Dubai, United Arab Emirates
My daily, quarterly, yearly job --- Isn't to chase quarters - It's to build the engine that makes quarters happen. to write playbooks - It's to develop leaders who rewrite them better than I did. to find a great Sales People - It's to find someone hungry, show them how to win, help them become rich, and watch them outgrow me. to be the smartest person in the room - It's to hire the smartest people and back them. to drive the engine - It's to build it, hire the drivers, and get out of the car. to be in every deal - It's to build country leaders who close deals I'll never see. to deliver one good year - It's to build the discipline that delivers good years. to manage forecasts - It's to build the conviction underneath them - in leaders who defend their numbers with reasoning, not just data. to talk strategy - It's to translate strategy into the operating cadence that makes it real. to take credit when it works - It's to take the heat when it doesn't. 26 Years Learnings: - Good salespeople become great when they have a real playbook and a leader who believes in them. - Businesses scale through strategy - But meaningful journeys scale through people. - Stop pretending you know - Find people who do - Build the system around them. - The leaders you hire today are the executives someone else will hire tomorrow. - Quarters are won in the cadence between them (The reviews. The pipeline calls. The one-on-ones) - Hungry beats polished. Always. - I'm in the business of making other people successful. Turns out the business gets successful too. - The first 100 deals you lose teach you more than the next 100 you win - The next 1,000 just confirm what the first 100 taught you. - The salespeople who hit quota every year are usually the ones who left the QBR early to make a customer calls. - The fastest way to ruin a great sales people is to promote them too early - The second-fastest is to promote them too late. - If your operating cadence requires a PPT deck longer than the meeting, you don't have an operating cadence - You have a hostage situation - You can't motivate someone who isn't motivated - You can only get out of the way of someone who is. - Channel partners aren't your sales team - They're someone else sales team that you've rented for the quarter. - Pipeline isn't a number - It's a story your sellers are telling themselves about the future - The numbers are just the headlines. 26 Years - 8 Chapters || 1- The leaders i built. 2- The standards i raised. 3- The culture i created.
Chapter 8 || Scaling Across Borders the mission was completely different - I was being asked to scale an entire region. The mandate was ambitious: Take META Region generating roughly $15M ARR and transform it into a globally competitive growth engine. The challenge was no longer only about customers and pipeline - It was about organizational design. Talent density - Leadership layers - Regional operating rhythm - New-logo acquisition - Expansion strategy - Partner ecosystems. And building execution models that could scale across completely different markets and cultures. One of the biggest changes we made was moving away from a heavily centralized approach. Instead of trying to run the region from one hub, we invested in strong local leadership inside the markets that mattered most. We rebuilt the partner ecosystem. We designed dedicated new logo and expansion playbooks. Expanded deeper into Africa, Türkiye, and emerging growth markets. The organization grew from around 20 people to more than 60. The business scaled from roughly $15M ARR to more than $70M ARR. The region became one of the top-performing organizations globally in security growth, new-logo acquisition, and overall regional execution. And then came another signal of trust. In 2025, the company expanded my responsibility into Europe, adding France to my leadership scope as part of the next phase of growth. What this chapter taught me was this: Building a business and scaling a business look similar from the outside. But internally, they are completely different jobs. One requires conviction. The other requires systems. Which probably says a lot about the next chapter I am about to write :)
Driving Growth in Middle East - Africa & Türkiye
Chapter 8 Started
Chapter 7 || Leading Regional Transformation After years of building business from the ground up as an IC, I reached a point where the challenge was no longer just closing deals - it became building organizations that could scale beyond me. I moved from carrying a territory to leading a region. From driving personal revenue to owning organizational performance. From managing accounts to designing Org Charts and regional growth strategies. We grew the business from roughly $2M in annual revenue to more than $12M - And scaled the regional organization from 3 people to 18 serving customers across multiple countries. This was also the period where I went deeper into carrier-grade infrastructure, telecom operators, and mobile service providers - environments with larger contracts, longer cycles, and operational expectations at an entirely different scale. Selling into operators taught me something important: Enterprise urgency and operator urgency are not the same thing. Carrier environments demand patience, precision, technical credibility, and the ability to navigate organizations where downtime is measured in financial and national impact. What this chapter taught me was this: Leading a region is not a bigger version of leading a country. It is a completely different discipline. Because regional leadership is no longer about being the best seller in the room. It is about building leaders, systems, culture, and execution models that continue performing even when you are not in the room.
Chapter 6 || Building a Business from Zero I joined Infoblox as the company first hire focused on building the business across Saudi Arabia. At the time, there was almost nothing. No customers - No pipeline - No partners - No brand recognition - No market momentum. Just a technology the market did not yet understand and a belief that eventually it would have to. We were walking into enterprise accounts trying to explain why core network services like DNS, DHCP could no longer remain manual, unsecured, and treated as “free infrastructure.” So the first battle was not revenue - It was credibility - It was education. For nearly a year, it was nonstop meetings, workshops, events, whiteboarding sessions, and partner recruitment with almost no visible commercial return. And eventually, the market shifted. Organizations started realizing that automation, visibility, resilience, and DNS security were no longer optional as networks became larger, more distributed, and more critical to business operations. The same market that once ignored us started reaching back out - Partners who initially rejected the business were now competing to partner with us. Customers who saw the platform as “nice to have” suddenly viewed it as operationally critical. From zero, we built the business into more than 50 large enterprise and government customers across Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. What started as a blank page evolved into a multi-million-dollar regional business generating more than $7M in annual revenue with a significant enterprise pipeline and strategic presence across the Gulf. That journey eventually led to multiple President Club achievements and the opportunity to lead and scale business growth with lean, high-performing teams. What this chapter taught me was this: The hardest thing in business is not scaling momentum - It is creating momentum where none exists. Because once a market believes in you, growth becomes possible.
Chapter 5 || Joining the Global Stage After more than a decade working with local operators, resellers, distributors - I found myself joining one of the largest multinational technology companies in the world This was my first true global enterprise. The company had been shaping enterprise computing long before I entered the industry - I joined to help sell enterprise storage, networking, and security solutions into large enterprise and government accounts - but this time from the vendor side of the table. That experience became an advantage. For the first time, I could see how a global organization operates at scale - How forecasts roll up across regions and business units - How multinational vendors align direct sales, channels, operations, and regional leadership into one go-to-market motion without the seams showing. Every regional organization I have led since then has been built on systems first - not stars.
Chapter 4 || Inside the Channel I moved into the reseller and distribution world, working with global technology vendors like Oracle, NetAPP & Symantic - companies with strong technology and presence but they need to accelerate the business. Their challenge was not only selling products - It was understanding how to enter the market, build trust, navigate relationships, and reach enterprise and government customers at scale. That is where distributors and resellers became critical. I worked closely on growing vendor business across the Saudi market, helping bridge multinational technology companies into local enterprise ecosystems through channel partnerships, market development, and customer engagement. Because the region itself runs on relationships, influence, execution capability, and local trust. These years taught me: how distributors and resellers actually operate - What partners need from vendors beyond just discounts and products - How enterprise decisions are made when multiple stakeholders, governments, procurement teams, and competing interests are involved.