LIBRO Journey: 2.5 amazing years full of ups &?downs!?

My journey at LIBRO, the social enterprise, unfortunately, is coming to an end

On the first day of 2020, I wanted to share with you the lessons learned of my journey at LIBRO.

LIBRO is 2.5 years old, I started it after 6 years of a very fruitful technical consultancy experience in one of the top Fintech companies worldwide.

Before I quit my old company, I was a volunteer with more than 6 organizations working on women & youth issues in Lebanon.

I realized during my volunteering work that a big part of those issues faced by youth & women in our society is due to their lack of economic & moral empowerment.

Our society is advancing in diversity & inclusion but yet we still have a long road to pass.

Youth were and still suffering from elite capture, or known as “wasta”. It is when young graduates seek mainly their parents’ relatives or friends to push their applications in public & private sectors even if they were not the best fit for the position. This led of course during the last decades to a big decrease in productivity of the private sector and almost a complete paralysis of the public sector.

As for women, their main job, as perceived by the majority of the society, is to take care of the family & housework, and try to find part-time job to support her husband financially when needed.

This is starting to change but yet rare women, especially moms, believe that they can be successful in both professional & personal life with the needed partner support & advanced corporate cultures.

This led me to start LIBRO, a journey of social entrepreneurship, that I thought it is much easier, especially in a hyper challenging country like Lebanon where transparent & rebellious people face multiplied challenges to survive and thrive.

I am summarizing my path now, since unfortunately after the biggest economic crisis in Lebanon history, SMEs found it hard to survive. I did not shut down LIBRO, but it is temporary freezed.

Are you wondering what I am doing now? I am handling two projects, one as a technical project manager on one of the biggest LMS projects in the MENAT region, and one as director of programs at a technical academy that aims to empower youth with tech backgrounds to find great opportunities while remaining in Lebanon.

Of course, while spending all, and by all I mean each evening and weekend, working on initiatives that would support our community to phoenix itself after this hard period we are passing through.

At the end of the day, if we are not part of the solution then we are being part of the problem.

I will jump now into my summary of my top 5 lessons learned “LL”, hope it will be beneficial for every fresh entrepreneur. This section will be followed with what was done well too, we should always celebrate our achievement & learn from our mistakes to keep growing in our career ??

What are my top 5 Lessons Learned from June 2017 till December 2019?

• LL 1: I started the company without partners, well I added my family on papers with me to be able to register the company, but actually started this journey on my own. Now I realize that having a team at least of 3 co-founders with diverse backgrounds is very much needed. The amount of work when we kick off the company is huge, and we need professional & moral support from a strong team to pass the first stage more smoothly and quickly.
• LL 2: I was stubborn in accepting any investment in my company. I invested from my own savings. I was so focused and driven by impact that I did not want investors [especially that they wanted majority of seats on the board] to control the company’s vision. Actually now I realize that I needed this business layer, and instead of fearing control of decision making, I could have learned how to do better compromises that could sustain both; desired impact & company’s growth.
• LL 3: I have been a blogger & activist since 5 years now, and I have collectively more than 60k followers on social media. When I started LIBRO, I decided to play the role of its image to maximize our organic reach. That brought me a lot of business at the start. It became exhausting though after a certain period. People started contacting me instead of being redirected to the company’s website. I ended up being the marketing material, customer service, CEO & product manager of the company, will let you imagine the load! We had 42 amazing experts at the company, but people would request specifically to have their mentorship sessions with me, even if I am not the expert in the relevant field. They trusted my genuinety and it was amazing, but not sustainable to scale with the company.
• LL 4: I decided to do regular free events for LIBRO, as a way to support the community through the platform. People with time got confused if LIBRO is an NGO or a social enterprise and we had to put too much efforts to clarify this point to everyone. Being driven by impact is great, but a business-impact balance is needed so it wont backfire on the company.
• LL 5: LIBRO was focused on career coaching, to help juniors & seniors determine their next professional step & upskilling path, based on market shift in the era of 4th industrial revolution. The concept of career coaching is completely new in Lebanon and in the MENA region in general. I created a YouTube channel to start by main common steps which are professional branding. People thought that all the company does is creating CV & LinkedIn profiles for people. Nonetheless, that was the very shallow service. The core service was actually providing people with the right orientation from experts in more than 20 fields to help them determine their next steps.

You may think that it is lack of planning from the marketing perspective. Of course, the marketing team went on a learning journey; nonetheless opening a social enterprise in a completely unfamiliar topic to the society might be very challenging. Spreading awareness could take a very long time before switching to the next level.

Now, let’s go the what went well “WWW” section. Below is a summary of our top 5 achievements in the last 2.5 years.

What are my top “what went well” from June 2017 till December 2019?

• WWW1: I did not compromise the private sessions’ price. The average cost of 1-hour session was around 100$, which crosses the average range in Lebanon and many countries in the MENA region. Nonetheless, I took a decision not to compromise the private sessions price because I was hyper-confident from the quality of service we are providing. Yes, we did more than 20 free events covering more than 2000 youth for free, but that would be part of our corporate social responsibility activities. One on One sessions prices were never compromised even in the hardest period. This combination of free events/workshops + normal session prices contributed to having more customer loyalty. Many of my customers were organically forwarding our company’s website link to their friends & partners to benefit from our services.
• WWW2: Since day 1, especially that I decided to sponsor myself, I drafted a smart financial model that would minimize my monthly operational cost. We were 6 in the team full time. The 42 experts were contractual on project basis. I took one office in the heart of the ecosystem for exposure but employees desks were hosted at a friend’s office, who gave us the space for free for agreed-on exchanged services. This made me survive 1 year more than most of same size companies in Lebanon during the economic crisis.
• WWW3: Perhaps I did not start with partners or co-founders, but I have built a strong support network around me that would always jump in and help for believing in our cause and what we do, and the impact we brought to our society.
• WWW4: Creating plenty of community partnerships is definitely something we did well. That helped in maximizing the impact of our free events, and have organic reach for potential customers.
• WWW5: Early 2019, we expanded to the MENA region, and we served more 100 clients in the first 6 months of the year. You might be wondering how even though this expansion, we failed in sustaining ourselves. Well our services were provided remotely via video live sessions. During October, we had a huge issue in the banking sector in Lebanon so all money transfers operations were completely blocked especially in USD. That made many clients bounce, and many did not pay us back although we provided the sessions.

What could be next?

I have mixed feelings at this cross-roads, especially that LIBRO became with time part of my identity. It is hard to freeze its operations. The great moments with my amazing team to whom I am hyper thankful will be definitely missed.

I did not take my final decision yet, but I believe I will turn it into an NGO, leverage all what I have learned along those years, and try to provide as many free session to people around Lebanon as I can.

Sustaining & growing a company is, of course, satisfactory, but nothing competes with hundreds of messages from people telling us we helped them find jobs and succeed in their careers.

I would never want to compromise this impact, so the next steps will be finding the right crew to lead together potentially this NGO while trying on a personal level to give my best in the two projects I am handling for the next two quarters.

Lebanon needs us, and we need Lebanon. Grief will not help, acting and persevering will do!

Happy new year everyone, wish you all the success & prosperity in this year. Best of luck in 2020! And don’t forget, we can create our own luck!

The best way to create our future is to create it ??