‘Nothing is easy, the hard way is the right way’

Mo Fadlallah talks to The

National about his start-up Baby Arabia and his business outlook:

What is the secret to a startup’s survival?

It is about carefully managing resources because a lot of people spend their money quickly without looking ahead. Because of my experience,

I was able to gauge market conditions last year and this year and say ‘OK, advertising is not doing great.’ So rather than keep spending, spending, spending, it’s about carefully managing your resources. If you can survive the first three to four years of a business you will increase your chances significantly in order to grow.

What have you learnt since starting your business? Although I’ve aways been an entrepreneur and had other smaller businesses I’ve started up in the UK, such as a small production company, it’s always been my money invested. This is the first time I’ve taken on the responsibility of other people’s money. After living through the online boom and bust of the late 1990s and seeing how some businesses succeeded and others failed, it proved to me that it’s not about how much you raise (because some raised millions of dollars, creating a lot of hype but then disappeared), it’s about allowing a business to breathe and to naturally grow and evolve, especially if you can see the long-term vision. Therefore, I’ve learnt that nothing comes easy in life – the hard way is the right way.

What would you change if you had your time again? Because I’ve taken my time I don’t think I would change anything. Sometimes having too much money is an evil because it puts pressure on the business to spend that money in order to deliver results. For us it’s not about how fast we can build, because then it’s a case of then what, and if you build it too quickly, the house will fall down.

How involved are your shareholders?

They are not hands-on because there is a trust issue there. I inform them on a quarterly basis of what we are doing. All of them bought into the vision from day one whereas other investors and VCs completely missed the vision of what I was trying to build.

Why was that?

They’d say ‘no, there are other websites out there’. They did not see I was building a brand, an ecosystem, an environment for parents to come to and it can touch all these key points in terms of retail, education and more – they could not see that.

Did you time the launch of your business right?

Our timing was spot on but anyone trying to get into the e-commerce space now is pushing it.