Speaker: 0:01

Welcome to The Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let your heart guide your business journey.

Tom Jackobs: 0:36

Welcome back to another episode of the heart-led Business show. Peeking around the podcast porch, we have the pioneering powerhouse Shahada Karim. She left her lofty legacy at CBS television and lept into the labyrinth of wellness. She's been flexing her fitness finesse with her Habibi brand, all whilst casting love spells on every human's heart with her heart-led hustle. So get ready to dive deep into the divine details on this heart-led business show. And trust me, it's going to be a rocking rollercoaster with our homegrown health heroine. Shahada, welcome to the show.

Shahada Karim: 1:12

Thank you so much for having me.

Tom Jackobs: 1:14

Well, thanks for, thanks for being here and putting up with all the technical issues that we've been having here up to now. But this is gonna be a great show because I'm, I'm really interested to dive into your story, especially how you were able to transition away from a 22 year career in television and into your own brand, especially in the health and wellness industry, which is not that easy to do.

Shahada Karim: 1:38

Right.

Tom Jackobs: 1:39

But first I always like to ask, what's your definition of a heart-led business?

Shahada Karim: 1:45

My definition comes from learning the hard way that if you're gonna lead with your heart, then you have to step out in front of the camera. You have to actually lead visually. People have to see you. They have to hear from you. They should be able to communicate with you. Maybe not in a business sense, as in I have this question about your product or whatever, but at least on social media, at least in the occasional email, it's been a journey for me to learn the difference between informing people and helping people at the same time,'cause those two things are not mutually exclusive. Right. And I come from an information place. I come from a place where I inform and educate. This is my job as a journalist, but journalists also have a wall between themselves and their public.

Tom Jackobs: 2:40

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 2:41

We are never part of the story. We are behind the story. It's a recent phenomenon to get to know the journalists, to get to know the producers and the writers, and the anchors and the reporters. That's new. When I started as a journalist, nobody knew who I was and I was okay with that. That's how I learned, right? I was trained like that. I went to school like that. Our job was to tell the story, not be the story. So when I decided, when I made that pivot from just trying to run a company and expecting everyone to naturally trust me because of education, when I had to make the pivot into, oh no, trust me, because I've walked this walk, I understand this journey and we are more alike than we are different. That's when my business shifted from just being a company, just being a wellness company, just being a skincare company and, and understand that I started in skincare first and wellness came later. Also not mutually exclusive.

Tom Jackobs: 3:40

Right.

Shahada Karim: 3:41

Um, I learned that when I started telling my stories, when I started being honest about my struggles. I attracted a different kind of customer and scaled a lot easier and a lot faster than when I was just trying to be behind the, behind the camera, behind the story, and you didn't really need to know me. You just had the trust that the product was effective. And if you could just deal with the fact that the product was effective, then we could be friends, right? We could be business friends, but I've learned over time. That's not really what consumers were want. We've built a parasocial dynamic into business and it really became evident during the pandemic. And now a customer is disinterested especially in the wellness space, in doing real business with you and being loyal and a repeat customer if they don't know who you are.

Tom Jackobs: 4:38

Exactly. It's, you know, I've seen this over and over again with, with businesses, especially non-heart-led businesses that try to create this wall between the customer and the, and the business. It just doesn't make sense because we're all humans. It might be, even if you do B2B sales and B2B business, you're still working with a person.

Shahada Karim: 5:01

Yes. And

Tom Jackobs: 5:02

if, we do business with people who have feelings and hearts and everything, and, and it's just, it always boggled my mind why there had to be this separation and you had to be different when you came into work than you were outside of work. And just, it just, like I said, it boggled my mind. So how did, how, oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 5:23

From a business perspective, it makes sense if you think like I used to, which is can I get sued for this? Very protective. I was very, very protective of my personal self. Very protective, extremely protective of my image. I still am, but also protective of my connection to the company. I started a business with the idea that people would just trust me because it was a good idea, not because, not that they would trust me because it was me. Right. Yeah. So I started with this great idea and I was like this is a good product. Use this product. If you like this product, yay. If you don't like this product, that's fine too. And I still kind of have that attitude, but there's more of me in the selling. Initially I was very shy about being, being that kind of person because I didn't need anybody to know my name. I didn't think that that was necessary. I didn't start push putting up pictures on social media. Until well after Facebook started. I mean, I'm, I'm an analog person. I used to rip scripts. We had beta tapes. This digital, completely different phenomenon. I started in 1996. We were not exposed the way that we're exposed. And because of that, I never had practice dealing with strangers. I always hid behind my words. I hid behind my video. I hid behind my production and my expertise. There was no need for you to get to know me. All you needed to know was what I could do. And because I was in that space, when I started talking about skincare, people were like, um, yes, this, these ingredients look amazing. This packaging is questionable. The inside is great, but also I don't know you. And my feeling was like, why do you have to know me? So that was a, a little bit of a push and pull. I would say, honestly, in the first decade, in the first 10 years, there was that push and pull between customers that I knew who I knew personally who would refer me. So I would end up getting customers and I would do things like, um, sponsor, community events and book clubs and stuff and, and gain customers that way. So I was, it was very grassroots and it was very much, if you knew me, then you would refer me. I had a good reputation on people who knew me. I did not have any reputation again, uh, around people who didn't know me. So therefore, I did not scale. Because strangers were not like, oh, this looks interesting. Let's try this. They didn't know who I was. I wasn't in front of the camera. I didn't take pictures. I didn't put anything of myself into the world in connection with Habibi. Habibi was just a thing that was separate from me.

Tom Jackobs: 8:05

Yeah. So I just wanna go, go back just a little bit. How was that transition from corporate television and just, you know, corporate in general into owning your own business? What was that transition like for you?

Shahada Karim: 8:21

Part of it was very personal. So the, the big secret about me, um, that's not a secret anymore'cause I'm very public about it, is that I was raised and trained even as a journalist to gate keep.

Tom Jackobs: 8:37

Hmm.

Shahada Karim: 8:38

So on the very personal side, I was raised to gatekeep because of my indigenous roots. So indigenous people, you don't know at this point, are not very trusting and we don't tell people that we're not very trusting. But it is very clear in your family and in your community that the last time we shared something our land got taken from us and that is passed down. That very natural caution that standing away from things is passed down through generations. It's been passed down through my great-great-great-great, great grandparents all the way down to me. It's not something that's, it's not necessarily a hostile thing or a negative thing. It's just a thing that you know,

Tom Jackobs: 9:22

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 9:22

You don't share your secrets. You live your life, how you live your life. You keep your head down and you do good work. This is the ethic of coming from these people and coming from this place. So that was on the personal side. So being a journalist was perfect for me. Perfect professional choice because you don't have to know about me, I just have to report the facts. I don't have to embellish, I don't have to add my own personal spin on it. This is not counting what passes for journalism today. I'm a Cronkite girl, okay? I came up with Cronkite Jennings Broka rather. Those are my people. So you saw the facts, you laid them out as simply as possible, and you reported the facts, period. Your opinion, your personal feelings, your politics do not factor what happened. Is it red? Is it blue? Is it white? All you did was report facts. So this is perfect for me, right? Because I'm a gatekeeper anyway. So the other thing you should know about my people and my mother's people is that they are earth people. They are herbalists. They are healers. They believe in tinctures. The first time I got stung by a bee, I was five years old. My mom mixed some herbs. She poured it in the earth. She made a mud pack, put it on my arm, drew the stinger out, grabbed some tweezers, pulled out the stinger, rinsed my arm off, put a salve on it, and sent me back outside to play. It took her 10 minutes. I was raised like that. That kind of medicine earth medicine is second nature. It comes very easily to me. It's not even something that I question. It's always been a thing, but nobody ever knew. Nobody ever knew because I never told anybody because why, why am I sharing my secrets? My mother said, don't share your secrets. Right? And that can become a huge part of your brand, especially around the skincare. Clearly, hundred percent.

Tom Jackobs: 11:20

You know, herbs and everything that you need.

Shahada Karim: 11:25

I am my first customer. I was my first customer years ago, and it's kind of funny and cliche because the, the normal story, especially in skincare, it's like, oh, I had these problems and I couldn't find anything that worked on the market, and so I made this myself, but that actually happened to me. That actually happened. That's not a story. It wasn't that I couldn't find anything that worked for me, it was that skincare on the market was too complicated for my skin. My skin was highly reactive and highly adaptive. So if you use, if I use something that was super active, it worked for like two days and then would stop working because my skin adapts really, really fast. And what I found out, and I've told this skincare story before, um, what I found out is that less is more. So I scaled all the way down. My very first product was four ingredients.

Tom Jackobs: 12:15

Oh wow. It was easy

Shahada Karim: 12:16

to imitate, it was easy to copy. This is before I learned how to run a business, right? Everything that I did, like a 5-year-old, could do it, but it worked. And once I realized that it worked and it was consistent, and I didn't need all these soup or fancy things. Because this is how we sell skincare. We sell skincare as in this is the super rare flower you can't get anywhere else. This is this seaweed that only blooms at midnight on the 10th day of June. This is how we sell skincare, right? Because this is how we justify the price markup. And we did this for decades before Des EM came along this, this, the skincare company that interrupted everything and was like, everybody's overcharging you. You don't have to pay these prices for these ingredients. Here's the same thing you've been paying$50 for we have it for 11.

Tom Jackobs: 13:01

Wow.

Shahada Karim: 13:02

That happened and when that founder revolutionized skincare, it forced a lot of people to tell the truth.

Tom Jackobs: 13:08

Wow.

Shahada Karim: 13:08

Which was great'cause I was already there.

Tom Jackobs: 13:10

Yeah. Yeah. So, so tell me how, how did, how did you get over then the, the gatekeeping and start telling your personal story, uh, to people so that they could understand you and the drivers behind you and your business?

Shahada Karim: 13:24

While I was still a journalist, while I still worked at CBS and, and the interesting thing about this story is that I'll also tell you the legal side of it, but the personal side of it was while I still worked at CBS, um, in 2003, I started Habibi Bath and Body, which was my very first company. And back then I worked at the station that we ended up merging with. So I worked at Kcal, and Kcal was it was a non-union spot. There wasn't that much corporate involvement. Right. So, and everybody knew everybody. We were all super personal in that newsroom. So I went to my boss and I was like, Hey, you wanna start a skincare company? And he's like, I don't care. Which is what you need to say that when you're employed somewhere, you need to make sure there's no conflict. And he was like, I don't care. Get out. Why are you bothering me about lotion? I don't care. We merged with CBS. CBS is highly corporate and we ended up with employee handbooks and rules and disclosure and regulations. And suddenly everything that we had been playing at with the,'cause, everybody I knew was doing a little something. We live in Los Angeles, this is like the land of the entrepreneurs.

Tom Jackobs: 14:33

Yeah. Right.

Shahada Karim: 14:33

So we all had to disclose. Meeting with legal. We had to talk to hr, we had to sign paperwork, and we had to make sure that there was no entity under the CBS or the Paramount umbrella that would conflict with what we were doing because at the time that I had to disclose and BRATS were going through a major lawsuit because the creator of BRATS worked for Mattel and created a product that Mattel said they owned because that person was employed by them at the time of creation. So CBS pulled out all of its legal knowledge and was like, if any of you are doing anything that even looks like conflict, you are required by law to disclose. And the great thing was neither CBS nor Paramount was interested in skincare and they were like, we don't care. Get out. Right. But it was a little scary for me because it was the first time I was being asked. a potential business owner to be accountable for the business that I owned, because I kept my job. I didn't jump up and be like, you know, I don't care, and throw up a peace sign or run out the door and go start my business. I knew better than that,

Tom Jackobs: 15:51

Good.

Shahada Karim: 15:52

I stayed employed until 2017. I started my first company in two, 2003, and I held a job until 2017. Wow. And then in 2018, grew and started Habibi Sport. But Habibi, bath and Body was the beginning and it existed alongside my going in, clocking in, doing the news every day it existed and that's how I funded my business. I didn't take outside money. I stacked money. I had a extremely good relationship. So I'm I, I cheated a little bit. I had a really, really, really good relationship with the finance manager at CBS and she started teaching me about money. And about personal money and business money, and not confusing the two.

Tom Jackobs: 16:44

Mm-hmm.

Shahada Karim: 16:45

And not allowing one thing to affect the other. That even if there was money in the business account and there was no money in my account, then I was broke and I have live with that. She taught me how to grow slow. I'm happy with growing slow. I know people who really pushed me to grow fast and people who grew fast and, and yay for them, right? But I was not comfortable with that. I wanted to grow slow because I was more interested in longevity than I was in making money. Lots of it, especially out the gate. Yeah. The thing that I learned was that if you burn hot and you burn bright without having any idea about what it means to sustain a business, then you can burn out. And I didn't want that to happen.

Tom Jackobs: 17:34

Did you ever come close to burning out? Because I'm, I'm sure like working a full-time job and then building a business for 14 years.

Shahada Karim: 17:43

I had not learned how to ask for help yet.

Tom Jackobs: 17:45

Ah,

Shahada Karim: 17:46

So I was doing everything my, for myself and I also, because I didn't know at the time that to run a successful and sustainable business that you not only have to be okay with saying no, you have to be okay with losing business. And

Tom Jackobs: 18:03

I wasn't

Shahada Karim: 18:04

okay with losing business. So I was trying to be all things to all people. I was trying to do everything, and I allowed my customers who knew me at the time, I had not started recruiting strangers. Everything was word of mouth. I was allowing my customers to run the business. So every time a customer made a suggestion, I would take it every time a customer asked for something special, I would do it if they wanted a formulation that was thicker or thinner or this color, or that color. Or could you find an herb that makes it smell like this perfume? And could you do this and could you do that? And this is before I learned that. You know, especially when you're buying supplies as a business, you're not buying retail, you're buying wholesale. So if I'm making a wholesale purchase and buying something in bulk for one customer, I am now stuck with all of those ingredients, which are perishable. I've now lost a ton of money, and then that person goes, thank you, bye. And you never hear from them again.

Tom Jackobs: 19:00

Yeah. Thanks for the eight ounces out of the five gallons.

Shahada Karim: 19:04

I have a 55 gallon drum of this product that I can't do anything with and that no one else wants. I couldn't sell it because I also wasn't talking to strangers. So there was no stranger that was going, oh hey, that looks awesome. I'll try that too. I'm only talking to people I know. Their mothers. And their aunts and their book clubs.

Tom Jackobs: 19:24

Yeah. And they all want something different.

Shahada Karim: 19:28

Strangers didn't trust me. They didn't know me and I wasn't interested in them getting to know me, so this was on me too. So 2005 I walked away quietly. I didn't say anything to anyone, and I technically didn't shut anything down. I just suspended the website without closing the store I could suspend the website so that all the products were still visible, but you couldn't click on them, you couldn't buy them.

Tom Jackobs: 19:53

Ah.

Shahada Karim: 19:54

And I thought it's fine. Nobody really cares about this but me anyway, I'm doing too much. That was the year that I got married and I planned the whole wedding myself because I thought I could.

Tom Jackobs: 20:07

It seems like an ongoing theme.

Shahada Karim: 20:10

Yes. I thought I could do it. That's 200 people. It's not a big deal.

Tom Jackobs: 20:15

Oh my gosh.

Shahada Karim: 20:15

I was absolutely insane by wedding day.

Tom Jackobs: 20:19

Oh, I bet.

Shahada Karim: 20:20

And I had shut the business down in January. Um, I shut the business down in January of that year of 2005, and I got married in September. So for that nine months I did not do anything with the business and I really thought, you know, who cares? No one's gonna care. It's gonna be fine. And my customers lost their minds. Really? And started again emails and What are you doing and why can't I buy my product? And I'm almost out and can you help? Can you help? Can you help? Can you help? So at the end of 2005, I reached out to everybody. I sent out an email, and I always say that this is the first time in the business that I told the truth, that I said how I felt and I didn't edit myself to make other people feel better. I said, I feel unappreciated, overwhelmed. I feel like you guys think that I'm Walmart, that I can be all things to all people, and you didn't consider the human cost, and I take responsibility for my part in this, for allowing you to think that you could get me to jump through rings of fire for$12 and 50 cents, never to be seen or heard from again. After I've spent$2,000 on this 55 drum container of aloe.

Tom Jackobs: 21:43

I would love to see a copy of that email.

Shahada Karim: 21:46

I wrote it when I was really upset.

Tom Jackobs: 21:48

Oh, no. And

Shahada Karim: 21:49

because I'm a journalist, typically I will always copy edit. I will always edit. And this was the very first time that I said, Nope, this is how I feel.

Tom Jackobs: 21:59

And send,

Shahada Karim: 22:00

And I hit send

Tom Jackobs: 22:03

Well, how'd that work out?

Shahada Karim: 22:05

Some people told me to kick rocks.

Tom Jackobs: 22:07

Okay.

Shahada Karim: 22:07

Some people said, we never asked you to do this.

Tom Jackobs: 22:10

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 22:11

You, we asked a question and you said yes, and so we thought it was okay, so you don't get to blame us, you know, for, for saying that it was fine when it really wasn't fine. This is, this is not our problem. Grow up, deal with it.

Tom Jackobs: 22:22

Yeah. Okay. And

Shahada Karim: 22:23

some people said, I didn't know that it would have that effect on you. I'm so sorry. I should have considered your feelings. But it was thing where I had already started out being a business that was separate from being a human. So people reacted to me like a business and then were blindsided. When I responded as a human.

Tom Jackobs: 22:45

Yep.

Shahada Karim: 22:46

It was a lesson for me.

Tom Jackobs: 22:48

That's such an important lesson too.

Shahada Karim: 22:49

I have to step back. And I have to think what do you want. What do you want?

Tom Jackobs: 22:53

Just wanted to kinda unpack that a little bit for the listeners too, just, and, and just mention how important that shift in mindset is that you have to bear some responsibility for your business and how the customers react. Like, like just what you said, you know, if you don't tell your customers, I do not do that, they will continue to ask you to do that.

Shahada Karim: 23:19

Right.

Tom Jackobs: 23:19

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 23:20

And as a result, I, I kept the customers that I needed and I lost the customers that I didn't need. That was my first real tough business lesson that you don't want everyone.

Tom Jackobs: 23:34

Yep.

Shahada Karim: 23:35

And all money is not good money. And you shouldn't spend as a human being, especially in the stages that I was in, which was doing everything myself. So also taking on the brunt of the pain and backlash and whatever, you know, which is not personal, but at the time was very personal to me. People don't know me. They just, I don't like this thing, or I do like this thing, or I want more of this. Or, why can't I have, why can't you give me? They don't know that I'm a person. That has to deal with that, and I hadn't separated yet emotionally as far as I was concerned. This was my baby, and you all are insulting my baby. You're telling me my baby is ugly and that my baby can't do more for you, and that my baby's packaging sucks. Oh. The feedback I would get about packaging, I used to have paper labels that as soon as they got wet. That I printed on an inkjet printer. Instead of getting labels professionally made on a laser printer, these were things I had to learn, right? I was like, who cares? The inside's amazing and what's hilarious. About that. So this was back in 2000, 2003, 2004. What is hilarious about that is that now in the wellness space, you can throw a rock and find the same kind of mediocre packaging and have it sell for 15 times as much with perhaps good, perhaps not so good ingredients on the inside. So when I see that now, I just laugh like, oh, I started this in 2004 and everybody told me I sucked. But now, it's great. You just tied a little piece of twine around this jar that I know you paid 12 cents for, and you told everybody that you got this clay from the Amazon and you you're charging$300 for it. Now that I understand what that is, I know what that is now because I've been in this business long enough to look at an ingredient or look at the hierarchy of ingredients or look at the source of an ingredient, and I can make a snap judgment about efficacy and delivery. This is something I had to learn. So in addition to all of this, 2006, I started back up again, but I changed my approach and I went back to school. So instead of me being like, oh, my mom made this, oh, my grandmother made this, oh, you know, these are just home recipes. I had to learn about preservatives. Everybody is like, oh, my stuff is preservative free. And I'm like, oh. So you get mold in six months. That's right. Yeah. You can use preservatives that are still natural and maybe not hurt your customers. But I had to learn that I had to learn about formulations that were sustainable so that the formulas will be consistent. I had to learn about preserving. I had to learn about light filtering for some of the ingredients. You can't have some ingredients exposed to any kind of light, artificial, or natural. If I was gonna use those ingredients, these were the sacrifices I was gonna have to make. So I went back to school. I learned how to make skincare. The beautiful thing was by the time this happened, we had merged with CBS and my shift changed to a very early morning shift. When I first started working in Los Angeles, I started working in Los Angeles in 2000, I first started working, I worked from 1:30 to 9:30, which means that my entire day was spoken for.

Tom Jackobs: 26:48

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 26:48

But when we merged with CBS, they moved me from 7:00 AM to three eight 3:00 PM

Tom Jackobs: 26:53

Oh, nice.

Shahada Karim: 26:53

And that changed everything.'cause now I can gould go to night school, which is what I did. So from three to eight

Tom Jackobs: 27:00

Oh my gosh. I can go

Shahada Karim: 27:01

figure out what I was doing and learn how to make the products properly. And the second thing I did was I got really cozy with the CBS, the main criminal attorney who then didn't referred me to a business attorney who got me involved in trademark, and I had to learn the legality. So I got very lucky in that. I got up under the finance manager who taught me about money. I was friends with one of the lawyers who referred me to someone who would be a better fit and taught me about protecting myself legally. Taught me about doing a federal search to make sure nobody else was using the name. This whole thing that no one tells you as an entrepreneur, you're just like, oh, this great idea. I'm just gonna jump out and do this thing, and everybody's gonna love me. Well, you know, I stumbled for two years before I learned that that wasn't true. Had to take a break for a year and then I, I said to myself, you're gonna do this. If you're really gonna do this, you gotta learn. How did you learn how to be a journalist? You went to school, right? It was education and practice. For me, learning to run a business and learning to make a product that would, would hold every single time was literally education and practice.

Tom Jackobs: 28:17

And such a great lesson too that you, you finally found that asking for help, not being that gatekeeper, not giving away, you know, giving away your secrets is not helping anybody.

Shahada Karim: 28:28

Right.

Tom Jackobs: 28:29

Yeah. It's, or holding your secrets isn't helping anybody. So, I mean, that's a, such a good lesson, uh, to share with the, the audience. And I think a lot of people's struggle with that to share who they are to open up and ask for help when needed. And you know, a lot of entrepreneurs go through that same struggle. So thank thank you for sharing that. One thing interesting is that I did learn a lot under Habibi, bath and Body about sharing myself, but Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 28:59

I went in the opposite direction for Habibi Sport, and that's the balance. I learned that you can do both. So I am definitely a gatekeeper in Habibi sport, and there's a business reason for that. The business reason is in the fitness space, and this is the space that you're very familiar with in the fitness space because we don't technically own anything in fitness. Fitness is fitness, right? You can't own a squat. You can't own a lunge. You, you really even have trouble trying to own choreography.

Tom Jackobs: 29:36

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 29:37

in a class or because you are gathering all of your, your choreography comes from predetermined moves, right? The body is the body. The human body moves in a certain way. We're not gonna reinvent the wheel here because of that a lot of people, for lack of a better word, I'm just gonna use this word, a lot of people steal.

Tom Jackobs: 29:57

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 29:58

And they don't give credit and they claim it as their own and they run with it. Now, the problem in Habibi sport is because it's a fitness space and because there is technically a proprietary technique to use, very normal, very recognized, um, very common moves. We just get there in a different way. I very shy about putting that out in public because content creators steal.

Tom Jackobs: 30:25

Sure. So if I

Shahada Karim: 30:25

put it on a public platform, it now is owned by that platform. If I put it on meta, it's owned by meta. It's in the terms and conditions that nobody reads.

Tom Jackobs: 30:33

Right.

Shahada Karim: 30:33

Which means that not only now I've put this thing up'cause I'm really excited about it, and other content creators can find it and say, this looks great. I'm gonna do that. Meta also owns it.

Tom Jackobs: 30:45

Hmm.

Shahada Karim: 30:45

They own our pictures, they own our videos. I, I wish that people understood the ramifications of sharing everything on social media without reading the terms and conditions. So understanding that, I was like, well, I don't want meta to own it, and I don't want content creators, especially content creators with larger platforms. To take from me and use something that I worked really hard on and that I had to study for a long time about. So that's the other side of this. Just like I went to school for Habibi Body, I also went to school for Habibi Sport. I have seven certifications in fitness. I had to learn how to do the thing that I wanted to share, the thing that I wanted to teach. Have I been lifting weights since I was 12 years old? Yes.'cause we all did that, right? As old as I am, I'm gonna date myself with some something that only certain reader, certain listeners are gonna understand. There was a program called Get in Shape Girl.

Tom Jackobs: 31:39

I don't remember that one. I did

Shahada Karim: 31:40

that program religiously, so this was back at the time of Mary Lou Retten and Nadia Kochi. Okay. They

Tom Jackobs: 31:46

have a gymnast in this

Shahada Karim: 31:47

program and I thought I wanted to be a gymnast, and so I bugged my mom and she bought me this program and I had been moving my body ever since. That's how long I've been moving my body.

Tom Jackobs: 32:00

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 32:01

But I had to learn how not to only move my body effectively, but how to adapt the way that I move my body as I aged. And that's where Habibi Sport comes from. It comes from adaptive exercise that is related to who you are and where you are at any given time. We can't do certain exercises forever. We think that we can. I often say to my male clients, this is the difference between men and women. Women have been have come up in a fitness space where we have a billion options. There's a billion different ways for us to move. It's a very female-centric space, but men learn how to do the perfect squat at 25, and they're still trying to do that squat at 65, and they can't figure out why it's not working and why their knees hurt, and why their hips hurt, and why their low back hurts because they haven't adapted the movement to the place where they are in life.

Tom Jackobs: 32:56

Exactly.

Shahada Karim: 32:56

This is one of the disadvantages. I've had this conversation with my husband. This is one of the disadvantages I think that men face because they were like, oh, I used to be able to do this when I was 30. Why can't I do this now? Why does this suck? Why am I paying for this? Why is my recovery time longer? Because you are different.

Tom Jackobs: 33:13

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 33:13

In that way. We develop bespoke programs, which are technically not as bespoke as more would have you believe. Like I said, the human body is the human body. So we've learned how to get people to adapt their movement, to benefit their body, to benefit whatever it is they're eating these days and the way that they're sleeping and the time that they wake up and the time that they go to sleep. And we've developed a formula that we can plug and play. Because at some point we all tend to, we start crossing right? At some point someone is my age in, in, in a body that is similar to mine with a similar lifestyle. And it's easy for us to now plug and play what works in my body in a very general sense to what works in their body with a few tweaks.

Tom Jackobs: 33:58

Yeah. I love that. I mean, that's, that's a great way of scaling, but also being bespoke at the same time.

Shahada Karim: 34:04

We still want to take care of people. The big lesson I learned about, especially about being heart-led, beyond exposing, you know, who I really am was exposing that I just wanna give everybody a hug. I just want everybody to fall in love with themselves. I want people to look in the mirror and be happy. We've been conditioned to look in the mirror and scowl and immediately pick out flaws and immediately see the thing that we want to improve instead of looking in the mirror and being like, good morning. Hey, beautiful. Hey handsome. How you doing today? What? What are we doing today? What are we getting into? How do we feel? It's really important that I get people to understand that you're the only one you take to bed at night. You only got the one you. Look after you, and it doesn't have to be expensive or complicated for you to do that. So even the way that we offer bespoke programs are on a sliding scale. Maybe you don't want our premium package. Maybe you just want the basics because you figured out everything else. You're like, I already know doing all the things. I don't need this whole package from you. I just need this one little thing. Okay, well, this one little thing can be as low as$15 a month.

Tom Jackobs: 35:14

Yeah, and make a huge difference in a life too.

Shahada Karim: 35:18

That's reasonable as opposed to 10K month for your full package, right? So we literally go from 15, to 10,000. Pick what works for you, and we got everything in between. And we've been able to digitize yay for, for digital marketing and, and for digital platforms. We've been able to digitize everything. So this takes a ton of pressure off of the human toll. This takes the human toll out of the equation where I'm not doing everything. Members of my team are not doing everything. We're not exhausted in sniping and trying to figure out how we're gonna manage these clients because we've built a computer program that will do it for us. And people pay into that. And they can give us feedback. It's fully interactive. It's very integrative. You know, use it if you want. You can cancel whenever you want. We learned how to scale without killing ourselves. And what was really important to me, um, without being told what to do, which is why we didn't take outside money. Because we didn't want to be pressured on the ROI.

Tom Jackobs: 36:21

Yeah. Well, and that enables you to be more heart-led at the same time without the constraints.

Shahada Karim: 36:27

Really deal for us. We almost went the investor route um, actually is when I say like, you start learning that everything happens for a reason. We almost went the investor route at the end of 2018

Tom Jackobs: 36:39

Oh,

Shahada Karim: 36:40

and we did everything we, we initially pitched to, um, some venture capitalists and they told us that we did not have a plan that could dominate at least 87% of the market. So it was a no.

Tom Jackobs: 36:57

Okay.

Shahada Karim: 36:57

But because it, because this group was a heart-led group. It was, we sought them out on purpose. They were heart-led group. They gave us homework.

Tom Jackobs: 37:07

Oh.

Shahada Karim: 37:07

If you wanna be attractive to a VC, this is what you need to do, and this is what your pitch needs to look like. And if you'd like, we can walk you through it for a fee, of course. Or you can take these bullet points, you can take'em home for free and you can figure it out. And so all 2018, we busted our butts. We're gonna scale, we're gonna take this money, we're gonna do this investor thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We got all the way up to the end of 2018. We were highly excited. We were ready to pitch. Or 2019, excuse me, we were ready to pitch and then in 2020,

Tom Jackobs: 37:41

Yeah,

Shahada Karim: 37:42

the whole world shut down.

Tom Jackobs: 37:43

That's right. No more fitness centers. March

Shahada Karim: 37:45

15th. I will never forget this.

Tom Jackobs: 37:49

Me neither.

Shahada Karim: 37:49

We have our last big event on March 15th and our event wrapped at 8:00 PM at 8:15. Literally 15 minutes later we were still cleaning up. The team was striking. I was kind of just walking around trying to make sure, you know, we did not leave the space terrible because we were not trying to pay the security deposit.

Tom Jackobs: 38:06

Right.

Shahada Karim: 38:06

And we got a text message from the mayor at the time saying, everybody go home. The city of Los Angeles is shutting down. And at first they told us two weeks, and after two weeks, they told us two months. And after two, months they said, we'll get back to you.

Tom Jackobs: 38:20

Yeah. Right. Oh yeah. What a, what a crazy time that was.

Shahada Karim: 38:24

The blessing was that because we did all of this work in 2019 to scale digitally, we already had an infrastructure and we only did it to make ourselves attractive to the venture capitalist. We were just trying to get outside money and we were just gonna hire an operations manager and be like here, and we were gonna go sit on a beach somewhere and collect money and drink my ties. This was our plan. Our plan was to stop working and to hire a bunch of people work for us, and to sit back and let the ones and zeros, you know, let the algorithm, let the binary system do all the work for us. And we only did it to pitch. That was the only reason we went in that direction. Otherwise, I would still have been teaching in-person classes as a yoga teacher. So even, and remember, even when I was at CBS, I would leave CBS, take a shower, put on my clothes, go teach a yoga class.

Tom Jackobs: 39:16

Right.

Shahada Karim: 39:17

So was doing everything, everything. This is why, this is why I almost killed myself. I was doing everything. I almost ran myself like a hundred percent into the ground

Tom Jackobs: 39:24

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 39:25

Because I was trying to do everything and I didn't trust anybody to help me. And the thing that I, I've learned the hard way in the hiring process is to ask really tough and sometimes probing questions about what people really want. Because I live in a city, um, Los Angeles is a very temporary city. Everyone is doing something until they get to do the thing that they want to do. And initially when I first started hiring, would be like, oh, I love your, I love your program. I love your brand, I love your idea. But then an audition would come up because you really were an actress. Or an interview would come up because they really were a singer, or they had this idea for a movie and they needed to take two months off to write a script. Or some celebrity came into the restaurant or they were waiting and they, and they needed to be able to pursue this celebrity because they wanted to pitch the script to them and they needed this person to be a producer. I had to learn to ask real questions. Is this your profession? Is this what you want to do? I'm disinterested and you hanging out with me for six months then being like, oh, well this thing came up and I can't be here anymore and, and literally leaving me hand dry. This is what I do. I need this also to be what you do. And if this is not what you do, that's okay. That's okay. That's great. I learned that with my assistants. I learned that with marketers. I learned that with social media managers. I learned that with formulators. I learned that everybody was like, oh, I'm gonna do this until my ship comes in and then I'm out. So that was, that was very, very hard lesson in the hiring process where I had to ask that question and I had to hold them to that. This is what we do. I also became a huge fan of contracts. Because contracts take emotion out of everything. What does the contract say? This is your expectation. This is my expectation. This is how we function harmoniously without either one of us feeling like we're not getting what we paid for.

Tom Jackobs: 41:27

Totally understood. Yeah. So I can't, I can't believe the time has just flown by so much here. This is really incredible content and, and advice that you're sharing with the audience is really incredible. But how can people learn more about your brands and you in particular, because I know that's what people wanna know, is you, how can they learn more about you?

Shahada Karim: 41:49

I've learned that the best way to communicate with people is open and honestly, so the best way to find me is just to Google my name. I don't hide behind everything. My social media is literally, my name is Shahada Karim. It's super easy to find me. You just stick those two words in Google and everything comes up. I

Tom Jackobs: 42:11

don't know. And you'll be fine.

Shahada Karim: 42:12

there's really a combination of those two names.

Tom Jackobs: 42:15

Yeah, right, exactly.

Shahada Karim: 42:16

In relation to Habibi, you can put in Shahada Karim Habibi. We have, um, ways to reach us on all of our websites. So Habibi Body is skincare. It's info@habibibody.com. Habibi Body Sport is fitness and nutrition. It's info@habibibodysport.com and habibi Life is the wellness umbrella that we all live under, and that's info@habibilife.com. You can find habibi, bath and body, Habibi Body Sport, and Habibi life on all major, uh, social media platforms. You can find me, I've, the other thing I've learned, and I will leave you with this, is to take the time to answer my own inquiries. I did not do that for years. And part of exposing myself was being like, I can talk to these people. And so I make sure, and I used to have, I used to have an assistant that would send the emails to our team and someone, we would always designate the one person with the nicest personality to answer the emails because that way we wouldn't piss anybody off.'cause remember I wanted all the money'cause I thought all the customers were great.

Tom Jackobs: 43:23

Right.

Shahada Karim: 43:23

But now I will answer them and sign them myself. So if you get an email from me and you see my name, I wrote that email. If you get a DM from me and you see my name, I wrote that dm that used to be another person. And then when we would digital, we automated it and that did not work because people could tell they were talking to a computer.

Tom Jackobs: 43:48

Yep.

Shahada Karim: 43:48

So now it's me. That has become my job. I'm happy for it to be my job because I've given all the other jobs that I thought I needed to do. I've given those away and I've delegated.

Tom Jackobs: 43:59

Yeah.

Shahada Karim: 43:59

So I'm happy for people to be able to feel like they can talk to me, that I'm a human being and that sometimes I might say no, but I will always offer you a caveat. I will al always offer you an alternative, what I found is that. That trust that I was looking for, it grew exponentially when I started just being me in front of the camera. Good, bad or indifferent, good days, bad days. People

Tom Jackobs: 44:31

percent.

Shahada Karim: 44:32

this is a person and I can trust this person, and maybe this person, maybe I need to back up off of this person'cause it's a person. Or maybe I feel brave enough to ask this person a question because I, I too have a feeling and I would like to understand this feeling more. It's worked out tremendously for me to just step out in, into the sun connect myself and my heart with my business.

Tom Jackobs: 44:55

Love it. That's awesome. And thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, and I, I really appreciate you sharing your advice and your, your journey as well. It's been quite the, quite the career, so thank you so much for, for coming on the show. Of course. And thank you show listeners for listening to the show today or viewing it on YouTube I really do appreciate it and make sure that you're checking everything out that Shahada is doing in the show notes. So we're gonna put all those links down there, uh, for her different businesses so that you can connect directly with her. And if you could do me a favor and share this show with another person that could use the advice shared on it. Maybe somebody that has a heart-led business and wants to get it better, and, uh, use some of the advice that Shahada has, uh, provided today. So thank you again and lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: 45:49

You've been listening to The Heart-Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.