How to Attract Better Clients by Focusing on Service with Christophe Zoghbi

In this episode of Success Leaves Clues Podcast, our guest is Christophe Zoghbi, leadership coach, consultant, speaker, and business development expert who helps professionals and organizations grow through authentic relationships, strategic networking, and a people-first approach to business. Drawing from his international experience working with leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals across industries, Christophe shares valuable insights on building trust, strengthening your personal brand, leveraging LinkedIn effectively, and creating meaningful business opportunities by focusing on service rather than sales. We explore why genuine curiosity and helping others often lead to stronger client relationships, how to identify ideal-fit customers, and the mindset shifts required to build a sustainable and rewarding business. Whether you're an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, executive, or professional looking to expand your network and influence, this conversation offers practical advice on growing your business through authenticity, value creation, and long-term relationships.

You can find him on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophezoghbi/
https://zaka.ai/
https://linktr.ee/christophezoghbi

Transcript

Christophe Zoghbi 0:00

Like I started delivering these workshops, helping people like bring your laptop, let us code this AI model together, or let us build this cool thing together. Because I wanted to geek out with some people and you know get them to learn. And this is where I realized that one, I love doing this. Like I never thought I would be an educator or a coach, right? I'm an engineer, but I noticed that I have a big passion for AI and I like doing it.

Davis Nguyen 0:24

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues, the podcast where we interview business owners on how they built their businesses and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is David Swain, and I'm a business coach and the founder of Purple Circle, where we help business owners achieve their first six-figure, seven-figure, and eight-figure year, all without sacrificing their quality of life. Before becoming a business coach and before founding Purple Circle, I started to schedule several seven and eight-figure coaching businesses and have been a consultant at several businesses doing over $100 million each, including some that are publicly listed and doing over a billion dollars each. In every episode of the podcast, you're gonna learn lessons that took RS years to learn, and you'll be able to learn that in minutes. No matter if you're a new business owner or an established business owner, every episode is gonna give you the clues in order to elevate your business.

Pedro Stein 1:08

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues Podcast. I'm Pedro, and today I'm joined by Christoph Zugby, founder and CEO of Zaka, whose mission to democratize artificial intelligence across the MENA region has led to the groundbreaking partnerships with Microsoft and Samsung while delivering industry certifications. Christoph's expertise spans computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing, giving him a rare ability to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and practical business implementation across industries, including legal, media, and finance. Chris has built a talent platform dedicated to tech and AI while organizing community-centric gatherings and technical workshops that make AI accessible to startups, enterprises, and individuals alike. His hands-on consulting work ranges from face and object detection to image classification and predictive systems, proving that when AI is made truly accessible, entire regions can leapfrog traditional technology adoption curves. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Christophe Zoghbi 2:25

Thank you so much, Pedro. Thank you for having me.

Pedro Stein 2:28

Oh, it's great to have you. You know, I'm excited to talk with you from the moment we met. Now, you know, Chris, I'm kind of a comic book nerd myself. People already know that and that follow the show, right? So I love the first edition. Back to the origin story, Chris. So every coach has that moment where they look at their life and say, Yeah, I guess this is what I'm doing now, right? So when was that for you, man?

Christophe Zoghbi 2:52

That was back in 2014, actually. I was I was working on my first startup. So my background is in software engineering. I'm a nerd by nature, I'm a geek, I write code. That that's how I used to spend my time. I worked for a couple of years as an Android app developer back in 2011, something like that. Then I decided to try my luck and building my own apps and my own startups. So I quit my job along with a couple of friends, and we were building a product that required what is now known as machine learning. I had no idea what it was back then. I just knew that I had to make a system that learns from my users. Um, and I had no idea what AI was, what this whole field was about, and I had to do what any uh engineer would do. I just went online, I Googled stuff, and I started learning, and I experimented a lot and I failed a lot, and I learned everything that I need to know by myself. Um, and so this has kind of led me to find my passion. I I fell in love with the concept of I was already loving the idea of programming, which like you can write some code and let the machine execute something, so create something virtual, and now I can even make even more things, more powerful, you know, apps, because of this machine learning concept, so letting the machine learn from the data. So this is when I realized I want to focus you know my energy and and my my focus on AI, and it all started back then, and the field is ever growing and moving faster than ever, so it's never been boring, to be honest.

Pedro Stein 4:26

Now there's a shift that happens, right, Chris? Like you're a software engineer and all that, and then you started your own business, you know. So, how did that look like? Because you were at the start helping people, you you were yourself trying to understand how to develop this to a point that you okay, this is a real business I'm building around this. You know, this is actually a coaching practice. I'm training people, I'm teaching people, I'm helping people, I'm giving advice, you know. So, how did that look like for you? The leap, right? From employee to you know, business owner and a coaching practice, to say the least. How did that look like?

Christophe Zoghbi 5:03

Yeah, so uh back to my story of the startup. I spent a couple of years figuring things out on my own. We actually ended up building good technology, but failing on the business side of things for that startup. So the startup actually didn't make it. But my passion for AI that's what made it through this experience. So I went out and I decided to build a community in Lebanon because I'm Lebanese, I was based out of Lebanon back then, and I wanted to promote AI in Lebanon. So I called this community Beirut AI, and the goal just to bring people share awareness on AI. Back then it wasn't as trendy as it is today, but people were interested in it. So we used to have these meetups, bring speakers who applied AI to share their experiences, and the point was to make it practical. Uh, we also started doing workshops, like I started delivering these workshops, helping people like bring your laptop, let us code this AI model together, or let us build this school thing together because I wanted to geek out with some people and uh you know get them to learn. And this is where I realized that one, I love doing this, like I never thought I would be an educator or a coach, right? I I'm an engineer, but I noticed that I have a big passion for AI and I like doing it. And second, I found that there's a need for it as well. People were willing to pay, even it was like small money back then because it was a community effort. The point was to sustain the community, cover the cost of some pizzas and the venue, and that's it. But still, I found that there is a need for it. Companies like they want to implement AI, they had no idea how to proceed. Someone had to teach them like what the hell is AI? How do I make sense of AI? And this question is still true today as much as much as it was true in 2018. So after a couple of years of doing this community work alongside me being a freelancer, I decided let me put my full-time effort and mission into this idea, make it my full-time job, make money out of it so I can really sustain and grow it. Because at the end of the day, you need to be able to put energy and all your time and effort behind this mission. And that's how my current company was born.

Pedro Stein 7:07

So you you made actually two leaps of faith. The first one didn't land, right? The startup, and that you mentioned, and then you you didn't, you know, uh dug in and and shied away from trying again. I I commend you in doing so, right? You were you were there like, oh, I'm gonna help this community and I'm gonna try it again. I'm gonna be stubborn. I really like that, man.

Christophe Zoghbi 7:27

Yeah, a lot of times, right?

Pedro Stein 7:30

I mean, believe in your dreams at the end of the day. Now, let me ask you this because you we already established your start helping, you created that community in Lebanon, right? And I'm in, you know, I'm I'm aware of that right now. And at this point, I tend to ask, who do you serve basically, right? So if I got this right, we're talking about the Mina region. You already established that, okay. But in the early days, or even now, right? Because there is the community, and then there's a deeper level, right? That you help people in a more customized way. But if you had to say, who are the people that kept showing up for that deeper level, not just the community, you know, the the people you do very customized work. Who who do you serve there?

Christophe Zoghbi 8:17

So on a high-level scale, we have two main approaches. We have the individual B2C approach for the community, and then we have the corporate uh approach as well. And because I believe it comes hand in hand, right? Uh you need to build the ecosystem, not just like one side of it. So on the community side for individuals, we help people learn, build skills, grow, and get hired in the field of AI. And on the B2B side, on corporates, we actually have a whole transformation framework for the companies to help them adopt AI. And this is like a five-pillar framework that you know, it's a whole thing where we had them on training, consultancy, development, hiring, and governance, like the whole thing on that. So the target audience, mainly, especially in the early days, it was mainly developers because prior to ChatGPT and this whole generative AI revolution, AI was a very technical field. So only developers, engineers were really interested in that. So we started doing uh boot camps and training programs for engineers who wanted to work in the AI field. And we actually had a program, like a 20-week program, uh, to graduate market-ready machine learning engineers and data scientists. So you joined the program with zero skills in AI, you graduated ready to find a job in the AI field. And I can tell you how many people actually got their careers started through that program and even transitioned that like we had civil engineers, we had mechanical engineers or agricultural engineers who were not able to find a job. They went to the program, they learned the AI parts, and now they're working as AI engineers uh, you know, in companies in the region. So for me, this like initially was the main group of people we targeted, but now as the company grew and you know our office uh offer offers and services also grew as well. So now we have a wide range of people we target through education and through other uh offerings as well.

Pedro Stein 10:11

Oh, nice, nice. Okay, now I want to do a quick exercise, okay? Uh, we kind of already established uh how do you help the B2C? There's the community and all that. I wanna pretend I'm the B2B guy, okay? I'm your potential client for that higher level you mentioned. Um, so how would I be able to find you, you know, marketing-wise?

Christophe Zoghbi 10:35

Um, we're very active on social media. I really believe in um organic growth. So we've this we've started doing those educational content on TikTok, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, uh, like a few years ago, and we've actually amassed like a decent uh number of followers in the region, uh, and especially non-technical people. So a lot of people follow us to understand what the hell is a large language model, what is ChatGPT, what is cloud, how do we deal with AI tools? So that's how most people find us. We do a lot of also community work, uh, as in like free webinars, we're active in events, uh, and all of that is marketing in a way, right? Instead of just paying for ads, we pay with our time and expertise and we give value to the people. And then it's also word of mouth. Uh, like today I was delivering a training for a company where the head of HR used to be at the previous company that we delivered a training to. He moved companies and then he also uh got Zaka to deliver another training. So my point is uh they found us through either word of mouth or uh organically through social media.

Pedro Stein 11:39

Okay, so I'm still that guy, okay. Uh, and I'm like, I saw your your content on social media, uh, or even though I was referred to you, right? Word of mouth you mentioned, and that kind of clicked for me. I'm like, Zaka seems cool. I want to work with them, you know. So I understand there's a sale, a sales process. We can speed up that a little bit. Let's just put it simply like there is alignment, you guys can help me, okay? Um, but you can dive deep a little bit there if you want to. But and I understand you may have different offers, right? So we can we can talk about the main one and however you feel like it too. So, how does it look like to work with Zaka and uh the potential outcomes I can expect out of it?

Christophe Zoghbi 12:24

Yeah, so most companies do reach out to us because they know AI is something interesting, they know they want to explore it, they just don't know what the hell to do with it. Um, and by the way, this is also, I didn't maybe forgot to mention, one of the reasons people also reach out, or one of the ways they find us is through going online to Google or ChatGPT and asking, I need to learn about AI. Who can help me figure this out? And usually Zaka is one of the top results that you would find as well. So we've been lucky because we've been doing this awareness uh outreach for some time, we are one of the top results you would find if you look for that. And this is why I'm saying people don't usually reach out saying, I have a specific need, help me do one, two, three. They're more like on the idea of what do I do with AI? I know I have to innovate, I know I have to integrate it. I know I want to add AI to my company. They just don't know what to do. So, usually what you end up doing is a discovery phase. Before we propose a training or a solution to or someone to hire, let us help you understand what AI means to you as a company in that industry, as a you know, exactly what you do, etc. So we end up spending a couple of weeks together to understand you as a business. What do you do? What which departments do you have? Uh, how does your team actually currently use AI, if anything, which tools do they use? How much do they know? All of these things. We map out all the workflows that you have, we try to find inefficiencies because what I avoid doing is just adding AI because it's a cool technology and selling you something you don't need. AI is not a solution. AI is actually sorry, AI is not like an end-to-end solution. It's it's basically a solution to a specific problem. So if we help you figure out what actually are trying to implement, what is your inefficiency, what's the bottleneck, what's something that's taking you a lot of time, and then let's help you figure out how AI can help you, you know, fix this problem. So this is part of the discovery phase. And at the end of that phase, you end up with a report that clearly says, me as a company, here's the different ways AI can support me. Maybe I need to train my team on using this tool, maybe I need to implement an automation here or build an agent there or whatever. So we help you have that clarity, and we can also help you execute it, but this is where it all starts. So this is like a to simplify the whole experience because we've been dealing with a lot of companies having the same issue. So instead of okay, tell me what you need, I'm I'm gonna help you figure out what you need in this very complicated world that's called AI and that's ever growing and ever so confusing.

Pedro Stein 15:02

Okay. Now I'm curious a little bit, I appreciate the insight, and I'm curious like something popped up on my head, which is like the community component, which is like more of the education piece, right? So, how does that look like? If I were going to join that, do we have a human component? Is it all videos? How does that look like?

Christophe Zoghbi 15:24

Uh, we at Zach do not believe in self-based learning, uh, purely self-based learning, right? There's a lot of online content. You can go take any content, and they're usually good. The problem is people they can commit, right? If it's something longer than like a two-hour course, no one's gonna not no one, but it's very difficult to commit a multi-week process where it's only you and yourself, and you have to force yourself to go take that course because life happens and you get busy and you get you know bored and you get tired, and you just you know, so you have the like, yeah, I I bought a course, I know it's there, but I just I'll check it out someday, and then 10 months later you still haven't opened the course. So we don't believe in self-based learning. All of our programs are either online or in person. If it's if they're online and long programs, they're hybrid. So we do have like our longest program, 20-week program, it's fully online. It is hybrid, meaning the content is online, it's self-based, but you have weekly sessions every week, like two or three sessions, live with the instructors, and it's cohort-based, meaning you have one week to finish that module, because next week we open up a new module. So the self-based component comes to give you a flexibility of take this content whenever you feel like it during that week. However, by the end of the week, you have to have finished the content, attended the live sessions, and submitted your uh submission or like work assignment for this week. And so this cohort-based learning uh gives us the flexibility to really scale the program and we have great attendance and completion rates because you're getting forced to deliver. Yeah, so that's how we do things uh interesting.

Pedro Stein 17:05

It sounds like we have an accountability piece that sounds like very important for you, so you can keep people on check, right? And like keep on track, guys, let's go for it. And you're also having a cohort, which kind of creates that dynamic, a group, right? And you can actually people are checking in on each other. So interesting. Now, I have some questions for you. You know, um, we're in the coaching space, AI is hot, hot, not just in every industry, but especially in the coaching industry. Now, I'm curious about one thing, and I've talked with a lot of people in the uh in the industry, and one of the things that sometimes uh a guy told me is that he was going to create a chat bot, okay, to replace a coach. Basically, just a chat GPT for coaching. Let's put it like that. I I have my own thoughts about it, but I want to hear yours, okay? What do you think about an idea like that?

Christophe Zoghbi 18:05

I mean, I I get the point that AI chatbots can help automate a lot of things, can help answer a lot of the low-hanging fruits, the FAQs, the basic things. I I still don't think AI is a full replacement to a human being, whether it's a coach or whether it's a therapist, or whether it's no matter which focus, like which uh role you focus on. Um there's definitely some pieces there, but I I wouldn't fully replace a coach with an AI. Um again, I I'll give you an example. In our program, uh we do have uh we run our cohorts on Slack, okay? So participants who join our program are added to a Slack, uh, which is a communication tool if no one knows what Slack is. It's a communication platform where people can chat, we send messages, reminders for the sessions, they can ask their questions, all of that. So on Slack, we have a bot, a Slack bot. We call it ZAC. ZAC is supporting our participants because sometimes we need to handle big scale cohorts, and sometimes they ask the same repetitive questions. So these things are easily routed through Zach. Zach can help you figure out when's the next session, send you reminders if you have a question about when I should submit this deadline or whatever. Um, and Zach can help you answer some questions on the content, but Zach doesn't fully replace uh the instructor, the live coach. That's why we still have weekly live sessions twice per week where they can join and ask their questions directly. Uh, so it AI is there to help us, AI is there to support our role, not to replace us. So, as long as there's a limit of like boundaries of what this can this AI chatbot do, and where does it actually escalate and hand it over back to the human? As long as this is in place, I'm all for AI chatbots doing that. But if you fully think that AI can tomorrow replace everything, that's not gonna be uh the case.

Pedro Stein 20:00

Interesting. Hearing from an expert that, you know, I've I talk with people and sometimes I feel like they they have a misconception of where AI is and what it what it can do. So we're we're not talking about replacing, we're talking about uh a hybrid model being more efficient and all that.

Christophe Zoghbi 20:18

I would say, yeah, augmenting, uh not replacing.

Pedro Stein 20:21

Okay. Now uh moving forward, I mean I'm gonna throw you a curveball because you do have a hybrid model, right? Um, and your work seems pretty hands-on. You're you're managing people, it's not just about numbers or data and all that. So I see a lot of coaches out there advocating against burnout and none of that, me, myself. I I sometimes I I I mean, sometimes it doesn't feel like work, you know? So I I overstretch a little bit and work a little bit more than I should. And I'm wearing a lot of hats on my own practice. So, how do you think about capacity, you know, so you don't stretch yourself too thin.

Christophe Zoghbi 20:59

I mean, it's a bit difficult when you have when you're running a company, uh, especially like at Zaka, we we're not just focused on one thing, we actually do a lot of different things. And I like it because sometimes I feel like it's the only way to complete the puzzle is to offer everything. Because our mission is really to help companies support them in adopting AI, and that can mean different things. It can mean only training and and you know, capacity building, it can mean helping them build the right solution, guiding them through consultancy, uh, helping them hire. So, all of these different uh services, they each one of them is a different practice by itself. And so we slowly build towards all of these things. We started with just doing training, but then I realized that okay, what's next? Like we can train you on a tool. Sometimes you need more than that. And we can offer you that. It's just I have to expand a bit the scope. So initially at the start, what I learned the hard way is that you have to focus, and we started doing everything. Initially, and then we failed. So we had to kind of pause all of the other things and just focus on building a really good education frameworks for companies. And then after we really built a strong pillar on the education side, we started expanding the other offerings as well. And to answer your question about the like how do you stretch yourself or make sure you don't stretch yourself too thin, it's building strong foundations before you scale. So now that we have a good focus on the education and this is strong and growing, I can put my time and effort to build up the other things because I know that I have a strong engine that the business is relying on. And you know, I can actually stop focusing a lot there and put my energy elsewhere. And with time, you tend to hire the right people and to grow it the right way. So I'm not sure if this answers exactly your question. That's how I understood it.

Pedro Stein 22:48

No, it does. It does. You know, I'm thinking about your first company you mentioned, right? Startup that didn't land. And then you you opened the second one and it it it actually landed. So the the reason I'm thinking about it, it's like it's almost like it's an you you're not in the AI industry. It's almost like you're in the education industry, you know. The the the it's not about implementing AI, it's just like first, I mean, I could be totally off here, but it sounds like there's a discovery process with the B2B. So they need to understand what they actually want to do. So that's education almost, right? An awakening process. And then there's the community part, which is also education. Have you ever considered that kind of like I'm I'm not I'm really teaching more than implementing? Like, and it's more about uh people learning than me putting systems in place. You know what I mean?

Christophe Zoghbi 23:41

Yeah, absolutely. Uh and again, this is my background is in engineering. I'm a software engineer. If you asked me 10 years ago, I never thought I'd be doing educational things, right? Right. But it's just happened that when there's a new technology that's so impactful, that's really affecting everything and moving so fast, um, you think you realize that you have to actually make people understand what it is. Like one of the biggest failures of why AI projects fail at companies is literally a misalignment between the idea of what leadership had and the actual expectations of the technology. Sometimes they think AI is this powerful magical thing that's gonna solve all their problems. They ended up implementing something and they get disappointed because no one actually set the right expectations for them. So that's why, like for me as a consultant, let's if I want to wear the hat of a consultant, I need to tell you what this actually can and cannot do. I cannot just overpromise, right? AI is gonna solve everything, like everyone keeps saying. And then you implement AI and you see, oh, it's just a chatbot, that's it. Like you you oversold me on a chatbot, right? And then you ended up losing faith in that. At the same time, I don't want you to think it's just it can be more than that. It's just it's not a perfect solution. It's the it's a tool. If you know where to deploy that tool, to which problem you can really have great results. But if you want to use it to fix everything, you're gonna be disappointed. So there's a lot of education that happens because it's such a new technology, because it's moving really fast, people need to really understand what it is before they can decide what to do and how to implement it.

Pedro Stein 25:13

Okay, and as a software engineer, I gotta ask you a little bit more about on the technical side, because I've been hearing a lot in our space about vibe coding, right? And you you're a hardcore coder, not a vibe coder. So, what's your take on vibe coding? Do you feel like that's doable? There are a lot of flaws, you know. I I just want to see your opinion on it.

Christophe Zoghbi 25:37

I think it's fun and definitely is something you can work with if you want to build a basic website like a dashboard, something simple. I don't think vibe coding is replacing developers, and I don't think AI will take over software engineers overall. Uh AI software engineers today are using and should be using AI to help them with coding, right? They're great at supporting them with stuff that accelerating their workload, just like any other profession, AI moves from becoming a tool, from being a tool to becoming a coworker, right? And I encourage everyone to co-work with AI, but not to delegate all their work to AI because it's not there yet, right? Uh you cannot fully push everything onto AI, but as a software engineer, you don't just write code, right? Like right, actually, writing the code is maybe 40% of what you do. The remainder 60% goes into research, brainstorming, architecture, dividing the problem into smaller problems and tackling each one. So these are things that are still human. And as a developer, you have to maintain these things and maybe offload. Okay, I need a function that does one, two, three. Okay, I can code that for me. I can check it out, makes sense. I'll add that to my code. Not like here's the whole project, do it for me. We're not there yet, and maybe we'll not be there yet uh in the near future.

Pedro Stein 27:03

Okay, I appreciate the insight. Now I'm curious about where you're taking all this, you know, looking ahead, future. Where do you see the business going? Are you thinking about scaling even more, hiring more people? Is there a next step you're excited about, Chris?

Christophe Zoghbi 27:18

There's a lot of steps to be excited about. So um the business is growing, and as I told you, like these different offerings, we're now uh packaging them into a better offering for companies and helping companies really uh like make the most out of AI. So my I'm excited about scaling that to more companies, and mostly I'm excited about seeing companies in the region uh transform using AI and start creating technology because our goal is to have local solutions for local problems. That's what I always say. And this means instead of using a technology that was created outside of the region by someone who is in Silicon Valley or in Europe or whatever, we have to build the capacity that we have to solve our own problems. So we want to become creators of technology, not just users of technology. And this is something we want to enable at Zaka. We want to help companies build the right talent, uh, have the right infrastructure, know the right roadmap, what to do to actually start creating their own technology.

Pedro Stein 28:18

Interesting. Okay, you know, and we're talking about the next chapter, right? And whenever we're talking about that, there's always something we're improving, put it like that. So, what are you currently trying to improve even or tighten up in your business right now at Zaka?

Christophe Zoghbi 28:34

It's basically how do we tie up all of these offerings and make it clear and like very uh straightforward for companies because as I told you, like because we offer so many things, it can be confusing for companies that want different things. And if you want to scale, you cannot just keep customizing things as well. So we have to put like a framework that's uh once this framework works on one company, it can work on other companies, and we can actually scale. So that's what I'm currently doing at the moment because we are preparing for a like big growth in the region, and you know, uh hopefully be able to replicate our smaller framework on bigger companies as well. So that's the idea.

Pedro Stein 29:13

Okay, now I want to ask you one last question. Okay, basically, uh let's pretend you can go back in time, okay, when you were let's say there's a time machine, some fiction, sci-fi here right now, and you can go back for the from like the day you started Zaka, okay, and you can give one piece of advice. What would that be?

Christophe Zoghbi 29:38

Have more confidence in yourself and move move faster. And I mean in hindsight it sounds more straightforward, but obviously when I first started, you have to know I'm I'm not a business guy. I I'm an engineer. I had no idea I was I can even build a company and and grow it and do all of these things, right? So I've always had this feeling that you know, is this the right way to do it? I have I never took any business course, any MBA, anything like that. All I know about business is from trial and error. I just had this passion. I want to teach people AI and I want to make money from it. And that's it. And everything I learned the business strategies, the marketing, the uh legal things that I had to learn, all of these were something that I learned on my own. And there's no playbook that tells you, yeah, you're doing it correctly. So you you you start to like slowly build that confidence. Right now I'm way more confident than I used to be, so but it took time. Maybe my advice would be trust in your gut more, and just no, no one knows this more than you do, right? Uh so have a bit more confidence.

Pedro Stein 30:48

I love that. Okay, and if someone listening wants to connect with you, right, and follow your work. And by the way, Chris, we're gonna have all the links in the description. But what's the best way to find Zach or even you?

Christophe Zoghbi 31:00

Um, Zaka is available on all social media platforms, so just look for or go to our website, zakkaza.ai, or look for Zaka AI on any platform you should be able to find us.

Pedro Stein 31:13

Okay, you know, Chris, there were a few moments from this chat that really stood out to me. Okay. Uh, let's start from the origin story, right? Uh, I really like the fact that you Zaka was built around a community in Lebanon, you know, and it's like it hits home, it's where you're you're really beneath yourself, and you're like, how can I help my people? And it starts with educating them and building a community piece. So that is so cool to watch, you know, coming from a different perspective of like I want to serve people first, it sounds like okay. Then we can move to like when you when we were talking about the discovery, right? And you're like, okay, let's uh let us help you understand what AI means to you first. So what's possible, right? Because there are a lot of misconceptions out there of what AI actually is about, how it can actually help my business. So that service alone, not just the community, but the discovery call of hey, wait a minute, we're not trying to push you into something. What uh does AI do you think can do for you first? Let's talk about that, right? Let's peel it out, peel off that onion so we can actually get to the root cause. So understanding first, right? So kudos to you on that. Um, and then last but not least, this is the part that really hits home for me. It's like when we were talking about the time machine and all that, and you were like, you know what? I I was never prepared to be a business owner. I'm a I'm a uh a data guy, a hard science guy, you know, and all that. And uh that really hits home because it's almost like a shift in identity, right? It's like you're in a birthday party, and then someone asks you, hey, what do you do? And I was in corporate, like I work at banking, I work at consulting firms, and I moved to coaching eventually. And uh that always caught me off guard for a while when I was like, oh, I'm a coach now. You know, that trying to understand who you are, that you're not that guy from you've been parroting about like the 10 years, oh, I do this, I'm in uh a data engineer or whatever, or I am a banker, I'm a whatever. No, I'm a coach, or in your situation, oh, I'm a business owner, I have Zaka. And so having that shift is always uncomfortable but necessary, you know. So really cool to watch, really hits home. And uh, Chris, this is just my long-winded way of saying that I appreciate what you do, and I appreciate you being here and sharing so openly today. Okay, it was great having you on.

Christophe Zoghbi 33:52

Thank you so much, Pedro. It was uh lovely being here as well, and uh I had a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

Davis Nguyen 33:58

That's it for this episode. This episode, as well as this podcast, was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help business owners elevate their business to six, seven, and eight figured years all without burning out. If you're looking to grow your business as well as get the time freedom that you are looking for, visit us at join purplecircle.com and see what we can do to help you end your business.