Today's Guest

Mohammad Anwar is the President and CEO of Softway and Culture+ and the WSJ Best-Selling Author of Love As A Business Strategy: Resilience, Belonging & Success. Mohammad’s passion for helping companies build better relationships with their employees led him to start Softway in 2003. With over 200 employees worldwide, Softway provides companies with the products, services, live events, and leadership insights they need to endear teams to each other and build business resilience. Learn how to apply Love As A Business Strategy to your business and unlock untapped growth opportunities.

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:             Hey-hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street. And this week, we're fortunate to meet Mohammad Anwar. Welcome to the show, Mohammad.

Mohammad Anwar:     Thank you, nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Gordon Henry:             Great to have you. So quick intro on Mohammad Anwar. Mohammad is the Founder and CEO of Softway, a business to employ solutions company that helped builds high-performing companies. He is the co-author of Love as a Business Strategy, and he's also started a podcast by the same name. Mohammad is the youngest of five children, was born and raised in Saudi Arabia by Indian parents. He graduated from the University of Houston with a BS in Computer Science. And at 20 years old, started Softway, where he still serves as the president and CEO. He lives in Sugar Land, Texas with his wife Yulia, a Russian diver and five time Olympic medalist, and his children, Sufia and Moshin.

                                   In his spare time, enjoys fitness and watching college sports. What should you as a listener get out of this episode? Take a fresh look at how you do things in the business world. It can often lead to surprising findings. And in this episode, you'll hear about a very different approach to company culture. So Mohammad, welcome to the show. I'd like to start off by sort of flipping back to where you begin your book, Love as a Business Strategy. You start that book with a very stirring memory of a terrible day at Softway, the company you built, when you had to announce a big layoff and personally fire a room full of employees. Can you take us back to that dark day and how that led you to Love as a Business Strategy?

Mohammad Anwar:     Sure. So it had been approximately 12, 13 years that I had been running the business, and I had hit the pinnacle of success, at least I believed I had. And I was living the life, especially, as you might call it, sometime the American Dream as an immigrant to this country. And I was driving my fancy cars and flying planes across Texas, and I was like, "This is life. This is what it means to own a small business." Had 300 employees at the time, and I had just turned 30 years old, and I was living it. And then, the hardest day, we call it the darkest day in the history of Softway, where we had no choice but to lay off people in order for us to survive because things weren't working. Our clients were dropping off, we were hemorrhaging cash. And we were losing employees left and right. And our company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

                                   So in order to survive, I had to make a difficult decision to lay off almost one-third of our workforce, and did so in a very inhumane, dehumanizing manner, unfortunately. And to be honest, I wasn't the one who had to let go of the people. I actually was not in the room when the people were put together and told them that their employment had been terminated. I was actually in another room with the people who were not on that list. And it's a day that still, I'm reeling in from. I'm not proud of how we did it, what we did. Again, that kind of set me on this path of changing everything about Softway, about myself and how I showed up as a leader for the company.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. So as you just said, you were in kind of room B. In room A, the employees who were being let go were told by somebody else that they were no longer going to be working for the company. You were busy telling the people who were going to remain with the company, that they were the lucky ones, I guess. And that they were going to stay. So what was the insight? What was the feeling that you had that made you think, I've got to do something about this in the future. I got to change the way we go to market?

Mohammad Anwar:     So when we had just gone through our layoffs at that moment in time, I kind of had lost my entire entrepreneurial spirit. I did not think that I was the right person anymore. I had lost all my confidence and I didn't even know if the doors of Softway would remain open. I was kind of at the lowest low point of my life. And I had the opportunity to go to a football game for my alma moderate university Houston about two weeks after the layoffs. And I was actually excited because I wanted something, a distraction in my life. And so, I just wanted to not think about work, not think about everything that was going on, just wanted to go have a good time with my brother. And showed up at the game and we were playing a 10th game that could have been our 10th victory and we were undefeated that season. It was a miraculous season.

                                   And going into this anticipation of us winning the 10th game, our team was losing my 20 points going into the fourth quarter. And at that time, I felt deflated even further. No matter what I do, things are not going well. And I debated leaving the stadium with all the other fans that were just getting up and leaving. But something inside of me told me, stay back, be there to support your team till the end. I'm glad I did because we witnessed a comeback of the ages and we won by a point with less than 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter, which is very unlikely. And witnessing that comeback, I saw myself rejuvenated. I saw myself believing again that Softway can have its own comeback. And I started to see Softway through the eyes of the Houston Cougar football team and I envisioned her own fourth quarter financial comeback.

                                   And I went back that night and ready to go back into work on Monday and not give up and keep fighting. And Monday morning, I showed up to work, launched on Facebook live at 11:00 AM to see then a rookie head coach Tom Herman addressed the press conference about the victory the past Saturday. And it's what he said that changed the course of my life and Softway. When the question was asked, what had led to the resilience and the comeback of the team, his response was that it was love. It was love and support that those players had for one another is what led them to win that night. And he began to expand, "This is not the love you bro, love you dog kind of love. This is genuine, you have my heart in your hand kind of love." And it's that kind of love and support where the players go on the field not to fight for themselves, but they fight for the brothers next to them.

                                   And that's the kind of love and culture of love that builds championship teams. And you can only win championships with that kind of a culture. And my mind was exploding hearing all of this, and I'm like, "I never expected that answer," but let alone everything he was saying was making sense. And I went into a deep moment of introspection and asked myself, "Do I love my team the way coach Herman is describing the culture of love?" And the answer is a resounding no. And that's when I had to have a realization that this is all my fault. This was my failure and my leadership and how I was incredibly selfish. I was greedy and I had created an environment of fear and a toxic workplace environment where people weren't putting their heart and full self to the work that they were doing.

                                   And so, if I needed to see a comeback for Softway, I needed to go on a journey of committing to becoming a leader that is empathetic, trusting and vulnerable, and puts the needs of others before myself and create a circle of safety where people can be empowered to learn, grow, make mistakes, forgive one another, and thereby, creating an environment of resilience and belonging. I'm still on that journey. I'm nowhere close to the destination because there is no destination. It's a permanent state of transformation. But as we began to go on this journey, our company started to survive and near bankruptcy, but then, we also began to thrive to where we tripled our revenues. In three years, we improved our EBITDA margin by 42% at points. Our client retention went up from 60% and 90% and our employee attrition went down from 30% to 12%.

                                   And that's kind of how we survived through our near bankruptcy so much. And it was so successful that our clients started to witness a change in how we showed up to work, the quality of work we are producing, our technology services that we are providing. So much so that a large Fortune 10 company in Houston that's a longtime customer for ours, told us like, "Hey, we would love to have a little bit of Softway culture in our own walls. Can you help us?" We were flattered, but at the same time we were like, "No, that's not what we do. We can help you with technology and communications, but culture is not what we offer." And they were like, "Look, we trust you enough that you guys can do it. We've tried the Deloittes and the Mckenzies and our leaders go to training seminars, come back with T-shirts, but nothing really changes. We trust that you guys can do something."

                                   So they pushed us, persuaded us to do a pilot program for their senior leaders, and that pilot became extremely successful. Next thing you know, they put us on a jet, to jet around the world to go to 10 different countries, train 1,400 leaders from 46 different ethnicities, citizens backgrounds from all over the world. And we tried to teach them how to lead with love and it became an incredibly successful program. And having been with such a diversity of the human population from all over the world, we realized that love is ultimately the way to unify and it's the universal truth from a human standpoint that allows us to lead no matter where you're from. So we finally felt like we found a purpose in you calling, which is to bring back humanity to the workplace. And we believe that that can be done through bringing love in as a business strategy to achieve that outcome. And that's kind of how we got on our journey.

Gordon Henry:             Interesting. So we hear a lot about what you're describing with the Houston Cougar football team. In sports, I think you do hear a lot about the bonds of teams, especially we're in the trenches together. You certainly hear it in the military. When Marines and others talk about how they feel about their brothers, you don't hear it so much in the corporate world. And when you do hear it in the corporate world, I think you tend to picture, at least I picture those retreats where you do these trust falls and people like you say, wearing t-shirts and maybe they're paddling a canoe. It doesn't really quite rise to the level of what you think of in the sports and military examples. So what's different about your approach in the way it's implemented that goes beyond the kind of trite corporate retreat and gets into this more deep relationship building that you're talking about?

Mohammad Anwar:     Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So I'd say the main difference is all these team building activities that are very traditional in the corporate world don't necessarily build or translate into higher performance when it comes into work. Because you are able to go through these team building activities and superficially just have fun, get to know each other. But really, the real bonds are built when you go through tough times together. When you're vulnerable with one another, when you're able to share things that you wouldn't generally share with each other and experiencing one another from that lens. And in order to do that, we have to help the people of the organization to see each other from that human lens.

                                   And so, we curate experiences that allow teams and individuals to go through introspective and self-awareness journey where they are not just having a good time, which we think is important, but having real honest inward look within to understand, hey, am I truly showing up the way I think I'm being experienced or am I really the leader that I believe people are experiencing me as? Or am I the coworker that is genuinely having honest conversations and not just trying to be polite and build a fake harmony? Am I really having the tough conversations that need to be had because I love my teammate to where I don't want them to fail, so I'm going to tell them the truth.

                                   I'm going to give the feedback they deserve to hear because, and they will accept it and receive it because they know that I love them and I have the best intent for them. So they're not going to get offended, maybe it'll sting, but at the end of the day they're not going to get offended to where they won't talk to me ever again. And that's the kind of relationship building and environment setting that we need to create in the workplace. And we were able to do that and not only do it for ourselves, but now help our customers go through similar journeys. And that cannot happen just by going out and having team retreats.

                                   It has to come from a place of deep introspection and self-reflection. Doing that collectively, but also, individually and becoming vulnerable with one another. Understanding that I may be holding onto unforgiveness from something you did or said that hurt me. Or I need to really understand what is the definition of empathy, and what is empowerment, what is trust, what does inclusion look like? And that all begins with understanding yourself, your mindsets and how you show up with your behaviors around one another. So that's kind of the difference in how we take it. It is really like if us humans had an operating system, we're upgrading that operating system to kind of unlearn what they've known to how we should work and how we should show up in the corporate workplace.

                                   We've all have these learned behaviors and we've seen success, don't get me wrong by being a certain way, acting a certain way. But in today's day and age, if you really want to get to that high performance, we don't have to learn new stuff. We first have to unlearn all of those behaviors we have learned over the years, unlearn and then, relearn new ways of approaching work, new ways of behaving with one another, acting with one another, treating one another. That can't happen just over a retreat.

Gordon Henry:             You say in some of your marketing materials, the workplace revolution is here. That's one of the taglines I saw. So has this book caused a revolution? You mentioned one top Fortune 10 and you said Houston company that adopted it and sounded like they had good results. Has this been adopted by many companies?

Mohammad Anwar:     Well, we just began this journey and we wrote a book only in 2020, it released last year. So I think the journey, the revolution has already begun with or without us, right? It's happening, we're witnessing it through how COVID changed the way people work. How there is now remote work environments, how there's the great resignation and everything that we're seeing, the turmoil around the workplace. This is the people eventually standing up and saying, enough is enough. I don't have to go to the office to be micromanaged. I can still get my stuff done at home. I don't have to really work five days a week. I can get my work done in four days. I don't have to really be at one physical location to get the work done. And they're also realizing I'm probably worked a lot more elsewhere and I don't have to be attached to these perks and benefits such with the free ice cream and free food and ping pong tables.

                                   I can choose to not have to put up with any of that. And I think up until COVID, it was brewing, but COVID just exacerbated the whole revolution and we're amidst it right now and we're seeing how the whole workplace is changing. And so, I just see ourselves as probably bringing hope and confidence in amongst this revolution to hopefully help show employers and employees that there is a way to do meaningful work, impactful work that can lead to profitable outcomes without sacrificing people and their desires. And we can align both people with profit and do it in a different way. So I'm just hoping we are a solution to the workplace revolution, but I don't believe we caused it or contributed to it. It was bound to happen.

Gordon Henry:             Interesting. For you personally as the CEO of the company, what was it like introducing Love as a Business Strategy, as an idea? It's not very CEO like, right?

Mohammad Anwar:     Yes.

Gordon Henry:             You're making yourself vulnerable. You're using, frankly a word like love, which we've done 150 episodes on the show. I don't think I ever said the word until now. People would normally not expect this of a CEO, and yet you did that. How were you received?

Mohammad Anwar:     So Saturday was the game. Monday, I had coach Tom Herman. Tuesday morning, we had a company wide event with approximately 200 people at a town hall kind of meeting. And I shared the story of the football team and I told everybody I love them. And I said, "I love you all." And this is about two weeks after lay-offs. And people let me tell you, they were rolling their eyes, they were definitely giving me the looks, they were concerned if I was fine. I learned a lot more stories of how people responded. They were like, "Oh, great Mo went on a football game and he's just high on that win and here's another flavor of the month." And so, that's how people responded. But I think the key was after that declaration, I realized I can't just declare, I have to act on it. So I had to personally, without mentioning love, I had to be a leader that acts with love or leads with love.

                                   And I had to really begin with myself and how I treated people, how I acted, how I behaved. And don't get me wrong, I couldn't change overnight. It was very difficult. I still have, our people call it the moments when I get upset or yell or scream, I still have those moments. But the frequencies is a lot lower, and it was a journey. It's still a journey. It was hard, but the more and more we went through the journey over time, people started to see a genuine care and genuine effort that I was really trying to make. And people began to actually believe in this approach and started to have confidence. And a lot of them decided to support me, be beside me, give me the feedback I deserve to hear, hold me accountable when I was not behaving in ways I should be behaving.

                                   And they did things for me I never expected. They did things for one another that spread that love even further. And soon, people who were amidst financial uncertainty with a company that's all known near bankrupt, they could have quit and left, but they decided to stick it out. They decided to stay with Softway. They decided to do things that for Softway even amidst financial uncertainty and got us through it together. And we're still now getting through many other challenges together, but we're also spreading with the others in the world how we can use love as a business strategy. So it's quite remarkable.

Gordon Henry:             You started off by saying that the journey sort of began that day where one room was people were getting fired, the other room people were being told they'd stay. And I think you said that the people were fired in an inhumane way. So now that you've kind of seen the light with Love as a Business Strategy, what's the humane way to fire people?

Mohammad Anwar:     So I can give it to you in the context of how I did it. So when I did it, I basically was not even there to deliver the news, deliver the message. Because I think in business, I don't want to leave with the misrepresentation that things like this will not happen in business. I think this is business. There will be times when we will have to do cost cutting, which could result in people being let go. But I think through Love as a Business Strategy, not only will we try to avoid that situation because if we are operating through true love, then everybody will be in it to make sure a company doesn't have to even reach a point of layoffs. And through COVID, we actually did encounter another almost existential threat. And I saw that our teams were willing to sacrifice their own paychecks, were willing to do a lot of things out of their own way to support one another so that we all were willing to suffer little, than some suffered more.

                                   And I saw that whole collaboration and camaraderie come together to survive. So we can avoid as long as possible, any job losses or layoffs and so forth. So that in itself is a big achievement, right? Because you're not even trying to get to that point and everybody works together to do it. But then, even if we do end up having to separate ways with certain folks, now it's done in a more humane way. It's done in a way that it's not a surprise, it's not something that's done in a way you're treated, like get out, take your box, be escorted of its security folks more, how can I help? What can I do? How can I get you your next job?

                                   How can I be a referral for you and even apologize for the situation and make sure they understand that it's not on them. It is the business's fault and the business situation, not you and so forth. So the conversations are different. I would be personally involved. It's be a very difficult conversation no matter what, but at least I would want to be there. I would want to be the face of it. I would want to be the one delivering the message and not hide behind my HR director or the security people escorting them or any of those things. So I think that changes the whole dynamic and it's done in a more human manner.

Gordon Henry:             We'll be right back with more from Mohammad Anwar. But first a message from our friends at Build Scale Grow. Build Scale Grow provides fractional COO and CFO services so you can focus on exponential growth. The insightful leaders at Build Scale Grow apply hard one lessons to help you scale quickly and exit successfully. Let Build Scale Grow's experienced team of operations and finance experts, install industry leading practices, people and software. So you can concentrate your time and energy on expanding Visit. webuildscalegrow.com to learn more, that's webuildscalegrow.com. And we're back with Mohammad Anwar, the CEO of Softway, and we're talking about his book and new strategy called Love as a Business Strategy. Let's step back and take a look quickly at your background, Mohammad. Do you have an interesting background? What was growing up in your family, and what got you to the US where you could launch a company at 20 years old?

Mohammad Anwar:     So I was born in Saudi Arabia to worker immigrants in Saudi Arabia from India. So my parents are Indian, I'm ethnically Indian, but I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia for about 14 years of my life. I went to school there, lived there. And then, I went to India for a year and then, I moved to Kansas in the United States to finish up my high school at a Catholic prep school in a small town called Atchison, Kansas. It's the birthplace of Amelia Earhart. And after, I stayed in the dorms there and after I finished high school, I was staying away from my family. I had moved out when I was 14, so I was ready to get close to family. So at the time, my sister and brother were living and pursuing their careers in Houston, Texas. So I chose to move in with my sister and go to college here at the University of Houston. So that's what brought me to Houston.

                                   And as I was pursuing my computer science degree, I met my wife in college who happens to be from Russia. She was on an athletic scholarship for the swimming and diving team and I was her math tutor and that's how we met. And we have two beautiful kids, Indian Russian American kids. And I can tell you it's full thing that this only happens in America. America is the true land of opportunity, but also the true melting pot where you can come from any background, wherever you're from, whatever your religion, whatever your ethnicity, you have these amazing opportunities to do something that can make a difference.

                                   And for me, I had the opportunity to start a business at 20 and do some amazing things that I can tell you it's not that easy to do in other parts of the world, let alone meet and marry a Russian. I don't know if I would've heard on that if I was in Saudi or if I was in India. So it's just amazing and I am extremely grateful for being able to have immigrated to this country and to do meaningful, impactful work. And now hopefully giving back to not just the United States, but to the world, a message that I think is much needed today, which is love.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, that's great. I do want to ask you about Yulia. She sounds pretty amazing too, a Russian diver, five time Olympic medalist, she must have started there. They all seem to start very young. Was she one of those super young athletes we see at the Olympics every four years?

Mohammad Anwar:     Yes. So she started when she was five years old, but that was during the Soviet Union era. So she was pretty much property of the state as she began on her diving journey. And her father was her coach and she made it to Sydney 2000 where she won a gold. And then, in [inaudible 00:28:52], she won a silver and bronze. And then, in Beijing, she won two silvers and we were married by the time we were the Beijing Olympics. I showed up to Beijing to support a rational athlete as an Indian ethnicity holding up a Russian flag.

                                   But who's American supporting a Russian? And the people in the audience are so confused, they were like, "Who are you? There are no Indians here, but you're holding up a Russian flag which can't speak Russian, what the hell is going on?" So it was an interesting experience. But, I guess, she's phenomenal. Five time Olympic medalist and without her support and her beside me, I wouldn't be where I am. I mean, I owe it to her to even give me the willingness and the fire to fight and do something meaningful in the world. I mean, a lot of that inspiration comes from Yulia, and what she was able to do.

Gordon Henry:             In your book, you do make some mention of diversity and inclusion and I'm curious, as somebody born to Indian parents raised in Saudi Arabia, immigrant to this country, have you felt prejudice in the United States?

Mohammad Anwar:     So to be honest, I have felt prejudice in all parts of the world in some form or fashion, some very overt and some not so overt. So for example, living in Saudi Arabia as a child of an Indian immigrant worker, it was a very different environment. It was not an environment that I would like to go back to. Probably my whole passion of bringing love to the world has to do with my childhood. I was not treated very well. I would go into say Burger King and I would stand in line and if a local Arab person walked in, they could cut in front of you and you couldn't say anything.

                                   My father would drive the car. And if he overtook a local at a signal, I've seen the person come out, slap my father in the face and say, "How dare you overtake me? You're Indian, stay in your lane." I have witnessed all of those things as a child, I've experienced all of those things as a child. So I have a keen desire to make sure that the treatment of people is never dehumanizing. And although I was guilty of it to a certain extent in my own business, I have a keen passion to end it, to make sure we don't allow it, don't see it happen anywhere in the world. And so, does it exist in the United States and in the world. I say yes, but it's not that over. It's not like what I experienced in other parts of the world. But I think America is going to be the leading voice in the world to make that change.

                                   Because if there is a country that can make the change and set the standard for the rest of the world, it has to come from America because we're very progressive in speaking up for those injustices and human conditions. And we are not afraid to call ourselves out and lead the change. And I admire that we can do that, we can speak about it openly, we can discuss it. We can have honest conversations about diversity and inclusion and lead the path forward for the rest of the world to follow. So that's kind of my opinion. I think it exists everywhere because humans are humans. This is a human problem, not a country problem, not a nation's problem. But I think the way our environment and the country is set up, it gives us the freedom and the voice to lead the change. So I do see us making big efforts and strides in bringing that human-centric concept to the world.

Gordon Henry:             We just have a few minutes left. So you, at 20 years old, started Softway, you got this incredible family, you've now made this book, which is inspiring companies, big and small to make these changes. What's next for Mohammad Anwar?

Mohammad Anwar:     I genuinely believe that I have found my true purpose and passion point for why I might exist in this world. And for me, I'm very steadfast now on this vision of bringing back humanity to the workplace. Because I believe if you want to see real change in the world, it has to start with the workplace. We all spend more awake hours in the workplace than with our own families and loved ones. And the corporate world has huge influences on the planet, on the governments, on policies and everything.

                                   And instead of working around corporations, I genuinely believe if we are able to start bringing the human-centric approach to the corporate workplace, we might be able to see real change around the world and meaningful change and impactful change. So I'm committed to it, I'm going to hold steadfast to this approach. I might change how I do it, but ultimately, even if not in my lifetime, I would love to see our work contribute to creating a movement and a change to the corporate workplace and eventually leading to a better world for everyone.

Gordon Henry:             Well, very exciting and I'll be eager to see where this goes for you and those who you're working with. Where can people who are listening to this learn more about what you're doing? As I said to you at the beginning of the show before we started, we have listeners who run businesses, many of them small businesses as well as some larger businesses. They might be interested in finding more about how to do this in their own companies. How should they get in touch with you?

Mohammad Anwar:     Yeah, I think number one, the book is pretty much a playbook if you're looking to get some inspiration and really our book, while a Playbook, we lead with our own vulnerabilities and failures as a way of learning. So loveasabusinessstrategy.com, check us out, you can buy a book. But also if you work at a corporate workplace environment where you're looking to bring a change with leadership and with culture, you can go to culture-plus.com, culture hyphen plus.com. And we have a suite of products and solutions where we offer culture as a service to help corporations go on this journey of strengthening their culture to bring people at the center of all their business decisions.

Gordon Henry:             Good stuff. Well, Muhammad, I want to thank you for coming on our shows. It's been really interesting journey to listen to this and it's just great to have you here.

Mohammad Anwar:     Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity

Gordon Henry:             And I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman and our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe. Please leave us five-star review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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