We really had to go through this whole process of educating the author local authorities as well and saying, look, this is a good thing for the city. We're promoting a healthy lifestyle, the communities, residents that are living here. They love this sport. You know, don't give up when the times do get tough because they are gonna get tough. And, you know, you'll go through things like, well, our business was completely closed and we were like, okay. What are we gonna do now? We don't have any income at all. We're getting fined if we went to the beach with our surfboard, and that fine would double if you got caught again and then double again. And, you know, so it was very stressful moment, but you just gotta keep going and just keep doing what you love and your passion.

I asked Daniel to be more specific. What exactly do you need to do in the UAE to develop your business despite the obstacles?

You have to earn that respect basically from them. You know, you go down, you have coffee with them, you eat dates with them, you, you know, you chat about their life stories, you just build that relationship. Right? But it takes time. Yeah. You just kind of build those relationships over time. And then one of our big things was having surfers in the water. This was before lifeguard systems they had in Dubai. We were saving a lot of the swimmers that were drowning. We had a flotation device. Swimmers surfers are quite strong swimmers. So we would we'd see someone drown. We'd swim over to them with a surfboard, put them on the board, and then take them back in. That was also an aspect where we said, look. If we're in the water, we're gonna help you. We're we're almost like the the good Samaritan, the unofficial lifeguards that they didn't have at the time. So that was a big winning point for us.

After six months, the ban was finally ended. I've heard that to do business in the UAE, you have to build relationships, drink coffee, talk. I've also heard that it's important to prove your usefulness to the city and the community, but this is the first time it literally took saving lives to do that. Next, Daniel and Scott faced a new problem. Okay. They were allowed to surf, but how do they make Dubai a tempting destination for surfers from all over the world? Like, how do you get them to come here specifically to surf?

It's a very good one. And, when my business partner and I were kind of drawing a a map for the future of where the business was gonna go, we I remember very clearly we had a whiteboard, and we just draw a local beach. In the top corner, we had letting people know that Dubai is a surf destination and that when people fly in, say if they're going to, you know, east, west, Dubai is always a hub and they stop over. And they're bringing their surfboards, but they don't get out because they don't think you can surf and then you just carry on. So our goal was how do we keep those guys that are coming in and let them know the rest of the world that that Dubai you can't surf, basically. We still get the question, you know, oh, I didn't know you can surf in Dubai, but that's less and less now. A lot of people know you can, and especially these wave pools now opening up. So, yeah, we just social media, was a big one for us. We have surfing events now where international competitors are coming in. The sponsors are very good, so the prizes are fantastic. So it's actually worth people flying in to come and enter the competition to win and then and then fly back out. So that's helped a lot. And then us going to the major events around the world as well, so the major surfing events and just showing our face and letting people know that you can surf in Dubai. So it took a long time. Now we have a UAE national team representing, obviously, the UAE in the, Asian championships, which is happening in five days in, Maldives.

Yeah. That's a sick one from Mohammed. I I love his style. I love, you know, his stance is secure. He's solid. He wanted to ride out of it.

You hear that?

His hands were out front. Here we go. Look at this.

That's our team competing at the championships in the Maldives.

Comes down the line and manages to stick the landing on this one. He bends down, you know, make sure he doesn't fall off.

Is that it? Success? Childhood friends, Daniel and Scott, start their business barefoot on the beach, become the first and only in their field, and participate in making Dubai surfing to the world stage. But there is a catch. There's always catch in the business.

Basically, our business would only run on the days when we had waves. So I don't know if you know how wave patterns work, but whenever the wind picks up and gets strong enough, you usually have two to three days of waves. And then once the wind drops down, then it's flat again. So we used to go online and just check when the forecast was gonna be up, and then we, you know, message people and go on the beaches when there'll be waves. So we would have typically about eighty to ninety days a year of surfing waves in Dubai. So it's not like we get it every single day. So our business was only running, imagine, eighty to ninety days a year. Because all other surf schools around the world, like, say, in Australia or in France and know, they get waste pretty much every day. So they can just run their business on a daily basis. It doesn't really matter. Whereas us, we're very limited.

So how could this business survive and grow if they only could work ninety days of a year? It's like, what, one quarter of a year? Daniel Scott had found beautiful solution for that.

So we knew that we couldn't survive off only surfing days. So we knew that we had to start generating business on those days when there were no waves, But we wanted to stay true ourselves and enter the business and not outsell ourselves doing something that we don't believe in. Surfing is a very you have, you know, a healthy kind of fit lifestyle. You have to be trained. You have to exercise. You have to eat healthy if you wanna perform. So we started, surf fitness classes on the beach, so in the days when there were no waves. Not like a boot camp, but it was similar, but it was all surf, related exercises.

To add surfing fitness on a beach is only the first step. Bason discovered another problem they could solve with their business, another undeserved demand.

So just to give you an idea, when we grew up surfing here, there was probably about twenty five surfers in the whole of Dubai, the whole of the UAE. So it was very, very small, and everyone knew everyone. And you couldn't get any surf products in Dubai. No shops were selling it here, so you'd have to wait until you'd go on holiday and then come back to get some gear or if your friend was going somewhere. As you know, online shopping back then wasn't a thing. If you broke your surfboard, you know, you'd have to wait a couple months until somebody else could bring another board in. So that's kind of what brought the whole idea and the demand for it. So you imagine that back then, twenty five surfers, and now we're talking about maybe thirty five hundred surfers here now in the region. So it's growing quite a lot. That's when the retail started coming into play. So So when I was in Australia, I met a lot of the that's where all the main headquarters are for the big brands. Just to name a few, the creatures of leisure, futures, SDS, all the major big surfing brands are all there. So I made some contacts and said we would like to be your distributors for the region. We don't have much waves. It's a very small scene, but it's growing. Would you be interested in us becoming your partner or your dealer for the region? And so it kinda grew like that. We opened up a shop. So the strategy for that one was to get the best products at the best prices possible. And the, basically, number one, like, rule rule of thumb was that I would never sell anything that I wouldn't use myself. So I wouldn't you know, just because it's cheap and I'm gonna make a quick buck, I'm not gonna bring that product into my business. If I believe in it and I would actually use that product myself, then I would sell it to you. So if I was comfortable with the quality of it, the price point, the everything, then that was kind of like the the passing point of us choosing which brands to work with, which products to sell. Yeah. For me, my favorite part is the retail just because I get to sit there and order all of the products that I would like to have myself. So then fitness training, retail, And then that one thing that was missing. So people were coming to us, going surfing. They were getting fit, and then everyone was hungry. And then they were just leaving and going to all these other places and spending money. Like, why don't we just set up a health food cafe that's, basically our concept is surf meals from around the world. So if you travel to Indonesia, you're gonna expect to have a nazi growing. If you go to Brazil, you're gonna get an acai. If you go to Australia, you're gonna have avocado on toast. If you go to Hawaii, you're gonna have poke bowls. So we wanted to bring that staple dish from all those iconic surf destinations from around the world into one place. So that was the the idea of the cafe. And then again, people stayed, and they didn't leave. They spent money back into the cafe. So it was a that was a real big game changer. That was another thing we said. Okay. Surfing in the region is very small, and we're limited to a certain amount of people. With food, everyone eats. Right? You don't need to be a surfer to eat. That was another kind of big game changer for us was just to enter into those other communities, those other markets. And one of those communities was the triathletes. They all train on the beach where we surf. They go swimming. There's a big cycle track right next to us, so they all cycle around there. And, you know, they're like minded. Even though they don't surf, they still want fitness kind of healthy lifestyle. So we started introducing the the triathletes and giving them some incentives, like discounts and free coffees and things like that. So we tapped into the the triathlon community, which then led into the running communities and then the cycling community. So that was a really kind of strategic move, but also not outselling ourselves. Just over there where I'm looking now, we have a triathlon shop, inside the facility. Yeah. That community really kind of found this as their base. So we thought, okay. Well, let's do a triathlon shop as well. So not us particularly, but we rent that space out. If you're proud because you were there from the start, we've probably impacted quite a lot of that growth back from its humble days with twenty five surfers. Obviously, Dubai as a whole has just grown, so people do come here, and that's just a natural kind of tendency. So we haven't contributed everything hundred percent to it. But, yeah, it's it's nice to know that we've started from those humble beginnings, and we've taught, you know, thousands and thousands of people in this region. And it's like this full lifestyle where we teach somebody who's never touched the surfboard before and introduce them to the sport in a safe way. They get hooked, then they buy their surfboard, and then we also do surf trips as well. So then they'll join us on local surf trips around, say, to Oman or international trips to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Maldives. So it's this full life cycle where we get them kind of hooked into it, and it becomes part of their life. And then they meet new people, new friends, and they start going on surf holidays with the whole family. So it's a really cool cycle to see happen. Now if you go on Emirates Airlines, when you're flying in into Dubai, you see surfing now on the advertising. It just it's a cool thing and and everyone's using surfing now as as their marketing, it seems. You know, banks are using it and hotels, you know, you go along the kind of just selling that whole lifestyle of of surfings.

I've been thinking a lot about this story. What's the key to success here and what I can learn from it from my business? I was thinking about the fact that if you bring something to the Emirati market that has not been there before, but for which the Emirates have all the conditions, then you're almost doomed to succeed. It's like riding a big wave. Yes, you still need to have business skills and the ability to negotiate with officials, for example, but the pull from the market, the force of demand is so great that it literally drags you to success. The same magic happened with our guests from previous season. Do you remember Lydia who brought a new way to learn Arabic to the Emirates? The market was ready for it. The market needed it, but no school could meet this demand to teach you start speaking Arabic in three hours. And when Lydia brought such a product to the emirate, her school was literally destined for success. In business, they call it blue ocean, when you have innovative business with no competition. Cool. But I have a completely different situation. That's what she literally told me. We have the same industry, but we have completely different markets when it comes to language. Like, it's true. I'm not the first to bring English learning to the Emirates. There are hundreds of English schools in Dubai alone, and anyone in the MENU region can connect to any of the international online schools, and I think there are millions of them. So how can I succeed if I'm not the first or even the hundredth in this market? I talked about this with my second guest, Grina Volgac, founder and CEO of YOLO Real Estate. Ever since she moved to the Emirates, she, like me, has been swimming in a bloody scarlet ocean surrounded by a hundred competitors. But she was lucky. She came to the Emirates with business experience that she got in her hometown, Voronezh, Russia. This is how it all began.

I'm coming from Voronezh. This is the city of Russia, pretty big city. It's not that big as Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but still it's the center of Black Sun region with one million of population living there. Five hundred kilometers from Moscow, so we are pretty close to everything that is going on in business life. And in Voronezh, there is a lot of business, a lot of retail stores trading. Whoever has a nice education, active, and has this entrepreneurship in heart, he tries to build his own company or his own business. So I was not the exception.

Galina started your business with her sister and a best friend. It was a construction company that promises clients to make fit up renovation in their apartment with a fixed budget and a fixed term.

We, ourselves, we're buying several apartments in our lives, and they're making this fit out process, and it took forever. The problem we face is when people buy the apartment, they buy it absolutely empty. So they need some help, and, anyhow, they need the company that brings the service or fit out or furnishing and doing things like that. And we recognize at some point that there is no company in the market that can provide the clear documents and clear understandable contract setting the stable and limited timing of fit out of the apartment. And, also, nobody in the market for some strange reason in Russia in general, nobody can fix the price. So whoever tells you the price from the beginning on your fit out, will the price will be increased by the end of your construction work? So we were basically me and my partners, we were the first ones in Russia who offered the contract, and the contract included both fixed price and fixed timing. So within three months, whatever apartment it is, it could be a huge three bedroom apartment or it can be a small studio. Whatever we take in three months, it's done, including all the jobs, all the materials, cleaning, maintaining, like, everything. So this was our business, and it did pretty good. We grew twice from year to year. And from business perspective, from the business model perspective, what we did was several decisions that really was very new to the market. Like, one of them was we realized that if we buy the big portions of materials, like bulk deals, and we can get buying that. And doing that, we can get a really nice discounts from the providers. So our main idea was to be able to offer the same price that people would just go to buy, like, in any supermarket or in any fit out store. So for the end user, it would be the same price. But having this discount, like, fifteen to twenty percent discount, we can provide the cheaper prices. So this was, decision number one. The second step we took was going away from when everyone in your construction team does everything. That's what it's usually organized, the way it's organized. So, like, people make tiles, they do electricity, they do the plumbing, like they do everything. So first thing we did was separating different types of jobs. We had this vertical of electricians. We had this vertical of the tile guys, then flooring guys, like so this was the way to make it happen in the shorter period of time. So this is how we managed to handle the timing. And the third thing we did was, trying to make as typical design as possible. So instead of developing the individual design project and individual fit out construction team, we were trying to make it as common as possible. And we created three basic designs, and people were not really customizing the design for themselves. So they only could choose one of three, Scandinavian design, minimalism, or classic design. That's it. So you cannot add something. You cannot add your own wallpapers or you cannot choose the color of the floors or the color of the painting on the walls. So we only have, like, very, very limited choice that allows us from, the business model perspective to make the fit out process as simple and as fast as possible. So this was the third main decision.

I love the beauty of this business solution. So they developed three standard designs for apartment fit out. Since the designs are standard, the budget is predictable, so they can promise clients something that no one could promise before, a fixed price. If she said that the renovation will cost a million, then that's how much it will cost. As the designs are standard, that means that the work on them is also standard, And that means that Galina does not need to outsource to new specialists on the site for each order, but hire a staff of qualified specialists tailored specifically for her work. So Galina manages to keep another unprecedented promise to meet the feed out deadline. If she said that the repair will take two months, then that's how long it will take. But that's not all. If the design is standard, then you always use the same materials. Right? That means that you can buy them in bulk and earn money from the difference in wholesale and retail prices. This is how Gallina manages to raise the marginality of the entire project without raising prices for her clients. Gallina was not the first to start renovating apartments in Varanasi, but thanks to her new approach to this industry, she managed to build a unique business that soon proved to be beyond competition.

And, also, I think that marketing is number one. If you have a strong marketing team, you can conquer the world. This is what I feel. And now I still feel though I run another business completely different business. But what we did, like, we realized that none of the construction companies, they were really very, very poor in marketing. They didn't have nice websites. They didn't use Facebook. They didn't know what Instagram is. And when we were doing a lot and strong marketing, we were doing YouTube reviews and room tours. We were making a lot of filmings, reels, and Instagram. Like, all these construction guys, they were going crazy. They're like, these strange ladies, what are they doing? They're just sitting in the phone. I mean, it will not help, but it did help in many ways. So we gained so many subscribers in such a short period of time. Like, there was around seventeen thousand subscribers in our Instagram, and Instagram was instrument number one for lead generation back then. We managed to make the seal optimization of our website. So whoever was, you know, searching for construction teams or construction companies, we were popping up the first in the first pages in Google. So this really helped a lot. And basically, like, all the business model was based on this marketing decisions. And after five years of doing this business, me and my sister, we realized that there is another way of doing the same things. And what we did was taking the loan, buying the apartment, shell and core, very destroyed, very bad, in a very, very poor condition, but in a good location. We were making the food fit out and selling these apartments. Using this model within one year and a half, we managed to make five or six of such apartments and gain like, the margin was one hundred, one hundred fifty percent. So we're like, oh my god. What was this before? For five years. We realized that this, renovation thing brings much, much more money. This where idea of making the business on real estate came from, and we made it less the separate business, the parallel business to our main one. Then in two thousand twenty two, war started with the Ukraine, and we had to leave the country because I'm Russian. My husband is Ukrainian, so we didn't really want it to be involved in all this situation. And we chose Dubai because Dubai was very strong, and it is very strong of economy in developing their country in general. It has very, very strong relationship with other countries, very, very welcoming to different nationalities, and real estate was booming than that. So, like, when we moved to Dubai, we didn't want to continue this construction process. We just jumped right into the real estate business. Literally, we came down to zero. We sold our business. We sold all the apartments we had. We sold our home. We sold our cars, and we went to nowhere. We didn't even visit Dubai before. It was all from scratch, one hundred percent. Very frightening at first. What's gonna happen next? We didn't know the prices. The prices seemed very high. The first year was just expenses, expenses, expenses, and they seemed like the street will never end. The first problem we faced, and this was a huge, huge difference from what we experienced in Russia. In Russia, we were doing the business in blue ocean, like, completely blue. Nobody was there. No competition. No other companies was offering the same. In Dubai, we jumped right into the red ocean, like, dark red ocean because real estate in Dubai is so hot. I mean, it's ridiculously competitive marketing, very aggressive. And a lot of people thinks that Dubai is about oil and gas. It was back then, like, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. It was only about oil. Today, it's not about oil. Construction and real estate sector takes twenty percent of Dubai economy. Like, it's a huge part of economy. A lot of companies, huge companies having six hundred, one thousand employees, and it's very, very hard to compete. And even if we speak about dealing with customers, I didn't get used to the situation when one customer deals with thirty people. And here in Dubai, they, like, really, they speak to ten, twenty, thirty agents or whatever agents, and the chances to close the deal is so small. This is what I didn't realize, but when I realized that it was too late because I'm already starting doing business in real estate.

Welcome to the red ocean. As Lisa, I feel exactly the same way. I wonder what Galina came up with for her yet another real estate agency.

So as the real estate market is so so competitive, we had to find an idea. So the first thing I did, I went to get the education, and I entered the London College of Economic and Political Science, and I got this certificate of real estate investment. So this is how I understand how to calculate return on investment, capital appreciation, what is more valued, what is the demand or the offering, like, how the market feels, what it depends on, or what the factors you should mention when you think of buying real estate. So, like, the first thing, number one, for me, it's this is just my way. I don't know. Like, different people do it differently, is to get this theoretical parts and, you know, to get the knowledge, basically. So this was the hard part because it took me three and a half months of studying. Last summer, I was studying, like, the whole summer, and it was such a huge volume of information. Like, I've never ever experienced it was in English and, you know, a lot of terminology of real estate, like, specific things you need to know. It was really hard, but, yeah, it gave me, like, a lot of things as a basic.

Galina started to better understand the specific of the real estate market even though she already had seven years of experience in this. This is her foundation, the theoretical part. And then she began to look for what could become that very unique approach that would distinguish your company Yolo Real Estate in the market. And the first idea is to use the state data on the real estate.

Thing number one, which is accessible to everyone, is data. What I love about Dubai economy and Dubai real estate market specifically that all the data is opened. I like everyone can see all the transactions on specific buildings, on specific areas, on specific developers, how much the property was bought for, how much it was sold for, when it was sold, like, how long did it take to sell this specific property? How much, for example, villas grow in price year to year, month to month, quarter to quarter? What's going on in commercial? What's going on in residential? Like, what's going on in plots building? You have all this information. And this is what shocked me the most that Dubai at some point, like, around fifteen years ago, Dubai land department that regulates the whole real estate market, they just made this data open. For those who don't use this data, I'm so sincerely surprised when I see that people don't use this. I mean, it's there. You can just take numbers, and it's not only, like, buy this property. It's nice. It's number based decisions. So this is the second thing I definitely used to build the strategy in the company to understand today, we're doing this kind of property. Tomorrow, we're doing luxurious property. Then the market slows down. For example, you switch from luxurious property to the cheaper property, like, as simple as it is. And, also, we use this knowledge and these numbers to work with investors and clients. Because I think, like, the most important thing is not, you know, to buy intuitionally. You need to count. You need to be able to count, and that's what our profession is about. We are property advisers. We need to tell people what to do because they don't know. They shouldn't know. Obviously, it's just another field of studying. That's what they pay for, for you to know what to do and to advise them.

The second attempt to find something unique is to start with marketing. This is what had worked for Galin and Varunish. So why not try it in Dubai? Right? Make cool content, involve the audience.

So the first one we officially hired was videographer because I had this idea, oh, we need to start our YouTube channel. And I'm like, oh, okay. I need someone. I just Google it. And then I asked a couple of my friends. Somebody advised me a nice videographer, and, yeah, first official employee was videographer. And everyone was like, oh, really? Don't tell me this. Why did you do this? So I think in this business, you need to show what you sell. You need to show nice properties and make really nice photos and videos. And, yes, he was, like, extremely well in this one. This is what I first did. I just began to create video content. It was reels. I made these, overviews of the areas of Dubai. In my Russian channel, I was discussing about the profession of broker. And by the way, this was, like, extremely well. These videos jumped up in the search. If you type in, like, how to find a job as a new real estate agent or how much real estate agents earn in Dubai, usually, like, somewhere, like, first ten is my videos. And this is the main source of, hiring people, by the way. A lot a lot of candidates just write me from those videos. Also, we were just filming their properties themselves. I mean, villas or nice apartments. I was speaking about new projects that come up to the market, like, things like that. Strategic locations, things like that. Then I realized that probably Russian audience is not enough for me. They say that Russians are number three buyers in the market. I mean, it's probably true in a way for two thousand twenty two, two thousand twenty three. But, I mean, it's not you know, most of the buyers are Russians. I cannot say this. I would say it's maybe ten, fifteen percent of Russians. As for now, beginning from this year, we transferred all the marketing to international clients, international buyers, international sellers. Now we started to develop, our content in English. It's getting so hard to promote yourself in social media now. You know, I've heard one of, the brokers in the market in her real. She said ninety percent of real estate brokers of Dubai make TikTok videos, and only twenty percent make money. It seems like, yeah, it's really what's going on in the market now. They do film a lot. I mean, everyone is filming, but not everyone sells well. Not everyone makes, you know, business and makes money. So this is the sad part. But still, I mean, you need to be there. But you need also you need to find new and new and new solutions. One of these solutions I found with your help, by the way, it was, making podcasts because not a lot of people make podcasts here. And I found that I have a really, really nice and strong network after this two years and a half. I know a lot of sales directors and developers. I know CEOs. I know founders of the real estate companies. I know different people who work with numbers and with data, different real estate professors, like all kinds of people's lawyers, like all kinds connected to real estate. And I just sat down. I just leaned out and, like, okay. What if I just bring them in and ask them questions? They will be so, so interesting. And this is what I did.

The third unique idea is to build long term relationship with clients. Usually, no one does this in Dubai. Everyone, a number of clients, and speed of closing deals, but rarely does anyone think about retention and lifetime value.

Brokers is all about speed. If they don't sell now, if you don't have the request now, they just switch to another client. Yeah. We have here in Dubai seven thousand agencies and more than fifty thousand brokers in Dubai. And none of them makes this following up process or building the relationship with the clients. So we decided, This was moment. Like, oh, okay. This is what we need to do. We wanted to make following up, being in touch with the client for all his needs. If he needs a will, for example, we can help him do this. If he needs a residential visa, we can help him do this. If he needs the mortgage, we can help him do this. If he doesn't know how to transfer the money, I don't know, from Russia to Dubai or from Europe to Dubai, we can find a solution. And now a new position we just invented is called happiness manager. Happiness manager is, basically k account or manager. This is the one who is following up all the clients. You have thirty, fifty agents calling you every day. So it's hard even to remember the names. You know? So, like, I believe that if you do follow-up the client, if you help him with all the questions connected with the properties, our company will be the first one he will remember when he has any issues connecting with the properties. And when he decides to buy or sell, he will call Yolo. This is, like, what I feel. But we need to check that one because this is a new position as I mentioned. This employee just will, join us from the beginning of next week, So we'll see how it goes, but this is, like, the process. I feel like it should be this way. And that's where we are now. So we started our own real estate company, me and my husband. My game changer moment here in Dubai was definitely my biggest sales of twenty eight point five million dirhams. It was a huge one, a hard one. There is a new building right next to Burj Khalifa. It all consists only of half floor and full floor penthouses. Penthouse is huge. It's like five hundred square meters. Like, it's huge apartments. And I see, like, a lot of people now call me primo queen because the in January, like, only two months and a half after I managed to close one unit in this building, and I have now two units, upcoming. Hopefully, deals will be done. Now after two years, we have a team of ten people, and we do all the operations with, real estate, buying, selling, renting out.

It seems Galina is perfectly able to navigate through the Scarlet Ocean, work in a competitive market. So, financially, it works great. So I asked her how it feels when after her previous one of a kind business, she now has yet another one agency.

This is totally different story for me. It's really hard. This is like the sad part of I need to open you. This is hard. When you make something unique, in many ways, it's easy. It's easy to get recognized. It's easy to become noticeable. It's easy to be a part from everyone else, and it's very prestigious too. You come out to the market, and and I felt this at the very first stage. Like, hi. I'm real estate broker. And, like, the person you meet, like, oh, no. No. Not one more real estate broker. And you feel this in a way. But now after, like, two and a half years of doing this, I can say definitely that in every red ocean, even if it's extremely red, you still can find the solutions. You can still can use new ideas. You can do things differently inside.

I shared with Galina my fears that I myself work in an extremely scarlet ocean. English school? She said, it still can be unique and one of a kind and immediately offered to introduce me to a businessman who just, like me, is building an English language school but found his exceptional way.

And he made the blue ocean, and he already started the school. It's not the traditional English school. He makes games. So he is playing games in English, developing both English and soft skills. So, like, all kinds. Bone care evolution here in Dubai. He did such a great job. He's living in Dubai Creek Harbour in the area I'm living with. Everyone like, every single mom knows him. And now he's expanding, and he's opening the branches all over Dubai. Really begin to speak when they get excited, when they forget that it's in English, and, you know, like, it works extremely well. Our kids started speaking English in three months. They knew zero. In three months, they went to school, yes, speaking English and passing the exams.

I teach English only to adults, but talking to the owner of such an English game school would be really interesting for me. I mean, I want to know how to move from yet another English school to the this is a unique everyone knows type of school. So, Gallina, please introduce me. I hope in the future episodes you'll hear his interview. I am really inspired of this new connection, but do you know what else inspires me? It seems that our podcast has grown into entrepreneurial community. Guests introduced me to their partners and acquaintances. I introduced guests to each other and podcast listeners write to my guests on social network and offer cooperation. This is the best I could hope for when launching a podcast. If you want listeners and guests to know about you and your project, write a comment where you listen to podcast. Tell us what you do. You are listening to Crossing the Desert podcast by Fortis. Fortis helps seamlessly connect businesses and their customers and run the business. It assists in attracting and retaining customers, selling products and services, accepting payments both online and in store, and managing finances and personnel. Join Fortis social media. Links are in the episode description. Follow our podcast or add it to your favorites. Give us five stars or heart and leave us a comment. This will help other listeners find out about us, and we love to read and answer them. And see you in the next episode. Production by Hedgehog podcast studio. Showrunners and editors, Alexandra Volkow and Ileana Volkow, producer, Daria Sanipova, sound designer Ksenia Kazantzova, and I am your host, Isaac Dolonin.