Many people ask about my beginnings and expect a story about an early passion for trade or a small school project. The truth is different: I started my career as a specialist nurse at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, in the stem cell transplant unit. Today I lead four companies with more than 135 employees.
The distance between the two rooms looks long. In reality it is shorter than you think. The most important things I know about running companies I learned there, before I signed my first commercial contract.
Protocol saves lives — and systems save companies
In a stem cell transplant unit, nobody works by mood. Every step has a written protocol: the dose, the timing, the sterilisation, the documentation. Not because the nurse is incompetent, but because the system is designed to prevent error even on the worst day of the best nurse.
I carried that conviction into my companies unchanged: any repeated task needs a written procedure, not individual improvisation. A company that depends on the cleverness of its people in every situation will collapse the first day the clever ones are away. A company that depends on its system performs at a steady level no matter who comes and goes.
A small error multiplies
In healthcare, a small error does not stay small. A dose delayed by an hour, an observation left undocumented, incomplete sterilisation — each starts small and ends large. That is why clinical work is built on one rule: fix the error at its source, immediately, however trivial it looks.
In companies, the rule is the same. An unaudited invoice, a customer complaint with no reply, a repeated delay that passes without accountability — these are not details. These are beginnings. The only difference is that a company does not die in a single day like a patient; it dies slowly, while everyone assumes it is fine.
The customer comes to you in their hardest moment
A stem cell transplant patient and their family are living through the hardest period of their lives. I learned there that clear communication is not a courtesy but part of the treatment: what will happen, when, and what we expect. Ambiguity doubles fear; clarity builds trust even when the news is hard.
The customer buying on instalments, handing a project to a marketing agency, or waiting for a car goes through a lighter version of the same feeling: anxiety, anticipation, and a need for someone to tell them the truth. Companies that master expectation management earn lasting customers. Companies that master promises earn a single transaction.
Deciding under pressure with incomplete information
In the hospital you do not always have the luxury of complete information. You act on the best you have, then adjust with every new piece of information. Waiting for certainty can itself be the fatal error.
That is exactly what business requires. Most executive decisions are made with incomplete information, and the founder who waits for the full picture always decides too late. A good decision today beats a perfect decision a month from now — a principle I still work by, and its roots are there.
What does this mean for you?
You do not have to go through nursing to benefit from its lessons. What I carry from both rooms: build a system that does not rely on individual heroics, fix the small error before it grows, be clear with your customer in their hardest moment, and do not postpone a decision whose answer you already know.
An unconventional background is not a flaw in an entrepreneur's profile. Sometimes it is the one advantage nobody can copy.