What running a business in Sudan taught me about being ready

I was born in Britain to Sudanese parents, my father from Berber and my mother from Shendi. I studied business, did my MBA at Warwick Business School and spent my career in British companies, from a first job in Dubai to digital transformation at Reed Business Information. At 32 I became the chief executive of a public company in Britain, at the time the youngest in the country. I was also travelling three weeks of every month and seeing my young daughters less and less.

In December 2016, on the night flight from New York to London, the plane nearly went down. It shook, dropped and climbed while people screamed and luggage fell from the lockers. In that moment one question came to me, and it has never left.

If I die now, God will ask me what I did with what He gave me.

I had made money and helped a lot of companies in America and Britain. I had done nothing for Sudan. When the plane landed, my wife and I stopped saying "one day". I resigned and in 2017 we moved to Khartoum. Even with everything that came after, it is the best decision I have made. For more on Sudanese who built careers outside Sudan, see our episode on Sudanese success abroad.

The plan was a free training centre. In 2017 Sudan was still under sanctions, and young people had never seen Facebook or Google ads, while freelancers in Egypt, Nigeria and the Gulf were working remotely for British companies. I knew Sudanese talent could do the same work at the same standard.

What I had not reckoned with was that I had never lived in Sudan. Everything I knew came from summer holidays. Two years as chief commercial officer at Canar Telecom taught me how work actually gets done there, and in the first months I was shouting at people because I did not understand it. Canar gave me far more than I gave Canar.

Sudan Digital began at the dining table of our flat in Kafouri, with Abeer Husham as the first employee. Then people in my network in America and Britain started asking whether we did marketing. In the West a company can easily spend 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month on marketing agencies, so I decided to train young Sudanese to world-class level and offer the same work for far less. If you are starting with little, our episode on starting a business with no money covers that side.

Clients came from England, America, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, every one of them referred by another client. We never ran an ad. Three clients told us to drop the name Sudan because the country was under sanctions. We refused each time, because I wanted people who had never heard of Sudan to hear the name next to high quality. All three stayed with us for years.

In 2018 the government started cutting the internet during the protests. A client in America will not accept "the internet is down", so we bought a line from every provider, because company lines usually kept working, and added batteries and solar power. We never went offline.

In January 2020 I was in Mecca for Umrah and saw thousands of people in masks. I came home and told my wife this could shut the world down. We did not allow remote work, so we tested it: first one person at a time, three days each at home, fixing every internet and power problem, then team by team through February. We also moved content production from one week ahead to sixty days ahead. When the lockdowns came in March, our clients were not affected, and we won more work than ever.

By January 2023 everyone felt something was coming. In a management meeting we agreed to open a backup office in the Emirates. As we were wrapping up, Alhaj, one of the management team, asked: "But guys, if they close the airport, what do we do?" That question moved the backup to Aswan, where my wife's family was building a house with room for a small office. We bought the air conditioners and booked a month-long trial there for after Umrah on 17 April. We also wrote down who would leave with us if disaster struck and which clients we would keep.

The war started on 15 April. On the Monday night after it began I counted 73 armed vehicles leaving Kafouri and knew it would not end in days. We carried out the plan, called people one by one and reached Aswan. Some of the team had kept working from under their beds while shells fell. We did not lose a single client, and several told us afterwards they had no idea we were in a war.

The name Sudan was now tied to something none of us could control, so Sudan Digital became Cush Digital. We had always called the women who made up 70% of the team the Kandakas of Sudan Digital, and the Kandakas come from the people of Kush.

Marketing changes faster than almost any profession, and AI is the biggest change yet. We have used it since 2022, starting with Writesonic and ChatGPT 3.5, and it changed what we are. We now work as our clients' marketing team. It also changed hiring. I used to train graduates who could serve clients within six months. Today the basics are one step of the 300,000 you need, and being sharp and prepared from day one is required.

The lesson from all three crises is the same. The preparation that saved us was done months before anyone needed it.