I am Nadeem Barakat. I stopped loving products, which led to loving numbers

Nadeem Barakat’s story starts without the usual founder mythology. When asked how he got into sales, he traces it back to a practical decision at university. As a Business Administration student at the German University in Cairo, he wanted a part-time job and took what was available: retail sales.

That role did more than pay the bills. It exposed him to the mechanics of persuasion, service, and trust in their simplest form, one customer at a time. Over time he moved through different sales environments, from retail to commission-based corporate work, and noticed two signals that mattered: he was good at communicating, and customers were happy with the experience. That feedback loop is what turned sales from “a job” into “a path”.

When the conversation turns to his next steps, Barakat gives a clear timeline rather than a redemption story. In 2014, at 24, he launched a marketing agency. It failed. The reason, he says, was lack of experience. Instead of romanticising the risk, he treated it as tuition and returned to employment to build competence.

He joined a company supplying food to corporates and factories across Egypt and Saudi Arabia, working on product development and market entry. He studied hard on the job, delivered results, and built a reputation in the sector. Offers followed, but he wanted a change, which led him into early-stage building with Homzmart in Egypt as part of a small founding team. From there he moved through logistics and into healthcare with Chefaa, where he says he rediscovered his core obsession: sales, numbers, and profitability.

Asked how Chefaa built trust in a competitive online pharma market, Barakat does not talk about branding or discounts. He goes straight to transparency.

Chefaa, he argues, clearly understands what it can and cannot do, and that clarity is what creates long-term trust with users and partners. It is a simple stance, but rare in fast-growing markets where companies often promise speed and coverage they cannot consistently deliver. For him, trust is not built by overpromising, it is built by being precise.

When asked how he manages multiple growth pillars as Regional Business Director, Barakat describes the work as a constant alignment exercise. Each year, Chefaa sets a strategy, and his job is to make sure expansion, partnerships, and commercial execution serve that strategy rather than compete with it.

He is explicit that balance does not mean equal attention. Priorities shift with the company stage, and some pillars take precedence at different moments. The other lever is people. Strong local teams in each market are not a nice-to-have, they are the only way to scale without breaking. His sharpest line here is also the most revealing: your success is measured by whether you can build teams that are even better than you.

Pressed on what he sees while mentoring at AUC Venture Lab and Flat6Labs, Barakat names a mistake that sounds harsh because it is true. Founders fall in love with the product instead of the numbers.

His worldview is almost mathematical. Vision matters, but numbers are the only truth. The practical advice is to keep the vision, then build a short-term plan made of small, calculated steps. He distrusts big leaps. Progress, in his model, is compounding, not dramatic.

When asked about the most common mistakes in sales and business development, Barakat flips the usual obsession with closing. The biggest sales mistake, he says, is fixating on closing deals when the real failure happened earlier: targeting the wrong customer.

Start with the wrong client and everything downstream collapses, no matter how good the pitch is. In business development, he sees a different kind of impatience, trying to achieve everything at once, profit, growth, brand, without deciding what matters most at the current stage. He also cautions against lazy benchmarking. Comparing yourself to Amazon or Apple is useless. The only relevant comparisons are realistic competitors in your own market.

When the conversation turns to Saudi Arabia, Barakat is blunt about the trap. The biggest mistake is copying what worked in Egypt and expecting it to work unchanged in Saudi.

The markets are different. Customers are different. Competition is different. He gives a concrete example: a delivery speed that feels acceptable in Egypt may feel slow in Saudi Arabia. The remedy is localisation, but not the superficial kind. You have to “live the market”, talk to customers, meet competitors, and understand how behaviour varies across regions in a large, diverse country. For him, expansion is not replication, it is re-learning.

Asked how he keeps training practical, Barakat describes a simple method: theory must be tied to application, and application must be grounded in examples people recognise.

Because he has worked across sectors, food supply, e-commerce, logistics, healthcare, he can translate the same business principle into multiple contexts, which makes learning stick. It is also how he avoids the hollow motivational style that ruins many training programmes. He is not teaching inspiration, he is teaching decisions.

Pressed on whether AI will reshape sales training, Barakat does not hesitate. Yes, and the impact will be structural. AI enables precise performance tracking, personalised learning, and real-time feedback. The era of “one course fits all” training is ending.

He is already testing that idea through a project with Tick & Talk, where AI simulates realistic sales situations, like handling an angry client, then evaluates performance and suggests improvements. The pitch is not that AI makes training easy. It makes it faster to acquire judgement, compressing years of experience into structured practice.

When asked about podcasts in the Arab world, Barakat offers a balanced view. Awareness is rising, but Arabic content remains limited compared to English. More importantly, he resists the exaggeration. A podcast will not change your life in one episode, but it can spark ideas that lead to lasting change.

That belief sits behind his own podcast, Maharat, which he launched after noticing that success is not only technical. Leadership and emotional intelligence shape outcomes just as much. The guests he cites, and the quotes that stayed with him, reflect that focus: organise your thoughts before you speak, and maintain relationships if you want to progress.

When asked what he wishes he had known in his first year, Barakat gives an answer that sounds like it was earned. Great ideas are many, but the right ideas are few. An untested, poorly researched idea has no real value.

That same logic explains his current goal: Business for Teens, an educational project teaching teenagers trade basics, budgeting, and business thinking. He has already trained over 300 students aged 10 to 15, ending with a showcase where they present real products. His ambition is to turn it into a full academy for young entrepreneurs across the Arab world.

The through-line in Barakat’s work is consistent. Sell smarter means target better. Scale faster means localise properly. Lead stronger means build people who can outgrow you. And if you want something sustainable, start with the numbers, then earn the rest.