Egyptian-born newcomer Moatassem Moatez builds a successful business during the pandemic

Credit to Author: Lisa Evans| Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2022 16:40:29 +0000

Imagine you decide to start a new company in a country you recently immigrated to. You don’t have any clients yet and rather than try to get the small fish in the sea and build from the ground up, you decide to knock on the door of the largest online retailer in the world – Amazon.

Now, imagine they say yes?

Moatassem Moatez, CEO of MyCourier

That’s what happened to Moatassem Moatez, CEO of MyCourier. Moatez was born in Egypt, spent 15 years building a career in Dubai and immigrated to Canada with his wife and two children in August 2019, only six months before the world would be shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months after arriving in Canada, Moatez decided to start an e-commerce business selling an outdoor retractable stool that he branded Yellow Box.

“The first shipment came at the end of January, then boom – March 2020 came. I felt I was literally just starting,” he says. With people in lockdown and mindsets shifting from outdoor social activities to isolation activities, Moatez decided to scrap the business and donated the entire shipment of the product to charity.

“If you leave it in the warehouse, you’re paying for the warehouse and it’s not selling,” he says.

By May 2020, Moatez was done with the Yellow Box. He says this was the dark part in his journey. Still new to the country, having received a lot of no’s from companies he’d applied to, the pandemic felt like a dark cloud over what he had hoped would be a bright future in Canada.

Then out of the darkness came the idea for MyCourier. “I was calling a neighbourhood grocery store. I asked them for a couple of products, and I wanted delivery. The gentleman told me, ‘We don’t have delivery capacity.’”

Moatez figured that there must be other local retailers with the same issue. He dove into researching the courier business. For three months, he worked as a driver, using his own car, picking up and delivering flowers, pharmaceuticals, and the like. As he was working, he was speaking with customers to determine what could make the delivery experience better.

Being a delivery driver during the pandemic wasn’t easy. Moatez experienced a strange duality of treatment. Some people expected him to be a carrier of the virus. “You are the COVID yourself,” he says. “People asking you not to go into the elevator, people asking you to go to the back door, the side door.”

But Moatez says he also experienced the kindness Canadians are so known for. “One time at a bank, people were lining up outside. I had my vest on and was going to stand in the line to pick up some papers. It would have eaten up my whole day. People said you’re a front liner, please cut the line and go do your job.”

Moatez says these experiences reinforced to him how easy it was to dwell on the negative experiences and encounters, but when something good happens, like someone opening a door for you or giving you a bottle of water, it could turn the whole day around.

In July 2020, Moatez launched MyCourier, a courier company that could offer more personalized and customized service with delivery times  that could be adjusted to meet flexible office hours; something that larger delivery businesses don’t have the flexibility to offer.

Without a single client, he decided to cold call the world’s largest retailer, Amazon. “I thought let’s shoot for the moon. What will I lose?”

Moatez didn’t have an impressive list of customers to share with Amazon (they were going to be his first client). Nor did he have a long history of running the company (he didn’t even have a truck yet). But what he did have was experience.

“The courier business is about managing a huge number of drivers at the same time,” he says. Moatez, a serial entrepreneur who had run a series of start-ups in the Middle East, was used to managing teams on the ground, hiring, training and performance monitoring. “Amazon can work with big companies, but they also want someone that has this mindset of how can we solve this, how can we push through when things become really tough on the ground,” says Moatez.

He secured the Amazon contract and started delivering in downtown Toronto. MyCourier now has approximately 100 drivers and continues to work with Amazon as well as independent retailers.

In 2022, Moatez received the Oakville Chamber of Commerce’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award and is now in discussions of expanding his company into Quebec.

Moatez has five tips to share with newcomers.

1. Park your ego. You’re going to hear a lot of no’s, but if you take it personally, you’re never going to move forward.

2. Ask. You’ll never know the ‘no’ if you don’t ask.3. Believe in yourself. You never know what your capabilities really are until you are faced with a challenge that forces you to do things your own mind could never imagine you would do.

4. Have faith that things will fall in place at the right time for you.

5. Count your blessings. If you have your health, your family, your support system, a roof over your head and food, these are blessings.

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