Logistics and supply chain management is a field that was unknown to most people, Hesham Al-Araky proved that diverting from the usual paths can create new opportunities.
Hesham proved to be an influential character in various ways including education, sports, entrepreneurship, event management, interviewing business leaders, and social media. He is talented in mastering different influential tools including public speaking, content creation, podcasts, and blogging. Hesham could have easily been a social media influencer in any trending topic, but instead he chose to become an influencer in a very niche area and industry! Hesham Al-Araky has succeeded to became Egypt’s First Supply Chain Influencer; Al-Logistawy, believing that “life is all about supply chain”.
Hesham is currently working as the Head of the Supply Chain Incubator at the Entrepreneurship Center of the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT), a Lecturer at College of International Transport & Logistics (CITL), and a Ph.D. candidate. Alongside his pillar role at the university, he is also the Founder of the Association of Supply Chain Professionals (ASCP), Supply Chain Secrets (SCS), Qualiphi Summit, and has co-founded the Supply Chain Innovation Summit (SCIS). He is a public speaker in many events. He also participated in TEDxManaratAlFaroukSchool with his talk “Blue Ocean”. Besides his limitless career ambition, he is an athlete as he was an Arabian-African champion in Gymnastics.
Hesham Al-Logistawy is sharing secrets to his success story with Influencers Today!
Influencers Today: Being a social media influencer you didn’t go with the flow… instead you chose to be an influencer in a non-trendy topic, until you have made a trend out of it! And hence, Al-Logistawy became your personal brand. That’s veryentrepreneurial! Can you take us through the technical challenges you have been through and approaches you used to create your own personal brand and trend?
Hesham Al-Araky: My main objective wasn’t being an influencer or creating a personal brand, I faced 2 main challenges which were a turning point in my life and inspired me to be who I am today. First of all, I studied international transport and logistics at Arab Academy for Science Technology and Maritime Transport; which was a new major at that time. Although I graduated from it with GPA 4 and I was ranked first of my class but I was surprised when I graduated that I didn’t have enough practical knowledge about this field. There were no mentors, no internships, and most people didn’t know what logistics or supply chain was! So one of the biggest problems I faced was that no one understood what I was doing or what I studied in college although it is very important in global international trade, in companies, and in countries’ economy all over the world. After that I found out that this wasn’t only my problem, I found all the graduates clueless and even some of the practitioners working in this field couldn’t find a way to further develop in their careers or even can’t apply in a job. That’s why I decided to take a step and try to help this community in a unique way. I did some initiatives as: student activity specialized in supply chain, association NGO specialized in supply chain and I gathered in it all international experts and also I tried to do some events. Meanwhile, I started working online on my personal brand AL-logistawy which might be a weird name and some people told me it won’t be catchy or trendy but I insisted on it because I wanted people to relate that my branding is related with logistics. I started working on this page 5 years ago I started with some comics and memes, then some videos to help people to know more about logistics and educate them about this field. Then I became the only influencer in logistics and supply chain.
Influencers Today: You have a big number of growing followers on your different social media – platforms, are all your followers working in the supply chain industry? Why are people keen to follow content about logistics and supply chain?
Hesham Al-Araky: I am well-known in this field that I have a specialized network and not only a number of followers. For example, I have a total of 100k followers, comparing to any influencer that’s not a huge number of followers but they are all related to the logistics and supply chain field, either students or fresh graduates searching for jobs or entrepreneurs or experts in the industry or even companies. So all of my followers are interested in the same topic. I think they follow the content for 2 reasons: the first is that maybe I am the only influencer posting content related to logistics and supply chain [uniqueness]. The second is that I try to simplify the information to the audience so they can enjoy the content and at the same time gain beneficial information
Influencers Today: As an academic researcher, what could be the relationship between supply chain and social media influencing / blogging? Can the study of “supply chain” be beneficial to other influencers and bloggers?
Hesham Al-Araky: All supply chain companies aim to get business leads, so as an influencer I help them find business leads since I have a community on social media who is interested in supply chain and I arrange events attended by everyone interested in this field. Therefore, some companies ask me to do a video for their company or talk about their supply chain capabilities. They started doing their marketing through me not through ordinary social media ads. Moreover, social media affected my career as it widened my social network and it helped me find opportunity to offer training courses in these companies.
Hesham Al-Araky: I made a specialized program called supply chain for startups to host founders and CEOs in a podcast to market a company through videos which is direct business because we have a target audience. So companies began using influencers to market for them through social media.
Influencers Today: A lecturer is an influencer in his own way, how do you distinctively influence your students?
Hesham Al-Araky: When I graduated, I introduced myself as a modern professor. Of course I carry all respect to my previous professors but I hated the traditional methods of teaching which mainly depends on attendance and grades. I felt the students’ pain and I sympathized with them because I knew that the methods used in teaching at universities weren’t the best. That’s why I tried to help them with student activity specialized in our field, and I tried to really influence them by changing the objective from teaching them a subject to help them pass the exams and get high grades, to searching for their defects to fit into the labor market. So I started building a larger community to help my students. Then I started arranging internships and events for them including guest speakers from companies and I arranged visits to some companies and sometimes we offered trainings to some students. I tried to link academic work with the industry so when these students graduate they don’t find themselves clueless, and of course it made the university and the academic life more interesting. This had a great impact on the students either technically or their career readiness. Our aim is to help them find a job when they graduate and I am very thankful that we succeeded in having our graduates to work at multinational companies and some of them help us in the summits we organize either as a speaker or even by getting their companies to sponsor the summit.
Influencers Today: Entrepreneurship, public speaking, blogging, vlogging, teaching and organizing events… Out of this entire long list, which do you find is the most impactful way of “influencing” others?
Hesham Al-Araky: I wanted to be an influencer in the supply chain field so I focused on all different segments in the community. First of all, I am a university doctor so I focused on the students and supply chain student activity. Then, I created an association to gather all unique people in the industry and do activities with the government and different companies (professional level). Then, I created the supply chain accelerator with businessmen. Last but not least, I founded the supply chain summit which includes all of them so I tried to support everyone. I aimed from the beginning to be a community builder. All of the activities that you mentioned in the question are only tools used to widen your impact. For example: I am very passionate about public speaking that’s why I gave speeches all over Egypt even in Assiut, Sohag, Qena, Alsharkya and Tanta. I even started giving courses in public speaking and personal branding.
Moreover, I extremely love events. After I created my personal brand Al-logistawy and precisely in 2017, did my first event which was Al-logistawy gathering. Its aim was gathering all people who were interested in logistics and it was for free. My second event was Al-logistawy Iftar Ramadan, I gathered some companies and employees to get to know each other more. It was in the academy and it was for free too. Then it developed into supply chain innovation summit attended by 3000 to 4000 person and the more than 50 sponsors and 292 speaker and the greatest companies all over the world.
Influencers Today: Last but not least, can you share with our readers, who might not be in the supply chain industry, why is supply chain from your perspective important for each and every one of us?
Hesham Al-Araky: To begin with, it’s important to the international trade. If we remember the covid-19 crises, some countries stopped the international trade that’s why some products weren’t available and the prices increased. Second, supply chain is important to companies and it’s a very long process, which aims to decrease the costs of all these operations and to make the product available at a suitable price, quality, packaging and quantity. The ranking of companies nowadays is determined by the age of supply chain. For example: McDonald’s’ slogan is “the fastest delivery in Egypt”, and Zara changes its fashion or layout of its shops every season. So supply chain is really important to each company. Moreover, it’s important to people even if they aren’t interested in this field because it’s really important to know the journey of each product; where it was initially created and how it was transported from place to another? For example, a car can be developed in more than 20 different countries. To sum up, supply chain is very important to countries, to companies and to us.
Influencers Today: Last but not least, can you share with our readers, who might not be in the supply chain industry, why is supply chain from your perspective important for each and every one of us?
Hesham Al-Araky: To begin with, it’s important to the international trade. If we remember the covid-19 crises, some countries stopped the international trade that’s why some products weren’t available and the prices increased. Second, supply chain is important to companies and it’s a very long process, which aims to decrease the costs of all these operations and to make the product available at a suitable price, quality, packaging and quantity. The ranking of companies nowadays is determined by the age of supply chain. For example: McDonald’s’ slogan is “the fastest delivery in Egypt”, and Zara changes its fashion or layout of its shops every season. So supply chain is really important to each company. Moreover, it’s important to people even if they aren’t interested in this field because it’s really important to know the journey of each product; where it was initially created and how it was transported from place to another? For example, a car can be developed in more than 20 different countries. To sum up, supply chain is very important to countries, to companies and to us.
