Latest / The Heart-Led Business Show / News to Nature: Shahada's Journey with Shahada Karim

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News to Nature: Shahada's Journey with Shahada Karim · The Heart-Led Business Show

• 0:01
  Speaker: Welcome to The Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love.
• 0:09
  Speaker: Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second.
• 0:20
  Speaker: From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism.
• 0:29
  Speaker: So buckle up and let your heart guide your business journey.
• 0:36
  Tom Jackobs: Welcome back to another episode of the heart-led Business show.
• 0:40
  Tom Jackobs: Peeking around the podcast porch, we have the pioneering powerhouse Shahada Karim.
• 0:46
  Tom Jackobs: She left her lofty legacy at CBS television and lept into the labyrinth of wellness.
• 0:52
  Tom Jackobs: She's been flexing her fitness finesse with her Habibi brand, all whilst casting love spells on every human's heart with her heart-led hustle.
• 1:00
  Tom Jackobs: So get ready to dive deep into the divine details on this heart-led business show.
• 1:05
  Tom Jackobs: And trust me, it's going to be a rocking rollercoaster with our homegrown health heroine.
• 1:11
  Tom Jackobs: Shahada, welcome to the show.
• 1:12
  Shahada Karim: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:14
  Tom Jackobs: Well, thanks for, thanks for being here and putting up with all the technical issues that we've been having here up to now.
• 1:20
  Tom Jackobs: But this is gonna be a great show because I'm, I'm really interested to dive into your story, especially how you were able to transition away from a 22 year career in television and into your own brand, especially in the health and wellness industry, which is not that easy to do.
• 1:38
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 1:39
  Tom Jackobs: But first I always like to ask, what's your definition of a heart-led business?
• 1:45
  Shahada Karim: My definition comes from learning the hard way that if you're gonna lead with your heart, then you have to step out in front of the camera.
• 1:56
  Shahada Karim: You have to actually lead visually.
• 1:59
  Shahada Karim: People have to see you.
• 2:00
  Shahada Karim: They have to hear from you.
• 2:02
  Shahada Karim: They should be able to communicate with you.
• 2:06
  Shahada Karim: Maybe not in a business sense, as in I have this question about your product or whatever, but at least on social media, at least in the occasional email, it's been a journey for me to learn the difference between informing people and helping people at the same time,'cause those two things are not mutually exclusive.
• 2:28
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 2:29
  Shahada Karim: And I come from an information place.
• 2:31
  Shahada Karim: I come from a place where I inform and educate.
• 2:34
  Shahada Karim: This is my job as a journalist, but journalists also have a wall between themselves and their public.
• 2:40
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 2:41
  Shahada Karim: We are never part of the story.
• 2:42
  Shahada Karim: We are behind the story.
• 2:44
  Shahada Karim: It's a recent phenomenon to get to know the journalists, to get to know the producers and the writers, and the anchors and the reporters.
• 2:53
  Shahada Karim: That's new.
• 2:55
  Shahada Karim: When I started as a journalist, nobody knew who I was and I was okay with that.
• 2:59
  Shahada Karim: That's how I learned, right?
• 3:00
  Shahada Karim: I was trained like that.
• 3:01
  Shahada Karim: I went to school like that.
• 3:03
  Shahada Karim: Our job was to tell the story, not be the story.
• 3:06
  Shahada Karim: So when I decided, when I made that pivot from just trying to run a company and expecting everyone to naturally trust me because of education, when I had to make the pivot into, oh no, trust me, because I've walked this walk, I understand this journey and we are more alike than we are different.
• 3:28
  Shahada Karim: That's when my business shifted from just being a company, just being a wellness company, just being a skincare company and, and understand that I started in skincare first and wellness came later.
• 3:38
  Shahada Karim: Also not mutually exclusive.
• 3:40
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 3:41
  Shahada Karim: Um, I learned that when I started telling my stories, when I started being honest about my struggles.
• 3:51
  Shahada Karim: I attracted a different kind of customer and scaled a lot easier and a lot faster than when I was just trying to be behind the, behind the camera, behind the story, and you didn't really need to know me.
• 4:04
  Shahada Karim: You just had the trust that the product was effective.
• 4:08
  Shahada Karim: And if you could just deal with the fact that the product was effective, then we could be friends, right?
• 4:12
  Shahada Karim: We could be business friends, but I've learned over time.
• 4:16
  Shahada Karim: That's not really what consumers were want.
• 4:19
  Shahada Karim: We've built a parasocial dynamic into business and it really became evident during the pandemic.
• 4:26
  Shahada Karim: And now a customer is disinterested especially in the wellness space, in doing real business with you and being loyal and a repeat customer if they don't know who you are.
• 4:38
  Tom Jackobs: Exactly.
• 4:39
  Tom Jackobs: It's, you know, I've seen this over and over again with, with businesses, especially non-heart-led businesses that try to create this wall between the customer and the, and the business.
• 4:51
  Tom Jackobs: It just doesn't make sense because we're all humans.
• 4:54
  Tom Jackobs: It might be, even if you do B2B sales and B2B business, you're still working with a person.
• 5:01
  Shahada Karim: Yes.
• 5:02
  Shahada Karim: And
• 5:02
  Tom Jackobs: if, we do business with people who have feelings and hearts and everything, and, and it's just, it always boggled my mind why there had to be this separation and you had to be different when you came into work than you were outside of work.
• 5:17
  Tom Jackobs: And just, it just, like I said, it boggled my mind.
• 5:20
  Tom Jackobs: So how did, how, oh, go ahead.
• 5:22
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 5:23
  Shahada Karim: From a business perspective, it makes sense if you think like I used to, which is can I get sued for this?
• 5:31
  Shahada Karim: Very protective.
• 5:32
  Shahada Karim: I was very, very protective of my personal self.
• 5:34
  Shahada Karim: Very protective, extremely protective of my image.
• 5:36
  Shahada Karim: I still am, but also protective of my connection to the company.
• 5:43
  Shahada Karim: I started a business with the idea that people would just trust me because it was a good idea, not because, not that they would trust me because it was me.
• 5:56
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 5:56
  Shahada Karim: Yeah.
• 5:56
  Shahada Karim: So I started with this great idea and I was like this is a good product.
• 6:01
  Shahada Karim: Use this product.
• 6:02
  Shahada Karim: If you like this product, yay.
• 6:03
  Shahada Karim: If you don't like this product, that's fine too.
• 6:05
  Shahada Karim: And I still kind of have that attitude, but there's more of me in the selling.
• 6:10
  Shahada Karim: Initially I was very shy about being, being that kind of person because I didn't need anybody to know my name.
• 6:17
  Shahada Karim: I didn't think that that was necessary.
• 6:19
  Shahada Karim: I didn't start push putting up pictures on social media.
• 6:22
  Shahada Karim: Until well after Facebook started.
• 6:25
  Shahada Karim: I mean, I'm, I'm an analog person.
• 6:27
  Shahada Karim: I used to rip scripts.
• 6:29
  Shahada Karim: We had beta tapes.
• 6:30
  Shahada Karim: This digital, completely different phenomenon.
• 6:34
  Shahada Karim: I started in 1996.
• 6:36
  Shahada Karim: We were not exposed the way that we're exposed.
• 6:39
  Shahada Karim: And because of that, I never had practice dealing with strangers.
• 6:44
  Shahada Karim: I always hid behind my words.
• 6:46
  Shahada Karim: I hid behind my video.
• 6:48
  Shahada Karim: I hid behind my production and my expertise.
• 6:51
  Shahada Karim: There was no need for you to get to know me.
• 6:52
  Shahada Karim: All you needed to know was what I could do.
• 6:56
  Shahada Karim: And because I was in that space, when I started talking about skincare, people were like, um, yes, this, these ingredients look amazing.
• 7:05
  Shahada Karim: This packaging is questionable.
• 7:07
  Shahada Karim: The inside is great, but also I don't know you.
• 7:11
  Shahada Karim: And my feeling was like, why do you have to know me?
• 7:13
  Shahada Karim: So that was a, a little bit of a push and pull.
• 7:15
  Shahada Karim: I would say, honestly, in the first decade, in the first 10 years, there was that push and pull between customers that I knew who I knew personally who would refer me.
• 7:25
  Shahada Karim: So I would end up getting customers and I would do things like, um, sponsor, community events and book clubs and stuff and, and gain customers that way.
• 7:34
  Shahada Karim: So I was, it was very grassroots and it was very much, if you knew me, then you would refer me.
• 7:41
  Shahada Karim: I had a good reputation on people who knew me.
• 7:43
  Shahada Karim: I did not have any reputation again, uh, around people who didn't know me.
• 7:47
  Shahada Karim: So therefore, I did not scale.
• 7:49
  Shahada Karim: Because strangers were not like, oh, this looks interesting.
• 7:52
  Shahada Karim: Let's try this.
• 7:52
  Shahada Karim: They didn't know who I was.
• 7:54
  Shahada Karim: I wasn't in front of the camera.
• 7:55
  Shahada Karim: I didn't take pictures.
• 7:56
  Shahada Karim: I didn't put anything of myself into the world in connection with Habibi.
• 8:02
  Shahada Karim: Habibi was just a thing that was separate from me.
• 8:05
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 8:06
  Tom Jackobs: So I just wanna go, go back just a little bit.
• 8:09
  Tom Jackobs: How was that transition from corporate television and just, you know, corporate in general into owning your own business?
• 8:19
  Tom Jackobs: What was that transition like for you?
• 8:21
  Shahada Karim: Part of it was very personal.
• 8:22
  Shahada Karim: So the, the big secret about me, um, that's not a secret anymore'cause I'm very public about it, is that I was raised and trained even as a journalist to gate keep.
• 8:37
  Tom Jackobs: Hmm.
• 8:38
  Shahada Karim: So on the very personal side, I was raised to gatekeep because of my indigenous roots.
• 8:44
  Shahada Karim: So indigenous people, you don't know at this point, are not very trusting and we don't tell people that we're not very trusting.
• 8:54
  Shahada Karim: But it is very clear in your family and in your community that the last time we shared something our land got taken from us and that is passed down.
• 9:02
  Shahada Karim: That very natural caution that standing away from things is passed down through generations.
• 9:11
  Shahada Karim: It's been passed down through my great-great-great-great, great grandparents all the way down to me.
• 9:15
  Shahada Karim: It's not something that's, it's not necessarily a hostile thing or a negative thing.
• 9:20
  Shahada Karim: It's just a thing that you know,
• 9:22
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 9:22
  Shahada Karim: You don't share your secrets.
• 9:24
  Shahada Karim: You live your life, how you live your life.
• 9:26
  Shahada Karim: You keep your head down and you do good work.
• 9:27
  Shahada Karim: This is the ethic of coming from these people and coming from this place.
• 9:33
  Shahada Karim: So that was on the personal side.
• 9:35
  Shahada Karim: So being a journalist was perfect for me.
• 9:39
  Shahada Karim: Perfect professional choice because you don't have to know about me, I just have to report the facts.
• 9:47
  Shahada Karim: I don't have to embellish, I don't have to add my own personal spin on it.
• 9:52
  Shahada Karim: This is not counting what passes for journalism today.
• 9:55
  Shahada Karim: I'm a Cronkite girl, okay?
• 9:58
  Shahada Karim: I came up with Cronkite Jennings Broka rather.
• 10:02
  Shahada Karim: Those are my people.
• 10:04
  Shahada Karim: So you saw the facts, you laid them out as simply as possible, and you reported the facts, period.
• 10:12
  Shahada Karim: Your opinion, your personal feelings, your politics do not factor what happened.
• 10:20
  Shahada Karim: Is it red?
• 10:20
  Shahada Karim: Is it blue?
• 10:21
  Shahada Karim: Is it white?
• 10:22
  Shahada Karim: All you did was report facts.
• 10:24
  Shahada Karim: So this is perfect for me, right?
• 10:25
  Shahada Karim: Because I'm a gatekeeper anyway.
• 10:26
  Shahada Karim: So the other thing you should know about my people and my mother's people is that they are earth people.
• 10:32
  Shahada Karim: They are herbalists.
• 10:33
  Shahada Karim: They are healers.
• 10:34
  Shahada Karim: They believe in tinctures.
• 10:36
  Shahada Karim: The first time I got stung by a bee, I was five years old.
• 10:39
  Shahada Karim: My mom mixed some herbs.
• 10:42
  Shahada Karim: She poured it in the earth.
• 10:43
  Shahada Karim: She made a mud pack, put it on my arm, drew the stinger out, grabbed some tweezers, pulled out the stinger, rinsed my arm off, put a salve on it, and sent me back outside to play.
• 10:54
  Shahada Karim: It took her 10 minutes.
• 10:56
  Shahada Karim: I was raised like that.
• 10:57
  Shahada Karim: That kind of medicine earth medicine is second nature.
• 11:00
  Shahada Karim: It comes very easily to me.
• 11:02
  Shahada Karim: It's not even something that I question.
• 11:04
  Shahada Karim: It's always been a thing, but nobody ever knew.
• 11:08
  Shahada Karim: Nobody ever knew because I never told anybody because why, why am I sharing my secrets?
• 11:12
  Shahada Karim: My mother said, don't share your secrets.
• 11:14
  Shahada Karim: Right?
• 11:15
  Shahada Karim: And that can become a huge part of your brand, especially around the skincare.
• 11:19
  Shahada Karim: Clearly, hundred percent.
• 11:20
  Tom Jackobs: You know, herbs and everything that you need.
• 11:25
  Shahada Karim: I am my first customer.
• 11:27
  Shahada Karim: I was my first customer years ago, and it's kind of funny and cliche because the, the normal story, especially in skincare, it's like, oh, I had these problems and I couldn't find anything that worked on the market, and so I made this myself, but that actually happened to me.
• 11:45
  Shahada Karim: That actually happened.
• 11:46
  Shahada Karim: That's not a story.
• 11:47
  Shahada Karim: It wasn't that I couldn't find anything that worked for me, it was that skincare on the market was too complicated for my skin.
• 11:54
  Shahada Karim: My skin was highly reactive and highly adaptive.
• 11:58
  Shahada Karim: So if you use, if I use something that was super active, it worked for like two days and then would stop working because my skin adapts really, really fast.
• 12:05
  Shahada Karim: And what I found out, and I've told this skincare story before, um, what I found out is that less is more.
• 12:10
  Shahada Karim: So I scaled all the way down.
• 12:12
  Shahada Karim: My very first product was four ingredients.
• 12:15
  Tom Jackobs: Oh wow.
• 12:15
  Tom Jackobs: It was easy
• 12:16
  Shahada Karim: to imitate, it was easy to copy.
• 12:18
  Shahada Karim: This is before I learned how to run a business, right?
• 12:20
  Shahada Karim: Everything that I did, like a 5-year-old, could do it, but it worked.
• 12:25
  Shahada Karim: And once I realized that it worked and it was consistent, and I didn't need all these soup or fancy things.
• 12:32
  Shahada Karim: Because this is how we sell skincare.
• 12:34
  Shahada Karim: We sell skincare as in this is the super rare flower you can't get anywhere else.
• 12:39
  Shahada Karim: This is this seaweed that only blooms at midnight on the 10th day of June.
• 12:43
  Shahada Karim: This is how we sell skincare, right?
• 12:45
  Shahada Karim: Because this is how we justify the price markup.
• 12:47
  Shahada Karim: And we did this for decades before Des EM came along this, this, the skincare company that interrupted everything and was like, everybody's overcharging you.
• 12:55
  Shahada Karim: You don't have to pay these prices for these ingredients.
• 12:58
  Shahada Karim: Here's the same thing you've been paying$50 for we have it for 11.
• 13:01
  Tom Jackobs: Wow.
• 13:02
  Shahada Karim: That happened and when that founder revolutionized skincare, it forced a lot of people to tell the truth.
• 13:08
  Tom Jackobs: Wow.
• 13:08
  Shahada Karim: Which was great'cause I was already there.
• 13:10
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 13:11
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 13:11
  Tom Jackobs: So, so tell me how, how did, how did you get over then the, the gatekeeping and start telling your personal story, uh, to people so that they could understand you and the drivers behind you and your business?
• 13:24
  Shahada Karim: While I was still a journalist, while I still worked at CBS and, and the interesting thing about this story is that I'll also tell you the legal side of it, but the personal side of it was while I still worked at CBS, um, in 2003, I started Habibi Bath and Body, which was my very first company.
• 13:41
  Shahada Karim: And back then I worked at the station that we ended up merging with.
• 13:47
  Shahada Karim: So I worked at Kcal, and Kcal was it was a non-union spot.
• 13:52
  Shahada Karim: There wasn't that much corporate involvement.
• 13:54
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 13:55
  Shahada Karim: So, and everybody knew everybody.
• 13:56
  Shahada Karim: We were all super personal in that newsroom.
• 13:58
  Shahada Karim: So I went to my boss and I was like, Hey, you wanna start a skincare company?
• 14:01
  Shahada Karim: And he's like, I don't care.
• 14:02
  Shahada Karim: Which is what you need to say that when you're employed somewhere, you need to make sure there's no conflict.
• 14:07
  Shahada Karim: And he was like, I don't care.
• 14:07
  Shahada Karim: Get out.
• 14:08
  Shahada Karim: Why are you bothering me about lotion?
• 14:10
  Shahada Karim: I don't care.
• 14:11
  Shahada Karim: We merged with CBS.
• 14:14
  Shahada Karim: CBS is highly corporate and we ended up with employee handbooks and rules and disclosure and regulations.
• 14:24
  Shahada Karim: And suddenly everything that we had been playing at with the,'cause, everybody I knew was doing a little something.
• 14:29
  Shahada Karim: We live in Los Angeles, this is like the land of the entrepreneurs.
• 14:33
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 14:33
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 14:33
  Shahada Karim: So we all had to disclose.
• 14:35
  Shahada Karim: Meeting with legal.
• 14:37
  Shahada Karim: We had to talk to hr, we had to sign paperwork, and we had to make sure that there was no entity under the CBS or the Paramount umbrella that would conflict with what we were doing because at the time that I had to disclose and BRATS were going through a major lawsuit because the creator of BRATS worked for Mattel and created a product that Mattel said they owned because that person was employed by them at the time of creation.
• 15:07
  Shahada Karim: So CBS pulled out all of its legal knowledge and was like, if any of you are doing anything that even looks like conflict, you are required by law to disclose.
• 15:20
  Shahada Karim: And the great thing was neither CBS nor Paramount was interested in skincare and they were like, we don't care.
• 15:26
  Shahada Karim: Get out.
• 15:29
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 15:30
  Shahada Karim: But it was a little scary for me because it was the first time I was being asked.
• 15:36
  Shahada Karim: a potential business owner to be accountable for the business that I owned, because I kept my job.
• 15:44
  Shahada Karim: I didn't jump up and be like, you know, I don't care, and throw up a peace sign or run out the door and go start my business.
• 15:49
  Shahada Karim: I knew better than that,
• 15:51
  Tom Jackobs: Good.
• 15:52
  Shahada Karim: I stayed employed until 2017.
• 15:55
  Shahada Karim: I started my first company in two, 2003, and I held a job until 2017.
• 16:04
  Shahada Karim: Wow.
• 16:04
  Shahada Karim: And then in 2018, grew and started Habibi Sport.
• 16:09
  Shahada Karim: But Habibi, bath and Body was the beginning and it existed alongside my going in, clocking in, doing the news every day it existed and that's how I funded my business.
• 16:24
  Shahada Karim: I didn't take outside money.
• 16:25
  Shahada Karim: I stacked money.
• 16:26
  Shahada Karim: I had a extremely good relationship.
• 16:28
  Shahada Karim: So I'm I, I cheated a little bit.
• 16:30
  Shahada Karim: I had a really, really, really good relationship with the finance manager at CBS and she started teaching me about money.
• 16:39
  Shahada Karim: And about personal money and business money, and not confusing the two.
• 16:44
  Tom Jackobs: Mm-hmm.
• 16:45
  Shahada Karim: And not allowing one thing to affect the other.
• 16:48
  Shahada Karim: That even if there was money in the business account and there was no money in my account, then I was broke and I have live with that.
• 16:56
  Shahada Karim: She taught me how to grow slow.
• 16:59
  Shahada Karim: I'm happy with growing slow.
• 17:00
  Shahada Karim: I know people who really pushed me to grow fast and people who grew fast and, and yay for them, right?
• 17:08
  Shahada Karim: But I was not comfortable with that.
• 17:10
  Shahada Karim: I wanted to grow slow because I was more interested in longevity than I was in making money.
• 17:17
  Shahada Karim: Lots of it, especially out the gate.
• 17:20
  Shahada Karim: Yeah.
• 17:21
  Shahada Karim: The thing that I learned was that if you burn hot and you burn bright without having any idea about what it means to sustain a business, then you can burn out.
• 17:32
  Shahada Karim: And I didn't want that to happen.
• 17:34
  Tom Jackobs: Did you ever come close to burning out?
• 17:36
  Tom Jackobs: Because I'm, I'm sure like working a full-time job and then building a business for 14 years.
• 17:43
  Shahada Karim: I had not learned how to ask for help yet.
• 17:45
  Tom Jackobs: Ah,
• 17:46
  Shahada Karim: So I was doing everything my, for myself and I also, because I didn't know at the time that to run a successful and sustainable business that you not only have to be okay with saying no, you have to be okay with losing business.
• 18:03
  Shahada Karim: And
• 18:03
  Tom Jackobs: I wasn't
• 18:04
  Shahada Karim: okay with losing business.
• 18:05
  Shahada Karim: So I was trying to be all things to all people.
• 18:08
  Shahada Karim: I was trying to do everything, and I allowed my customers who knew me at the time, I had not started recruiting strangers.
• 18:16
  Shahada Karim: Everything was word of mouth.
• 18:18
  Shahada Karim: I was allowing my customers to run the business.
• 18:21
  Shahada Karim: So every time a customer made a suggestion, I would take it every time a customer asked for something special, I would do it if they wanted a formulation that was thicker or thinner or this color, or that color.
• 18:31
  Shahada Karim: Or could you find an herb that makes it smell like this perfume?
• 18:34
  Shahada Karim: And could you do this and could you do that?
• 18:36
  Shahada Karim: And this is before I learned that.
• 18:38
  Shahada Karim: You know, especially when you're buying supplies as a business, you're not buying retail, you're buying wholesale.
• 18:44
  Shahada Karim: So if I'm making a wholesale purchase and buying something in bulk for one customer, I am now stuck with all of those ingredients, which are perishable.
• 18:54
  Shahada Karim: I've now lost a ton of money, and then that person goes, thank you, bye.
• 18:59
  Shahada Karim: And you never hear from them again.
• 19:00
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 19:01
  Tom Jackobs: Thanks for the eight ounces out of the five gallons.
• 19:04
  Shahada Karim: I have a 55 gallon drum of this product that I can't do anything with and that no one else wants.
• 19:12
  Shahada Karim: I couldn't sell it because I also wasn't talking to strangers.
• 19:15
  Shahada Karim: So there was no stranger that was going, oh hey, that looks awesome.
• 19:18
  Shahada Karim: I'll try that too.
• 19:20
  Shahada Karim: I'm only talking to people I know.
• 19:21
  Shahada Karim: Their mothers.
• 19:22
  Shahada Karim: And their aunts and their book clubs.
• 19:24
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 19:25
  Tom Jackobs: And they all want something different.
• 19:28
  Shahada Karim: Strangers didn't trust me.
• 19:29
  Shahada Karim: They didn't know me and I wasn't interested in them getting to know me, so this was on me too.
• 19:35
  Shahada Karim: So 2005 I walked away quietly.
• 19:38
  Shahada Karim: I didn't say anything to anyone, and I technically didn't shut anything down.
• 19:43
  Shahada Karim: I just suspended the website without closing the store I could suspend the website so that all the products were still visible, but you couldn't click on them, you couldn't buy them.
• 19:53
  Tom Jackobs: Ah.
• 19:54
  Shahada Karim: And I thought it's fine.
• 19:56
  Shahada Karim: Nobody really cares about this but me anyway, I'm doing too much.
• 20:00
  Shahada Karim: That was the year that I got married and I planned the whole wedding myself because I thought I could.
• 20:07
  Tom Jackobs: It seems like an ongoing theme.
• 20:10
  Shahada Karim: Yes.
• 20:11
  Shahada Karim: I thought I could do it.
• 20:12
  Shahada Karim: That's 200 people.
• 20:13
  Shahada Karim: It's not a big deal.
• 20:15
  Tom Jackobs: Oh my gosh.
• 20:15
  Shahada Karim: I was absolutely insane by wedding day.
• 20:19
  Tom Jackobs: Oh, I bet.
• 20:20
  Shahada Karim: And I had shut the business down in January.
• 20:23
  Shahada Karim: Um, I shut the business down in January of that year of 2005, and I got married in September.
• 20:27
  Shahada Karim: So for that nine months I did not do anything with the business and I really thought, you know, who cares?
• 20:33
  Shahada Karim: No one's gonna care.
• 20:34
  Shahada Karim: It's gonna be fine.
• 20:35
  Shahada Karim: And my customers lost their minds.
• 20:38
  Shahada Karim: Really?
• 20:39
  Shahada Karim: And started again emails and What are you doing and why can't I buy my product?
• 20:43
  Shahada Karim: And I'm almost out and can you help?
• 20:45
  Shahada Karim: Can you help?
• 20:45
  Shahada Karim: Can you help?
• 20:46
  Shahada Karim: Can you help?
• 20:46
  Shahada Karim: So at the end of 2005, I reached out to everybody.
• 20:50
  Shahada Karim: I sent out an email, and I always say that this is the first time in the business that I told the truth, that I said how I felt and I didn't edit myself to make other people feel better.
• 21:07
  Shahada Karim: I said, I feel unappreciated, overwhelmed.
• 21:10
  Shahada Karim: I feel like you guys think that I'm Walmart, that I can be all things to all people, and you didn't consider the human cost, and I take responsibility for my part in this, for allowing you to think that you could get me to jump through rings of fire for$12 and 50 cents, never to be seen or heard from again.
• 21:34
  Shahada Karim: After I've spent$2,000 on this 55 drum container of aloe.
• 21:43
  Tom Jackobs: I would love to see a copy of that email.
• 21:46
  Shahada Karim: I wrote it when I was really upset.
• 21:48
  Tom Jackobs: Oh, no.
• 21:49
  Tom Jackobs: And
• 21:49
  Shahada Karim: because I'm a journalist, typically I will always copy edit.
• 21:54
  Shahada Karim: I will always edit.
• 21:55
  Shahada Karim: And this was the very first time that I said, Nope, this is how I feel.
• 21:59
  Tom Jackobs: And send,
• 22:00
  Shahada Karim: And I hit send
• 22:03
  Tom Jackobs: Well, how'd that work out?
• 22:05
  Shahada Karim: Some people told me to kick rocks.
• 22:07
  Tom Jackobs: Okay.
• 22:07
  Shahada Karim: Some people said, we never asked you to do this.
• 22:10
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 22:11
  Shahada Karim: You, we asked a question and you said yes, and so we thought it was okay, so you don't get to blame us, you know, for, for saying that it was fine when it really wasn't fine.
• 22:19
  Shahada Karim: This is, this is not our problem.
• 22:20
  Shahada Karim: Grow up, deal with it.
• 22:22
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 22:22
  Tom Jackobs: Okay.
• 22:23
  Tom Jackobs: And
• 22:23
  Shahada Karim: some people said, I didn't know that it would have that effect on you.
• 22:26
  Shahada Karim: I'm so sorry.
• 22:27
  Shahada Karim: I should have considered your feelings.
• 22:29
  Shahada Karim: But it was thing where I had already started out being a business that was separate from being a human.
• 22:37
  Shahada Karim: So people reacted to me like a business and then were blindsided.
• 22:42
  Shahada Karim: When I responded as a human.
• 22:45
  Tom Jackobs: Yep.
• 22:46
  Shahada Karim: It was a lesson for me.
• 22:48
  Tom Jackobs: That's such an important lesson too.
• 22:49
  Shahada Karim: I have to step back.
• 22:51
  Shahada Karim: And I have to think what do you want.
• 22:53
  Shahada Karim: What do you want?
• 22:53
  Tom Jackobs: Just wanted to kinda unpack that a little bit for the listeners too, just, and, and just mention how important that shift in mindset is that you have to bear some responsibility for your business and how the customers react.
• 23:10
  Tom Jackobs: Like, like just what you said, you know, if you don't tell your customers, I do not do that, they will continue to ask you to do that.
• 23:19
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 23:19
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 23:20
  Shahada Karim: And as a result, I, I kept the customers that I needed and I lost the customers that I didn't need.
• 23:28
  Shahada Karim: That was my first real tough business lesson that you don't want everyone.
• 23:34
  Tom Jackobs: Yep.
• 23:35
  Shahada Karim: And all money is not good money.
• 23:37
  Shahada Karim: And you shouldn't spend as a human being, especially in the stages that I was in, which was doing everything myself.
• 23:43
  Shahada Karim: So also taking on the brunt of the pain and backlash and whatever, you know, which is not personal, but at the time was very personal to me.
• 23:53
  Shahada Karim: People don't know me.
• 23:53
  Shahada Karim: They just, I don't like this thing, or I do like this thing, or I want more of this.
• 23:57
  Shahada Karim: Or, why can't I have, why can't you give me?
• 24:00
  Shahada Karim: They don't know that I'm a person.
• 24:03
  Shahada Karim: That has to deal with that, and I hadn't separated yet emotionally as far as I was concerned.
• 24:09
  Shahada Karim: This was my baby, and you all are insulting my baby.
• 24:12
  Shahada Karim: You're telling me my baby is ugly and that my baby can't do more for you, and that my baby's packaging sucks.
• 24:18
  Shahada Karim: Oh.
• 24:18
  Shahada Karim: The feedback I would get about packaging, I used to have paper labels that as soon as they got wet.
• 24:23
  Shahada Karim: That I printed on an inkjet printer.
• 24:26
  Shahada Karim: Instead of getting labels professionally made on a laser printer, these were things I had to learn, right?
• 24:31
  Shahada Karim: I was like, who cares?
• 24:33
  Shahada Karim: The inside's amazing and what's hilarious.
• 24:36
  Shahada Karim: About that.
• 24:37
  Shahada Karim: So this was back in 2000, 2003, 2004.
• 24:41
  Shahada Karim: What is hilarious about that is that now in the wellness space, you can throw a rock and find the same kind of mediocre packaging and have it sell for 15 times as much with perhaps good, perhaps not so good ingredients on the inside.
• 24:58
  Shahada Karim: So when I see that now, I just laugh like, oh, I started this in 2004 and everybody told me I sucked.
• 25:04
  Shahada Karim: But now, it's great.
• 25:06
  Shahada Karim: You just tied a little piece of twine around this jar that I know you paid 12 cents for, and you told everybody that you got this clay from the Amazon and you you're charging$300 for it.
• 25:16
  Shahada Karim: Now that I understand what that is, I know what that is now because I've been in this business long enough to look at an ingredient or look at the hierarchy of ingredients or look at the source of an ingredient, and I can make a snap judgment about efficacy and delivery.
• 25:32
  Shahada Karim: This is something I had to learn.
• 25:34
  Shahada Karim: So in addition to all of this, 2006, I started back up again, but I changed my approach and I went back to school.
• 25:43
  Shahada Karim: So instead of me being like, oh, my mom made this, oh, my grandmother made this, oh, you know, these are just home recipes.
• 25:49
  Shahada Karim: I had to learn about preservatives.
• 25:52
  Shahada Karim: Everybody is like, oh, my stuff is preservative free.
• 25:54
  Shahada Karim: And I'm like, oh.
• 25:55
  Shahada Karim: So you get mold in six months.
• 25:58
  Shahada Karim: That's right.
• 26:00
  Shahada Karim: Yeah.
• 26:00
  Shahada Karim: You can use preservatives that are still natural and maybe not hurt your customers.
• 26:05
  Shahada Karim: But I had to learn that I had to learn about formulations that were sustainable so that the formulas will be consistent.
• 26:11
  Shahada Karim: I had to learn about preserving.
• 26:13
  Shahada Karim: I had to learn about light filtering for some of the ingredients.
• 26:16
  Shahada Karim: You can't have some ingredients exposed to any kind of light, artificial, or natural.
• 26:21
  Shahada Karim: If I was gonna use those ingredients, these were the sacrifices I was gonna have to make.
• 26:24
  Shahada Karim: So I went back to school.
• 26:25
  Shahada Karim: I learned how to make skincare.
• 26:28
  Shahada Karim: The beautiful thing was by the time this happened, we had merged with CBS and my shift changed to a very early morning shift.
• 26:37
  Shahada Karim: When I first started working in Los Angeles, I started working in Los Angeles in 2000, I first started working, I worked from 1:30 to 9:30, which means that my entire day was spoken for.
• 26:48
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 26:48
  Shahada Karim: But when we merged with CBS, they moved me from 7:00 AM to three eight 3:00 PM
• 26:53
  Tom Jackobs: Oh, nice.
• 26:53
  Shahada Karim: And that changed everything.
• 26:55
  Shahada Karim: 'cause now I can gould go to night school, which is what I did.
• 26:58
  Shahada Karim: So from three to eight
• 27:00
  Tom Jackobs: Oh my gosh.
• 27:01
  Tom Jackobs: I can go
• 27:01
  Shahada Karim: figure out what I was doing and learn how to make the products properly.
• 27:07
  Shahada Karim: And the second thing I did was I got really cozy with the CBS, the main criminal attorney who then didn't referred me to a business attorney who got me involved in trademark, and I had to learn the legality.
• 27:22
  Shahada Karim: So I got very lucky in that.
• 27:24
  Shahada Karim: I got up under the finance manager who taught me about money.
• 27:28
  Shahada Karim: I was friends with one of the lawyers who referred me to someone who would be a better fit and taught me about protecting myself legally.
• 27:35
  Shahada Karim: Taught me about doing a federal search to make sure nobody else was using the name.
• 27:40
  Shahada Karim: This whole thing that no one tells you as an entrepreneur, you're just like, oh, this great idea.
• 27:45
  Shahada Karim: I'm just gonna jump out and do this thing, and everybody's gonna love me.
• 27:48
  Shahada Karim: Well, you know, I stumbled for two years before I learned that that wasn't true.
• 27:52
  Shahada Karim: Had to take a break for a year and then I, I said to myself, you're gonna do this.
• 27:56
  Shahada Karim: If you're really gonna do this, you gotta learn.
• 27:59
  Shahada Karim: How did you learn how to be a journalist?
• 28:01
  Shahada Karim: You went to school, right?
• 28:03
  Shahada Karim: It was education and practice.
• 28:04
  Shahada Karim: For me, learning to run a business and learning to make a product that would, would hold every single time was literally education and practice.
• 28:17
  Tom Jackobs: And such a great lesson too that you, you finally found that asking for help, not being that gatekeeper, not giving away, you know, giving away your secrets is not helping anybody.
• 28:28
  Shahada Karim: Right.
• 28:29
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 28:30
  Tom Jackobs: It's, or holding your secrets isn't helping anybody.
• 28:33
  Tom Jackobs: So, I mean, that's a, such a good lesson, uh, to share with the, the audience.
• 28:37
  Tom Jackobs: And I think a lot of people's struggle with that to share who they are to open up and ask for help when needed.
• 28:46
  Tom Jackobs: And you know, a lot of entrepreneurs go through that same struggle.
• 28:49
  Tom Jackobs: So thank thank you for sharing that.
• 28:50
  Tom Jackobs: One thing interesting is that I did learn a lot under Habibi, bath and Body about sharing myself, but Yeah.
• 28:59
  Shahada Karim: I went in the opposite direction for Habibi Sport, and that's the balance.
• 29:04
  Shahada Karim: I learned that you can do both.
• 29:06
  Shahada Karim: So I am definitely a gatekeeper in Habibi sport, and there's a business reason for that.
• 29:13
  Shahada Karim: The business reason is in the fitness space, and this is the space that you're very familiar with in the fitness space because we don't technically own anything in fitness.
• 29:27
  Shahada Karim: Fitness is fitness, right?
• 29:28
  Shahada Karim: You can't own a squat.
• 29:29
  Shahada Karim: You can't own a lunge.
• 29:31
  Shahada Karim: You, you really even have trouble trying to own choreography.
• 29:36
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 29:37
  Shahada Karim: in a class or because you are gathering all of your, your choreography comes from predetermined moves, right?
• 29:44
  Shahada Karim: The body is the body.
• 29:45
  Shahada Karim: The human body moves in a certain way.
• 29:47
  Shahada Karim: We're not gonna reinvent the wheel here because of that a lot of people, for lack of a better word, I'm just gonna use this word, a lot of people steal.
• 29:57
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 29:58
  Shahada Karim: And they don't give credit and they claim it as their own and they run with it.
• 30:02
  Shahada Karim: Now, the problem in Habibi sport is because it's a fitness space and because there is technically a proprietary technique to use, very normal, very recognized, um, very common moves.
• 30:17
  Shahada Karim: We just get there in a different way.
• 30:19
  Shahada Karim: I very shy about putting that out in public because content creators steal.
• 30:25
  Tom Jackobs: Sure.
• 30:25
  Tom Jackobs: So if I
• 30:25
  Shahada Karim: put it on a public platform, it now is owned by that platform.
• 30:29
  Shahada Karim: If I put it on meta, it's owned by meta.
• 30:31
  Shahada Karim: It's in the terms and conditions that nobody reads.
• 30:33
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 30:33
  Shahada Karim: Which means that not only now I've put this thing up'cause I'm really excited about it, and other content creators can find it and say, this looks great.
• 30:41
  Shahada Karim: I'm gonna do that.
• 30:43
  Shahada Karim: Meta also owns it.
• 30:45
  Tom Jackobs: Hmm.
• 30:45
  Shahada Karim: They own our pictures, they own our videos.
• 30:47
  Shahada Karim: I, I wish that people understood the ramifications of sharing everything on social media without reading the terms and conditions.
• 30:55
  Shahada Karim: So understanding that, I was like, well, I don't want meta to own it, and I don't want content creators, especially content creators with larger platforms.
• 31:03
  Shahada Karim: To take from me and use something that I worked really hard on and that I had to study for a long time about.
• 31:10
  Shahada Karim: So that's the other side of this.
• 31:12
  Shahada Karim: Just like I went to school for Habibi Body, I also went to school for Habibi Sport.
• 31:17
  Shahada Karim: I have seven certifications in fitness.
• 31:19
  Shahada Karim: I had to learn how to do the thing that I wanted to share, the thing that I wanted to teach.
• 31:24
  Shahada Karim: Have I been lifting weights since I was 12 years old?
• 31:26
  Shahada Karim: Yes.
• 31:27
  Shahada Karim: 'cause we all did that, right?
• 31:29
  Shahada Karim: As old as I am, I'm gonna date myself with some something that only certain reader, certain listeners are gonna understand.
• 31:35
  Shahada Karim: There was a program called Get in Shape Girl.
• 31:39
  Tom Jackobs: I don't remember that one.
• 31:39
  Tom Jackobs: I did
• 31:40
  Shahada Karim: that program religiously, so this was back at the time of Mary Lou Retten and Nadia Kochi.
• 31:46
  Shahada Karim: Okay.
• 31:46
  Shahada Karim: They
• 31:46
  Tom Jackobs: have a gymnast in this
• 31:47
  Shahada Karim: program and I thought I wanted to be a gymnast, and so I bugged my mom and she bought me this program and I had been moving my body ever since.
• 31:57
  Shahada Karim: That's how long I've been moving my body.
• 32:00
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 32:01
  Shahada Karim: But I had to learn how not to only move my body effectively, but how to adapt the way that I move my body as I aged.
• 32:09
  Shahada Karim: And that's where Habibi Sport comes from.
• 32:12
  Shahada Karim: It comes from adaptive exercise that is related to who you are and where you are at any given time.
• 32:21
  Shahada Karim: We can't do certain exercises forever.
• 32:23
  Shahada Karim: We think that we can.
• 32:26
  Shahada Karim: I often say to my male clients, this is the difference between men and women.
• 32:29
  Shahada Karim: Women have been have come up in a fitness space where we have a billion options.
• 32:34
  Shahada Karim: There's a billion different ways for us to move.
• 32:36
  Shahada Karim: It's a very female-centric space, but men learn how to do the perfect squat at 25, and they're still trying to do that squat at 65, and they can't figure out why it's not working and why their knees hurt, and why their hips hurt, and why their low back hurts because they haven't adapted the movement to the place where they are in life.
• 32:56
  Tom Jackobs: Exactly.
• 32:56
  Shahada Karim: This is one of the disadvantages.
• 32:58
  Shahada Karim: I've had this conversation with my husband.
• 33:00
  Shahada Karim: This is one of the disadvantages I think that men face because they were like, oh, I used to be able to do this when I was 30.
• 33:05
  Shahada Karim: Why can't I do this now?
• 33:06
  Shahada Karim: Why does this suck?
• 33:08
  Shahada Karim: Why am I paying for this?
• 33:09
  Shahada Karim: Why is my recovery time longer?
• 33:11
  Shahada Karim: Because you are different.
• 33:13
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 33:13
  Shahada Karim: In that way.
• 33:15
  Shahada Karim: We develop bespoke programs, which are technically not as bespoke as more would have you believe.
• 33:22
  Shahada Karim: Like I said, the human body is the human body.
• 33:25
  Shahada Karim: So we've learned how to get people to adapt their movement, to benefit their body, to benefit whatever it is they're eating these days and the way that they're sleeping and the time that they wake up and the time that they go to sleep.
• 33:36
  Shahada Karim: And we've developed a formula that we can plug and play.
• 33:40
  Shahada Karim: Because at some point we all tend to, we start crossing right?
• 33:43
  Shahada Karim: At some point someone is my age in, in, in a body that is similar to mine with a similar lifestyle.
• 33:50
  Shahada Karim: And it's easy for us to now plug and play what works in my body in a very general sense to what works in their body with a few tweaks.
• 33:58
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 33:59
  Tom Jackobs: I love that.
• 33:59
  Tom Jackobs: I mean, that's, that's a great way of scaling, but also being bespoke at the same time.
• 34:04
  Shahada Karim: We still want to take care of people.
• 34:07
  Shahada Karim: The big lesson I learned about, especially about being heart-led, beyond exposing, you know, who I really am was exposing that I just wanna give everybody a hug.
• 34:16
  Shahada Karim: I just want everybody to fall in love with themselves.
• 34:19
  Shahada Karim: I want people to look in the mirror and be happy.
• 34:22
  Shahada Karim: We've been conditioned to look in the mirror and scowl and immediately pick out flaws and immediately see the thing that we want to improve instead of looking in the mirror and being like, good morning.
• 34:34
  Shahada Karim: Hey, beautiful.
• 34:36
  Shahada Karim: Hey handsome.
• 34:37
  Shahada Karim: How you doing today?
• 34:38
  Shahada Karim: What?
• 34:38
  Shahada Karim: What are we doing today?
• 34:39
  Shahada Karim: What are we getting into?
• 34:40
  Shahada Karim: How do we feel?
• 34:41
  Shahada Karim: It's really important that I get people to understand that you're the only one you take to bed at night.
• 34:47
  Shahada Karim: You only got the one you.
• 34:49
  Shahada Karim: Look after you, and it doesn't have to be expensive or complicated for you to do that.
• 34:55
  Shahada Karim: So even the way that we offer bespoke programs are on a sliding scale.
• 35:01
  Shahada Karim: Maybe you don't want our premium package.
• 35:03
  Shahada Karim: Maybe you just want the basics because you figured out everything else.
• 35:06
  Shahada Karim: You're like, I already know doing all the things.
• 35:08
  Shahada Karim: I don't need this whole package from you.
• 35:09
  Shahada Karim: I just need this one little thing.
• 35:11
  Shahada Karim: Okay, well, this one little thing can be as low as$15 a month.
• 35:14
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, and make a huge difference in a life too.
• 35:18
  Shahada Karim: That's reasonable as opposed to 10K month for your full package, right?
• 35:23
  Shahada Karim: So we literally go from 15, to 10,000.
• 35:27
  Shahada Karim: Pick what works for you, and we got everything in between.
• 35:31
  Shahada Karim: And we've been able to digitize yay for, for digital marketing and, and for digital platforms.
• 35:37
  Shahada Karim: We've been able to digitize everything.
• 35:39
  Shahada Karim: So this takes a ton of pressure off of the human toll.
• 35:42
  Shahada Karim: This takes the human toll out of the equation where I'm not doing everything.
• 35:46
  Shahada Karim: Members of my team are not doing everything.
• 35:49
  Shahada Karim: We're not exhausted in sniping and trying to figure out how we're gonna manage these clients because we've built a computer program that will do it for us.
• 35:58
  Shahada Karim: And people pay into that.
• 36:00
  Shahada Karim: And they can give us feedback.
• 36:01
  Shahada Karim: It's fully interactive.
• 36:02
  Shahada Karim: It's very integrative.
• 36:04
  Shahada Karim: You know, use it if you want.
• 36:05
  Shahada Karim: You can cancel whenever you want.
• 36:07
  Shahada Karim: We learned how to scale without killing ourselves.
• 36:10
  Shahada Karim: And what was really important to me, um, without being told what to do, which is why we didn't take outside money.
• 36:18
  Shahada Karim: Because we didn't want to be pressured on the ROI.
• 36:21
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 36:22
  Tom Jackobs: Well, and that enables you to be more heart-led at the same time without the constraints.
• 36:27
  Shahada Karim: Really deal for us.
• 36:28
  Shahada Karim: We almost went the investor route um, actually is when I say like, you start learning that everything happens for a reason.
• 36:35
  Shahada Karim: We almost went the investor route at the end of 2018
• 36:39
  Tom Jackobs: Oh,
• 36:40
  Shahada Karim: and we did everything we, we initially pitched to, um, some venture capitalists and they told us that we did not have a plan that could dominate at least 87% of the market.
• 36:54
  Shahada Karim: So it was a no.
• 36:57
  Tom Jackobs: Okay.
• 36:57
  Shahada Karim: But because it, because this group was a heart-led group.
• 37:01
  Shahada Karim: It was, we sought them out on purpose.
• 37:03
  Shahada Karim: They were heart-led group.
• 37:04
  Shahada Karim: They gave us homework.
• 37:07
  Tom Jackobs: Oh.
• 37:07
  Shahada Karim: If you wanna be attractive to a VC, this is what you need to do, and this is what your pitch needs to look like.
• 37:15
  Shahada Karim: And if you'd like, we can walk you through it for a fee, of course.
• 37:19
  Shahada Karim: Or you can take these bullet points, you can take'em home for free and you can figure it out.
• 37:22
  Shahada Karim: And so all 2018, we busted our butts.
• 37:26
  Shahada Karim: We're gonna scale, we're gonna take this money, we're gonna do this investor thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 37:30
  Shahada Karim: We got all the way up to the end of 2018.
• 37:33
  Shahada Karim: We were highly excited.
• 37:34
  Shahada Karim: We were ready to pitch.
• 37:36
  Shahada Karim: Or 2019, excuse me, we were ready to pitch and then in 2020,
• 37:41
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah,
• 37:42
  Shahada Karim: the whole world shut down.
• 37:43
  Tom Jackobs: That's right.
• 37:44
  Tom Jackobs: No more fitness centers.
• 37:45
  Tom Jackobs: March
• 37:45
  Shahada Karim: 15th.
• 37:47
  Shahada Karim: I will never forget this.
• 37:49
  Tom Jackobs: Me neither.
• 37:49
  Shahada Karim: We have our last big event on March 15th and our event wrapped at 8:00 PM at 8:15.
• 37:56
  Shahada Karim: Literally 15 minutes later we were still cleaning up.
• 37:59
  Shahada Karim: The team was striking.
• 38:00
  Shahada Karim: I was kind of just walking around trying to make sure, you know, we did not leave the space terrible because we were not trying to pay the security deposit.
• 38:06
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 38:06
  Shahada Karim: And we got a text message from the mayor at the time saying, everybody go home.
• 38:12
  Shahada Karim: The city of Los Angeles is shutting down.
• 38:14
  Shahada Karim: And at first they told us two weeks, and after two weeks, they told us two months.
• 38:18
  Shahada Karim: And after two, months they said, we'll get back to you.
• 38:20
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 38:20
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 38:21
  Tom Jackobs: Oh yeah.
• 38:22
  Tom Jackobs: What a, what a crazy time that was.
• 38:24
  Shahada Karim: The blessing was that because we did all of this work in 2019 to scale digitally, we already had an infrastructure and we only did it to make ourselves attractive to the venture capitalist.
• 38:38
  Shahada Karim: We were just trying to get outside money and we were just gonna hire an operations manager and be like here, and we were gonna go sit on a beach somewhere and collect money and drink my ties.
• 38:47
  Shahada Karim: This was our plan.
• 38:49
  Shahada Karim: Our plan was to stop working and to hire a bunch of people work for us, and to sit back and let the ones and zeros, you know, let the algorithm, let the binary system do all the work for us.
• 39:01
  Shahada Karim: And we only did it to pitch.
• 39:03
  Shahada Karim: That was the only reason we went in that direction.
• 39:06
  Shahada Karim: Otherwise, I would still have been teaching in-person classes as a yoga teacher.
• 39:10
  Shahada Karim: So even, and remember, even when I was at CBS, I would leave CBS, take a shower, put on my clothes, go teach a yoga class.
• 39:16
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 39:17
  Shahada Karim: So was doing everything, everything.
• 39:19
  Shahada Karim: This is why, this is why I almost killed myself.
• 39:21
  Shahada Karim: I was doing everything.
• 39:21
  Shahada Karim: I almost ran myself like a hundred percent into the ground
• 39:24
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 39:25
  Shahada Karim: Because I was trying to do everything and I didn't trust anybody to help me.
• 39:28
  Shahada Karim: And the thing that I, I've learned the hard way in the hiring process is to ask really tough and sometimes probing questions about what people really want.
• 39:41
  Shahada Karim: Because I live in a city, um, Los Angeles is a very temporary city.
• 39:46
  Shahada Karim: Everyone is doing something until they get to do the thing that they want to do.
• 39:53
  Shahada Karim: And initially when I first started hiring, would be like, oh, I love your, I love your program.
• 39:59
  Shahada Karim: I love your brand, I love your idea.
• 40:01
  Shahada Karim: But then an audition would come up because you really were an actress.
• 40:05
  Shahada Karim: Or an interview would come up because they really were a singer, or they had this idea for a movie and they needed to take two months off to write a script.
• 40:13
  Shahada Karim: Or some celebrity came into the restaurant or they were waiting and they, and they needed to be able to pursue this celebrity because they wanted to pitch the script to them and they needed this person to be a producer.
• 40:22
  Shahada Karim: I had to learn to ask real questions.
• 40:26
  Shahada Karim: Is this your profession?
• 40:27
  Shahada Karim: Is this what you want to do?
• 40:28
  Shahada Karim: I'm disinterested and you hanging out with me for six months then being like, oh, well this thing came up and I can't be here anymore and, and literally leaving me hand dry.
• 40:38
  Shahada Karim: This is what I do.
• 40:39
  Shahada Karim: I need this also to be what you do.
• 40:42
  Shahada Karim: And if this is not what you do, that's okay.
• 40:45
  Shahada Karim: That's okay.
• 40:45
  Shahada Karim: That's great.
• 40:46
  Shahada Karim: I learned that with my assistants.
• 40:48
  Shahada Karim: I learned that with marketers.
• 40:50
  Shahada Karim: I learned that with social media managers.
• 40:52
  Shahada Karim: I learned that with formulators.
• 40:53
  Shahada Karim: I learned that everybody was like, oh, I'm gonna do this until my ship comes in and then I'm out.
• 41:00
  Shahada Karim: So that was, that was very, very hard lesson in the hiring process where I had to ask that question and I had to hold them to that.
• 41:09
  Shahada Karim: This is what we do.
• 41:10
  Shahada Karim: I also became a huge fan of contracts.
• 41:12
  Shahada Karim: Because contracts take emotion out of everything.
• 41:14
  Shahada Karim: What does the contract say?
• 41:16
  Shahada Karim: This is your expectation.
• 41:17
  Shahada Karim: This is my expectation.
• 41:18
  Shahada Karim: This is how we function harmoniously without either one of us feeling like we're not getting what we paid for.
• 41:27
  Tom Jackobs: Totally understood.
• 41:27
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 41:28
  Tom Jackobs: So I can't, I can't believe the time has just flown by so much here.
• 41:32
  Tom Jackobs: This is really incredible content and, and advice that you're sharing with the audience is really incredible.
• 41:38
  Tom Jackobs: But how can people learn more about your brands and you in particular, because I know that's what people wanna know, is you, how can they learn more about you?
• 41:49
  Shahada Karim: I've learned that the best way to communicate with people is open and honestly, so the best way to find me is just to Google my name.
• 41:58
  Shahada Karim: I don't hide behind everything.
• 42:01
  Shahada Karim: My social media is literally, my name is Shahada Karim.
• 42:05
  Shahada Karim: It's super easy to find me.
• 42:06
  Shahada Karim: You just stick those two words in Google and everything comes up.
• 42:11
  Shahada Karim: I
• 42:11
  Tom Jackobs: don't know.
• 42:11
  Tom Jackobs: And you'll be fine.
• 42:12
  Shahada Karim: there's really a combination of those two names.
• 42:15
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, right, exactly.
• 42:16
  Shahada Karim: In relation to Habibi, you can put in Shahada Karim Habibi.
• 42:19
  Shahada Karim: We have, um, ways to reach us on all of our websites.
• 42:24
  Shahada Karim: So Habibi Body is skincare.
• 42:27
  Shahada Karim: It's info@habibibody.com.
• 42:30
  Shahada Karim: Habibi Body Sport is fitness and nutrition.
• 42:33
  Shahada Karim: It's info@habibibodysport.com and habibi Life is the wellness umbrella that we all live under, and that's info@habibilife.com.
• 42:43
  Shahada Karim: You can find habibi, bath and body, Habibi Body Sport, and Habibi life on all major, uh, social media platforms.
• 42:51
  Shahada Karim: You can find me, I've, the other thing I've learned, and I will leave you with this, is to take the time to answer my own inquiries.
• 42:59
  Shahada Karim: I did not do that for years.
• 43:02
  Shahada Karim: And part of exposing myself was being like, I can talk to these people.
• 43:06
  Shahada Karim: And so I make sure, and I used to have, I used to have an assistant that would send the emails to our team and someone, we would always designate the one person with the nicest personality to answer the emails because that way we wouldn't piss anybody off.
• 43:19
  Shahada Karim: 'cause remember I wanted all the money'cause I thought all the customers were great.
• 43:23
  Tom Jackobs: Right.
• 43:23
  Shahada Karim: But now I will answer them and sign them myself.
• 43:28
  Shahada Karim: So if you get an email from me and you see my name, I wrote that email.
• 43:34
  Shahada Karim: If you get a DM from me and you see my name, I wrote that dm that used to be another person.
• 43:41
  Shahada Karim: And then when we would digital, we automated it and that did not work because people could tell they were talking to a computer.
• 43:48
  Tom Jackobs: Yep.
• 43:48
  Shahada Karim: So now it's me.
• 43:50
  Shahada Karim: That has become my job.
• 43:52
  Shahada Karim: I'm happy for it to be my job because I've given all the other jobs that I thought I needed to do.
• 43:57
  Shahada Karim: I've given those away and I've delegated.
• 43:59
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 43:59
  Shahada Karim: So I'm happy for people to be able to feel like they can talk to me, that I'm a human being and that sometimes I might say no, but I will always offer you a caveat.
• 44:12
  Shahada Karim: I will al always offer you an alternative, what I found is that.
• 44:18
  Shahada Karim: That trust that I was looking for, it grew exponentially when I started just being me in front of the camera.
• 44:27
  Shahada Karim: Good, bad or indifferent, good days, bad days.
• 44:31
  Shahada Karim: People
• 44:31
  Tom Jackobs: percent.
• 44:32
  Shahada Karim: this is a person and I can trust this person, and maybe this person, maybe I need to back up off of this person'cause it's a person.
• 44:38
  Shahada Karim: Or maybe I feel brave enough to ask this person a question because I, I too have a feeling and I would like to understand this feeling more.
• 44:45
  Shahada Karim: It's worked out tremendously for me to just step out in, into the sun connect myself and my heart with my business.
• 44:55
  Tom Jackobs: Love it.
• 44:56
  Tom Jackobs: That's awesome.
• 44:56
  Tom Jackobs: And thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, and I, I really appreciate you sharing your advice and your, your journey as well.
• 45:04
  Tom Jackobs: It's been quite the, quite the career, so thank you so much for, for coming on the show.
• 45:10
  Tom Jackobs: Of course.
• 45:11
  Tom Jackobs: And thank you show listeners for listening to the show today or viewing it on YouTube I really do appreciate it and make sure that you're checking everything out that Shahada is doing in the show notes.
• 45:22
  Tom Jackobs: So we're gonna put all those links down there, uh, for her different businesses so that you can connect directly with her.
• 45:30
  Tom Jackobs: And if you could do me a favor and share this show with another person that could use the advice shared on it.
• 45:36
  Tom Jackobs: Maybe somebody that has a heart-led business and wants to get it better, and, uh, use some of the advice that Shahada has, uh, provided today.
• 45:44
  Tom Jackobs: So thank you again and lead with your heart.
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to The Heart-Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs.
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.