episode. So we landed on three days a week. And we’ve actually experimented a lot on the format of the show, on the segments of the show, different types of episodes, whether it’s me teaching on camera, or whether it’s having a guest, or whether it’s reviewing a book, or whatever it might be. We tried a whole bunch of different formats to see what works and take a look at the data to see what it tells us.
Samantha Riley 8:17
I love you mentioned data because that’s something that I’ve written down here. You very much talk about, you know, you need the data to be able to know what to do. The reason that I reached out to you specifically for this episode, was because I saw a post that you put on Facebook, and it was back, I think you just gone number one business podcast in Australia. Congratulations for that too. That’s freaking phenomenal. So good. What is the data that you actually pay attention to within a podcast? Because it’s not as easy as looking, you know, at a spreadsheet. Some of the data isn’t quite as in your face as what it could be. And I know that we’re in a world with a lot of podcasters and they say, Oh, I don’t know if it’s working or not. So what do you look at to know, and I’ll put this in air quotes, if it’s working, because that is quite a gray area, right?
Omar Zenhom 9:20
That’s a good point. I like to try to keep my data as simple as possible. Whether I’m running a software company, I’m running any kind of business, and I try to narrow down to three numbers. What are the three most important numbers? Because I can look at those three numbers every single day. I can really focus on that and see what I can improve, you know. Once we get to like 10, 15 numbers, it’s really hard for you to be able to optimise anything. So the thing about podcasting is it’s not an exact science as much as other types of businesses or other types of medium. Even YouTube has much more rich data that you can take a look at given the fact that the distribution and the host is the same thing. With podcasting, your host is one thing, and then you distribute on different platforms, like Apple, like Spotify, like other players, and now even YouTube is in the game. So the three numbers I really focus on is number one, is the podcast growing and trending in the right direction? So am I getting more downloads this month versus last month? So that’s the first thing, and then just trends within each episode. So like, I take a look at how did this episode do versus that episode. Take a look at the title, take a look at the topic that is being discussed. Take a look at the length of the episode. Some people just don’t listen to long episodes. They just want shorter episodes, or vice versa. So I take a look at basic trends. Am I moving in the right direction? And that’s really what you can do with podcasting, because you can’t get really user specific data. There’s a lot of privacy issues, a lot of stuff like that. So you could just take a look at, am I moving in the right direction? The other thing is, I look at total number of downloads in terms of how much I’ve published. So if I’ve published, you know, X amount of episodes this year, how many downloads am I getting? Basically a ratio. I want to find out, Am I getting the downloads I’m looking for? And then the third number I’m looking at is, because we’re a show that has sponsorship, I want to make sure that we’re doing right by our sponsors, and that our sponsors are coming back, and our sponsors are actually benefiting from our partnership. So I took a look at revenue dollars. This is a conversation I have with our host and our agent, who’s Sirius XM. They take care of all our sponsorship and we have a conversation to find out, you know, which actual sponsors are happy with our relationship. How many conversions are they getting? Are they happy with those conversions? I take a look at exactly how much data in terms of all right, this, for example, you know, Apple is one of our sponsors. Apple paid us X amount of dollars. We find out, how much of a return on investment is that? How many spots is that on our side versus, you know, with podcasting, it’s all about inventory. It’s about opportunity costs. How much, how many slots am I giving away to Apple? How much are they paying us versus if I sold this to a different, you know, a different sponsor. But you know, if Apple is a good match for our audience, where they’re listening to the ad because it fits their needs and fits and solves problems for them, then that actually benefits my show and actually makes my show more listenable and more attractive to my audience. So I’m okay with maybe losing money on that, if it means I’m growing the show even through the sponsorship spots. So those are really the three things I look at, and outside of that, it’s very hard for you to know, you know, retention rates and all that kind of stuff, inside of podcasting. There’s also rank. Obviously, we take a look at rank and how we rank against other podcasts, but if you are not a top 100 podcast in your, I would say, in your genre or your niche, whether it’s, you know, comedy or business or finance or whatever it might be, rank really is not something you really should worry about right now, because you’re not getting any visibility anyway. So you know, it’s going to take a while for someone to scroll past 100 spots. So right now, our job as a team is we want to get, stay in the top five spots as possible, because those are the spots that get shown on in car integrations, whether it’s Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, or whether it’s using the native apps inside of Tesla cars, or whatever it is, we want to have exposure. So when somebody chooses business, they see our cover art, and that really has a lot of momentum. Once you drop out of those spots, you don’t get as much exposure.
Samantha Riley 13:46
I’m going to go back because I went down a rabbit hole and didn’t even close the gate. I originally was saying that I had seen a Facebook post where someone had said, So Omar, you’ve made it to the number one business podcast. What’s the one thing you did to grow that show? And the reason I want to talk about this is because your answer, I just loved it so much. And I don’t even know how long ago that was, but I can still remember it, because it was one of the best posts I’ve ever seen. Can you tell us what is the one thing you need to do to grow your podcast?
Omar Zenhom 14:28
I’m hoping this is the same answer I gave.
Samantha Riley 14:32
I’m hoping so, too, because now I feel like I have really thrown you under the bus.
Omar Zenhom 14:35
No, no, but I’m pretty sure it is. When I started the $100 MBA Show, I made the decision that I’m going to put in the time and effort into building the show, growing the show. This is a long term investment. I’m not going to do this for a couple months and quit or six months and see what happens. I’m here for 5, 10, years at least. So with that mindset, how does any show get successful, right? I’m talking about a television show. I’m talking about your favorite series on Netflix, Breaking Bad. You know, these things that people talk about constantly, you know, the best series they’ve ever seen. Break it down. What makes it great? What makes it great is, it’s the quality of the production is fantastic. You know, with the example, Breaking Bad, you know, they’re changing scenes, constantly changing angles, the way they show the character, the actual camera angles, right? So the actual production quality is great, but the story is great, and the script writing is great, and the performance of the actors are great. The delivery of the story is great, you know, the craft, the actual, we’re not talking about marketing here yet. We’re not talking about, you know, some sort of hack or running ads or any of that stuff, right? We’re just talking about creating a fantastic production. Okay, then obviously, these actors and the producers and the director of the show, they don’t just sit at home and do nothing. They go to talk shows. They push their show. They speak about ad junkets, they’re doing sponsorships so that they’re getting further, you know, exposure and people, Oh, I saw that guy before. What is he in? Oh, that show that’s on this channel, whatever it is, right? The point here is that they take it seriously, right? They’re being professionals about it. And I want to take that approach with podcasting, because I’m going to do the work anyway, I might as well try to do it right. And I find that too many people, especially in the business category, they start a podcast as some sort of marketing hack or some sort of way to kind of get leads. And there’s nothing wrong, I guess, with doing that, but I’m saying that it’s going to have a shelf life, because at the end of the day, if you don’t going into it saying, I want to get better as a performer on the mic, I want to get better with my delivery, I want to get better with how I present, I want to get better with my ad reads and convince people that they should check out that product, right? If you’re not going in with that mentality, you’re going to get your lunch stolen from you. Like, the competition is just too good, right? You have trained actors and comedians running podcasts now, right? And we’re, I’m not competing with just business podcasts. I’m competing for attention, period, any other choice of listening when they’re in their car, in the gym or folding laundry, right? So I’m competing with all these people that are out there in these apps. So you, you might as well just take it seriously, or don’t, or focus on something else that you’ll take seriously. If maybe that’s not podcasting for you, maybe that’s writing a book, or whatever it might be. So for me, that was kind of, you know, if you want to call it a hack, that was kind of my strategy is, like, I don’t want to just do this temporarily, or do this halfway. I want to get better at it. You know, when I started podcasting, I realized my voice was not where it should be. I need a voice coach. I got a voice coach so I can get better on the mic, so I’m not breathing on the mic like Darth Vader. I got public speaking lessons. I got, you know, and when I say this. These are ongoing trainings that cost a lot of money that I really couldn’t afford at the time, but I invested in it because I believed in the medium of the podcast. I believe the podcast was going to grow.
Samantha Riley 18:12
I love this so much because I think in this world of instant gratification, people want that one thing, that one thing that they can just grab now that it’s going to make the world of difference, but to be good at anything and to be a true artist, and I guess my background, I’m a classical ballet, classically ballet trained, so I know what it’s like to do the reps over and over and over, because that’s been, you know, that was my life for 30 years, 40 years, and business is no different. It’s not just that one thing. It’s like, okay, so this mic doesn’t sound like the way I want it to sound. I need a new mic. Or this, this camera isn’t giving me the quality that I want that, you know, the pitch in my voice isn’t quite right. It’s all of the things, and it’s looking, like you say as well, looking back and looking at the data. And I think that one of the things that I’ve taken out of being a podcaster is that it’s a constant experiment. That’s the way that we look at it in our business, it’s a constant experiment because we’ve tried so many things. My clients laugh because I often say, I’m just like a crash test dummy. I just throw myself at things and go, Okay, let’s see. Is it going to work? But it’s not something that happens overnight, and you just have to keep going at it. And I really love the way that you talk about looking at the people that are getting the results. And it’s out of, you know, it’s out of your niche. It’s out there in the big, wide world, looking at what’s working. And I really love that take on it.
Omar Zenhom 19:45
Yeah. And if I, you know, a lot of people say, Oh, you’ve been podcasting for 10 years. That’s crazy. I’m just getting started. I don’t even have the level where I need to be, you know, like, if I look at anybody who’s been great at anything, An athlete, a musician, you know. Let’s take, you know, Michael Jordan, for example, in basketball, you can start playing basketball when he’s like, you know, 22, he started playing basketball when he was like, six. So 10 years he was 16, he hasn’t even played in the NBA yet. Like, I’m still very young in this field, like, I still have more time to go to get where I need to go, you know. So if you look at anybody that you admire in any field, it takes a long time for them to get to a point where they are comfortable in their own skin, that they’re able to deliver consistently at whatever they do, their craft, their product or service. So you really need to kind of give yourself that time. And the problem I think a lot of people have is they don’t want to choose. They don’t want to choose what they’re going to work on. Because you have to choose and stick to, you got to pick and stick, you got to stick on and try to work at it and try to get better at it, and once you quit, right, you’re going to start all over somewhere else, and you’re going to have to put in more reps. And you don’t have that momentum, and you don’t have that compounded interest of skills that you need so that you can actually get some wins under your belt. So that’s really important for people to kind of understand, is that every time you switch gears, every time you switch, you’re restarting that momentum.
Samantha Riley 21:18
I love that. And when we link that back to what you said at the beginning, your first 100 episodes, you just can’t listen to, I actually sunset my first podcast because I couldn’t listen to it. But there was, you know, 100 episodes there where I went, Okay, like it was really a learning phase for me. And even at that, we’re only at 600 episodes, or 600 and something episodes now, I still am learning all the time, and I’m like you, I remember going and watching, I can’t remember his name, but it was a talk show host. We got tickets to go see his show live, and everyone’s like, Oh, why are you going to do that? I said because I want to see behind the scenes of him asking the questions and what I got from that, or my huge learning from that, is that he asked 50 questions, only 10 made it to air, and that made me go, oh, like he really wants to get the maximum effect, and that’s what gets shown. So, you know, it’s not just about sitting in front of the mic and learning here, it’s about like, Where can we take all of these other learnings?
But what I wanted to ask you off the back of what you said, you have to pick and stick, which I absolutely love. If there’s someone out there that’s like, alright, well, I need to grow my audience. And they’re like, Well, is it a podcast or is it something else? What are some of the things that they can ask themselves to decide whether this is the right medium for them? Because I don’t think it’s the medium for everybody.
Omar Zenhom 22:48
You gotta choose your pain. You gotta choose, what can I do for the next 10 years that I’m happy to suffer through? Like, that’s really the bottom line. Like, are you okay with shooting videos for the next 10 years, and even if you don’t do well, you don’t get the traction in the beginning, maybe you’re not so great at it, are you okay with just, keep on doing it. If not, choose something that you are willing to suffer through. And that’s what a lot of people don’t focus on, is that they try to choose something that they’re passionate about or something they love. It’s not fun when you’re not doing well, right? And you have, and that’s going to happen, you’re not going to be an overnight success. It’s just there’s too many people that have been doing it for longer than you that are going to get the exposure, that’s going to get the views, that are going to get, you know, the business or whatever it is. So choose your pain, choose what you want to do, what you’re willing to suffer through. You know? If you enjoy writing, and despite the fact that you write something and you put it out there, and you’re like, oh, I don’t really like that, or that wasn’t so great, that sounds amateurish. If that doesn’t stop you, that pain doesn’t stop you from keep on, you know, keep writing again and keep publishing again, then that’s the thing, that’s you got to keep on going and be willing to endure, you know, that cringe feeling for long enough for you to start getting a little bit better, a little bit better, you start realizing, Oh, that was better than last time. That was a little bit, that got response that people like that. And it’s not going to happen in two or three or four or five or six weeks. It’s going to happen six months, at 10 months, whatever it might take, you know, and that’s the thing about entrepreneurship in general, like you have to be okay with delaying the gratification. You gotta be okay with not knowing when the result will come, and just choose something that you’re happy to do and that you’re okay with enduring the pain.
Samantha Riley 24:38
I think that marketers have completely, I can’t think of another word besides bastardised this, because marketers talk about, it’s gotta be fun and do what you love, and they paint this amazing picture. And I think about it more as alignment in that, you and I both aligned as podcasters, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy all the time. But from the macro, we enjoy it. It’s fun because otherwise we wouldn’t endure the pain. But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy every day. I think back to, back a few years ago, I decided to run an experiment of a daily podcast. I did it for 30 days, and I told people it was a 30 day experiment, and I pre recorded, I think, about five episodes, and we went from the first of the month to the 30th of the month. On the second day of the month, we got the news that one of our family members only had a week to live. And at that moment, we had to go into state to see the family, and we went backwards and forwards interstate three times in that month. There are so many times in that month where I was like, I can’t do this. I cannot keep this up. And I knew that my audience would be like, we understand why you didn’t record daily because of what you were going through. But I decided that I was going to do it because I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I did it. Oh, man, some of those days recording, it was so hard, you know, recording five times because I kept breaking down. I was like, pull yourself together. You can do this. I’m recording in a tin shed one day with a torrential downpour, like there was all these crazy things, but, what you said, it was like, I had to, I had to suffer through that. I had to endure the pain. But I can tell you, at the end of that month, I wasn’t thinking, Oh my God. Why did I do that? I was like, God, I’m so proud of myself for doing that, like I stuck to it.
And I think that, you know, going back to that instant gratification thing, I think, and this is purely a personal take on this, I think that so many people are missing out on the elation of achieving something great because they’re choosing instant gratification. What’s your thoughts on that?
Omar Zenhom 27:02
I think anything that has value is difficult. Anything that is valuable, whether it’s winning a gold medal in the Olympics, or winning a Grammy, or, you know, winning an Oscar, or whatever it might be for you, or having a million dollar revenue business, whatever it might be is, is the accolade for you, something that you value, that’s something that’s valuable is going to be difficult. Otherwise everybody would just do it. Otherwise everybody would be, you know, a best selling author. Everybody would, you know, have it easy. But the thing about that is that we have to understand that when we’re getting started, I believe that one of the hardest things is that our tastes and our talents don’t match. What I mean by that is that what we believe is great, because we are exposed to great podcasts or great books or whatever we’re doing. If I’m writing a great book, and you might read a lot of great books, and you’re like, I want to write a book just like that. So our taste is quite elevated, but our talents and what we can do, our skills, are not at that level yet, and there’s where the frustration lies, is that you’re gonna suck in the beginning. That’s just the bottom line. You can’t expect yourself to be a prolific author if you’ve never written a book before, right? That’s just unheard of. Like you’re asking a baby to be able to run a mile like, no, that’s not gonna happen. So you need to just understand, going into it, that I’m going to create stuff that I myself, because of my elevated taste of consumption of great content, is not going to match. I’m going to be like, Oh, this is not so great. It’s not what I wanted. This looks so amateurish, but you got to put it out anyway, because doing it within yourself is not going to be enough. You have to put it out there and get that feedback from the audience. You got to understand. You got to feel that feeling of putting work out there and not being satisfied with it. You have to feel bad so that you are motivated to do something better next time, next time, next time, and you’re in good company, because everybody that I’ve read, every biography I’ve read, of anybody who’s accomplished anything great, they ate glass for 20 years, right? They didn’t, no one knew about them, and they struggled, and it was hard and was difficult, and then they made it big. This is what I love about biographies, because it asks you the question, as indirectly, as a reader, it asks you the question, are you willing to go through this in order to be successful? So I’m not saying that we all, we’re all human, you know, we all want to feel good and be happy. But when it comes to whatever you’re doing for a living, your life’s work, you know, don’t cheapen it by trying to get something quickly, because, you know, quickly gained is easily quickly lost. So you want to make sure that you’re building something that is going to last the test of time, and that comes through a lot of work, a lot of struggles, sometimes, internal struggle about what you’re doing and what’s around you, and it’s okay. I actually think that, you know, pain and struggle is not a bad thing. It’s actually pretty good. It actually pushes you, makes you stronger, it makes you more grateful for the, you know, the better times in life. So it’s not, it’s not the end of the world if we’re not constantly smiling.
Samantha Riley 30:07
I love that. And I think that reading biographies of people is all, I love it. Because I think, Oh, my God, I haven’t even done that tough. You know, you get caught up in your own world thinking, Oh, things haven’t gone as I wanted. And I remember, like, the two that stand out for me was Richard Branson’s, I can’t remember, which was his biography, maybe Losing Your Virginity or Losing My Virginity, and Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog. Those two autobiographies for me were like, Oh, Sam, pull your socks up and get on with it like you have not, you know, almost lost, you know, 84 planes, or you almost haven’t lost your whole business because someone overseas won’t sign a contract. So I highly, I love that you’ve said that, because they have definitely helped me move along. And, you know, pull my head in and go, All right, keep going. You’ve got this. So, yeah.
Omar Zenhom 31:02
I’ll throw another one in there. One of my favorite biographies is Open by Andre Agassi, and the opening line of that book is, I hate tennis. So like he wakes up every morning saying, I hate tennis. I hate having to get up in the morning and feel completely sore and can’t walk, and the only way I can start my day is with a hot shower so I can release the pain, and then I gotta get up and I gotta do physio, and I gotta go ahead and and do my drills and practice and run and all this stuff. And he’s like, I hate tennis, but I love winning. So he sets up this perspective, like, you don’t have to love every moment of your day in order for you to be happy in life, to feel successful, right? And I remember, in the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, she interviews Olympic athletes, and she’s interviewing an Olympic swimmer, I believe it was Michael Phelps. And she asked him, Do you love swimming? And he says, Are you asking me if I love waking up four o’clock in the morning to jump in a cold pool and do laps for two hours, looking at a blue line constantly, and then after that, come out, have a breakfast that is not satisfying, but it’s high protein. And then after that, I have to do my drills, and I gotta watch film. I gotta study what I’m doing wrong. Of course, I don’t like that, but I love being a champion, like that’s, sometimes you just want, you know, you just want to be able to be somebody. You want to get to a station. You want to be able to achieve something great that you always wanted, and you are willing to endure that pain that takes it there. So most of his time, he’s in pain, right? But, he could look back at it and say, you know, I did that because now I’m a champion, and no one can take that from me.
Samantha Riley 32:46
Love that so much. And as you were saying that, I think back to my dance studio days, and I have dance in my blood. I’ll be dancing till the day I die. But did I love running a dance studio? I had a very big love-hate relationship with it on the, like, again, at the big picture of it, yeah, I loved it, but, man, there was some parts of that that I hated, but it’s, it’s part of the, you know, it’s part of life. It’s the black and the whites, the light and the dark. You need both to be able to have something that’s holistic. Yeah, love that.
You’ve just exited WebinarNinja. You had acquisition this year. What does the future hold for you now?
Omar Zenhom 33:39
I love everybody asks me this question every time I go speak somewhere like, what’s next? My answer to that is, for 10 years, Nicole and I have given everything we could to this, to this business, the WebinarNinja, which is an incredible software that we built over 10 years, have influenced, you know, over 30,000 users, built and created webinars to grow their business. And it was a great achievement. And it’s also, for me, my favorite achievement is that we did a bootstrap. We did it on our own, not $1 invested from investors or even our parents. Nicole didn’t come from money so, and the other thing is that we didn’t live a very comfortable lifestyle in those 10 years. We actually took a reduction in salary, took minimum salary as possible, just so that we could live. We had engineers getting paid four and five times as much as us. I remember running payroll every every month, and seeing our salaries at the bottom of the list, and I remember that the reason why we did this is because we wanted to reinvest every dollar in profit into, back into the business, to grow to market, and because we owned the business, we understood that we’re putting new value in. Now, this is my story. This is the choices we made. But, you know, luckily it panned out. And you know, plenty of companies reached out to us that wanted to acquire us. They saw value in what we’re doing, and that was, that chapter in that life. But for a very long time, even when I was young as a child, we didn’t have money, I wasn’t very comfortable. So I’m in a situation right now where I’m very uncomfortable being comfortable, right? That’s not something I’m used to, where I don’t have to worry about money. So that’s something I need to learn. I need to change. I need to get better at, you know, I need to learn a little bit more. So I’m in a learning phase right now. You know? I’m focusing on the podcast as my daily kind of work, where I can give back and share the lessons I learned through those 10 years of building a software company that I exited, those who want to sell their business eventually. You know, there’s a lot that I can share, and that’s really what I’m focusing on with the podcast. But outside of that, Nicole and I are really focusing on our health. Our parents are getting older, so we’re realising, okay, you know, we don’t have this body forever, so we want to make sure that we improve our lifestyle and our health, because maybe we sacrificed that a little bit when we were working hard those 10 years, and just learning a little bit more about investing, learn a little bit more about, you know, how I can improve and how can I get better now that I have a little bit more, I would say, leeway time and capital to do so. So, yeah, that’s where I’m at. And one of the pieces of advice I got from a lot of my entrepreneurial friends that exited their businesses that don’t rush into anything new, just give yourself space and allow time and space for opportunities to come to you. So yeah, that’s my plan. So far.
Samantha Riley 36:34
Love it. I’ve sold three businesses, and I can think of two very close friends that I’ve had this discussion with, so I’m going to ask you, have you felt a bit of a hole left in your life since you sold that like you put so much effort into creating that business and it almost turns into your identity. Have you felt a shift there?
Omar Zenhom 37:00
Yeah, for a very long time, I was a webinar guy. You know, for 10 years, I was the face of the business. I ran a lot of the webinars. I know a lot of our customers personally. So for, and I did that because I wanted to give everything I could to the business. But I knew in the back of my head that one day we will exit, and I’m not the business like, you know, the business is something I build that serves me. And then when we exited, that became a reality, and I quickly realised, okay, they’re doing great without us, and they’re doing a fantastic job growing the software and the user base. And at the same time, I sold the business, but I’ve built a new skill set. I became a new person through that experience that I can use in whatever I do next. I can use to help other people at the $100 MBA and grow their businesses. So it’s very important for you to understand that you are working on yourself while you’re working on your business. You’re going to be able to utilise those skills, but at the same time, that’s just a vehicle. It’s a means to an end. And, you know, you sold three businesses, so you understand where that comes from. But honestly, I didn’t feel a sense of like, loneliness or a hole or anything. I luckily have the podcast, which is a big, you know, love of mine. I love to teach, I love to help other people, and I love to get better, because I still feel like there’s so much more room for me to get better at when it comes to sharing my knowledge.
Samantha Riley 38:31
Love that. So inspiring. Now, obviously, you are a fabulous business person. You’ve got a lot of resources and knowledge that you can share with people, and I know that you’ve got a free resource that can help people with talking about, you know, KPIs and some of the things that we’ve been talking about today. Can you share a little bit about that?
Omar Zenhom 38:53
Yeah, sure. I give a lot of talks at conferences, and when I go to conferences, I like to talk to the attendees as much as possible, during the lunches, during the breaks, and figure out where they’re at, so I can maybe tweak my talk a little bit based on that. And one of the things I have found that’s consistent in whatever kind of conference I’m at, whether I’m at a SaaS conference, you know, a digital nomad conference, podcasting conference, one of the things I found is, when it comes to business, a lot of entrepreneurs do not know their numbers. They don’t know their finances. They may know what’s in the bank, but they don’t know their profit rate, they don’t know their churn, they don’t know their cost per acquisition. These are numbers that you need to know like your last name, because it’s the meaning between living or dying in your business, because if you don’t have cash flow, it’s very hard for you to grow. It’s very hard for you to sustain yourself. You’ll just eventually die like, in business, there’s something called, you know, the churn line, which basically means that there’s a point where you’re going to churn out. Doesn’t matter how many customers you bring, you’re still, you just can’t outgrow the churn. So you need to know all these numbers. And so a lot of people would ask me, Well, how do I know these numbers? Like, I’m not really good in the math. So I thought, I built a template for myself, a P&L sheet that I use that shows me visibility, my cash flow, my profitability rate, shows me all my expenses. Shows me, you know, what an increase or decrease in my overhead. So I can, you know, keep an eye on it. So I decided just to clean up my sheet, make it a template, and offer it to the world, so that there’s no excuses. You could just download my own template. All the formulas are in there. You just put in your revenue, put in your expenses, you fill in the gaps. Yeah. And you can find that at our website, over at 100mba.net/templates, there’s a bundle of templates. That’s just one of them.
Samantha Riley 40:42
Love it so much. And of course, we’ll put that link in the show notes, wherever you’re listening, just scroll down and that link will be there. Omar, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. You’ve given so much wisdom, you’ve shared so much knowledge. I love the perspectives that you’ve shared, and I know that for people listening, they’re going to have that shift that they need in, you know, at exactly the right time. If there’s one thing you want to leave people with today, what would that be?
Omar Zenhom 41:12
If you’re in business, if you are still transacting, if you have customers, if you have sales, you are winning. You are lucky. Five out of six businesses fail because of lack of cash flow, and you’re one of those six, which is incredible. So you should be grateful, and don’t take your business for granted. You know, you should use that as motivation, as How can I, you know, shore up my business? How can I get better? How can I make sure that I stay in business next year and the year after and keep growing and thriving. So it’s a gift. Being in business is a gift, and you should treat it like that, and it’s a precious thing that you should not just take for granted and really use that as your motivation to keep going.
Samantha Riley 41:52
Love it. Thank you so much, Omar, for coming onto the show. Really appreciate you.
Omar Zenhom 41:56
You’re welcome.
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