EP 21: Building teams that multiply: Stoic leadership and the art of making people feel special

[00:01:22] Adriaan Kolff: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Leaders in Talent Podcast. My name is Adriaan Kolff. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Matchr, and I’m the host of the Leaders in Talent Podcast. And today I’m super happy to have Yasar Ahmad on the podcast. Yasar is an industry veteran in the recruitment world, has been awarded for not one, not two, but three years in a row as the most influential recruiter. It failed a little bit, Yasar, out of nowhere, but you’ve built a huge following on different social media platforms. And we’re going to be talking about entrepreneurship. We’re going to be talking about personal branding. We’re going to be talking about leadership. We have this really nice eclectic set of topics that we’re going to be speaking about. But Yasar, first of all, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:05] Yasar Ahmad: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited for this one. There are going to be a lot of juicy topics.

[00:02:11] Adriaan Kolff: I know there’s going to be a lot of juicy topics. Yasar, when we weren’t recording yet, you asked me a pretty personal question actually about entrepreneurship and about the journey. Let’s go off script. We’ve got all these beautiful questions, but let’s talk a little bit about it. Can you repeat the question?

[00:02:27] Yasar Ahmad: Yeah, yeah, sure. So my question, and we are reversing roles here, my question is around anxiety and how do you manage the early years of entrepreneurship. As someone who’s been an entrepreneur like yourself, successful, I’d say you’re very successful with Matchr, a great company. How did you manage those first couple of years? Because I often think about that, being a corporate professional. If I was to have a transition, what would that look like for me? And how would I manage my anxiety? And as stoic as I am, how does it work? Yeah. Like, who’s got the experience close to me?

[00:02:57] Adriaan Kolff: I love the question. It takes me back to the early days when we started Matchr in 2018. When I started Matchr, I made myself two promises. One, I would keep the relationship that I had with my girlfriend, Oya, who’s now my wife, intact. And secondly, I would do everything in my power to make Matchr work.

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[00:03:57] Adriaan Kolff: And those were the two. I was obsessed with both. And for some reason, and I don’t know why, there was this innate knowing that I will be successful at both if I would do everything in my power to do so. What that meant, though, because we started our company in Kyiv, Ukraine, is that I lived in Kyiv. I had zero friends. And when I say zero, I mean zero. I worked, worked, worked. I had my colleagues, but it’s very different being the boss, being the founder, and having friends, right? So everything in that first year and a half, two years, was Matchr. I worked every weekend, Saturday, Sunday, literally from nine to nine every day. That was how obsessive I was. And then I would fly to New York to be with my wife. That was kind of the only activity that I had.

[00:04:43] Yasar Ahmad: Just to interject, because some people will listen to this and they’ll say, “You’re just a workaholic,” or “There’s no life,” but you must have enjoyed it.

[00:04:52] Adriaan Kolff: Loved it. Great question, because I was so excited about the work itself. There’s something magical about starting a company because you have this blank canvas that you decide how you want to color it. But when you start to paint, you have no idea what the end result looks like.

[00:05:09] Yasar Ahmad: How did you control the anxiety, though? There must have been moments where you woke up in the morning thinking… the imposter syndrome that kicks in. You obviously had sheer perseverance, sheer enjoyment, sheer discipline. And there’s even this quote from Alex Hormozi about happiness where he says, “I don’t care about happiness because I’m so busy I can’t even focus on happiness.” You just keep busy, busy, busy. It kind of sounds the same. You just worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, kept yourself super busy, really focused on the goal. How does one manage the anxiety there?

[00:05:43] Adriaan Kolff: There are two very distinct moments that I remember, and there have been many more, but two moments that really stand by and I wear them as proud scars on my entrepreneurship body, on my armor, so to say.

The first real moment was a year and a half into Matchr. We were bootstrapped, we didn’t make any money, and I was literally looking down the barrel of my bank account. There was barely any money left, and I told my co-founder, “Now is the time that we need to start paying ourselves some money because I simply don’t have any money anymore.”

That was January of 2020.

[00:06:38] Yasar Ahmad: Matchr now? For context, because obviously you’re going from zero…

[00:06:42] Adriaan Kolff: Literally after that first month that we paid ourselves a salary, COVID happened and we lost seventy percent of our revenue.

[00:06:47] Yasar Ahmad: You lost…

[00:06:48] Adriaan Kolff: We lost seventy percent of our revenue.

[00:06:50] Yasar Ahmad: Wow.

[00:06:50] Adriaan Kolff: Because the whole world stopped hiring. All of our clients either terminated the contract or extended the contract and asked us to give them discounts. Everyone was trying to get out of their contracts. And that’s also when we realized that some of our clauses weren’t as strong as we thought they were.

That was a moment when severe anxiety kicked in, because we went from about fifty thousand euros of revenue per month with a twenty-four person team to about six thousand euros in revenue. Heavy loss-making, and we didn’t have any money to get us through that.

[00:07:24] Yasar Ahmad: Hold on. So you were making fifty K a month and not paying yourself?

[00:07:28] Adriaan Kolff: Correct.

[00:07:28] Yasar Ahmad: That’s some commitment.

[00:07:29] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah, because we were fueling it into the growth of the company. And luckily, both me and my co-founder knew that we had the savings to sustain ourselves because we didn’t want to raise money. Also, in our business, we didn’t feel there was a need to raise money. We’re not software, we’re a people business. Clients would pay us relatively on time.

For example, Booking.com at the time was one of our biggest clients. We had a team of ten there, but they had a sixty-day payment cycle. So when we hired people, we had to wait three to four months before the first money would come in. That’s how we were bankrolling our growth. Especially as we were growing rapidly in that first year, we were constantly a couple months away from being able to pay ourselves. We knew it would come back, but there’s a big difference between bookkeeping revenue and profits versus what’s actually in the bank.

[00:08:23] Yasar Ahmad: How did the team feel?

[00:08:25] Adriaan Kolff: The crazy part is this. At my previous startup, we didn’t share anything about how the business was really doing with our employees. It was always “great,” “amazing,” “exciting” until the day it wasn’t, and we had to let go of twenty-five percent of our staff. I had to have those conversations.

I’ll never forget one of them. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” That moment completely changed how I treat people. When I started Matchr with Martin, I said, “There’s one thing I want us to commit to. I want us to be fully transparent about everything. People need to know exactly what’s going on with the company.”

So we did. To this day, every month we share our financials. Every month we do the same internal survey. We’ve done that since the start of Matchr. Everyone can answer anonymously and give feedback.

So during COVID, people knew we were in trouble because the numbers were dropping. At that time, we were doing weekly financial updates and weekly cashflow statements. When we lost that much revenue and I had to let go of sixty percent of the team, the craziest thing happened. They comforted me.

[00:10:01] Yasar Ahmad: No way.

[00:10:02] Adriaan Kolff: They said, “Adrian, we completely understand. We hope you make it. We’re rooting for you.” They were comforting me in that conversation. That’s when I knew we had built the right culture.

[00:10:17] Yasar Ahmad: Do you think transparency is key to success with a small company, like a scale-up startup? Do you think every company should follow in the footsteps of transparency, especially at the early stages?

[00:10:27] Adriaan Kolff: It only works if the founders truly believe in it. One thing I’ve learned is that you can put any culture value on the wall, but it doesn’t matter. It is the founders that define the culture.

Let me give you an example. One of our culture values is to go above and beyond, to surpass expectations. The minute you get sloppy and you do not respond on time, even if it’s late or you have too much going on, that culture value doesn’t mean anything.

Your worst employee is the bar that everyone gets measured against, not your top performer, because that’s the behavior people can get away with.

[00:11:06] Yasar Ahmad: Your worst employee is the bar to measure against.

[00:11:10] Adriaan Kolff: Because that employee is being accepted by the company. That becomes the bar. Even though people aspire to be top performers, if they see that people are slacking and getting away with it, that becomes the standard.

[00:11:21] Yasar Ahmad: There’s an element of consequence management that needs to be instilled in managers and leaders early on. You should talk about behaviors instead of just actions. When it comes to low performers, you need to explain how behaviors lead to outcomes and help people reflect on their mindset and engagement. A lot of issues stem from the root cause, not the surface action.

[00:12:10] Adriaan Kolff: How has that been for you, Yasar? You became a manager quite early in your career. Tell me about stepping into leadership and how that evolved for you.

[00:12:22] Yasar Ahmad: I became a manager pretty much from day one. Being a young manager with limited training, you learn through osmosis by observing the managers around you. If you’re not careful, you absorb the wrong behaviors. I definitely did.

I used to look up to the managing director at one of the companies I worked at. He was old school. Everyone was just a resource. Make money, money, money. I led with the stick, not the carrot.

Later, the COO joined and sat me down. He explained how the same message can be delivered in two different ways, one that demotivates and one that inspires. That moment stayed with me.

Then I joined Wipro at a young age and became a director. It’s a huge company, around 250,000 employees. In my team, the next youngest person was ten years older than me. I had to learn again through osmosis.

I found a leader I admired and asked him for coffee. He spent an hour with me explaining his journey. It all came down to stoicism and deep-rooted gratitude.

[00:15:09] Adriaan Kolff: Wait, you did that every day? The journaling?

[00:15:11] Yasar Ahmad: Yeah.

[00:15:12] Adriaan Kolff: Wow.

[00:15:13] Yasar Ahmad: I’ve been doing it for like ten years.

[00:15:20] Yasar Ahmad: In the morning, you write what you’re grateful for, three things. Then three things that would make the day great. Then self-affirmations.

I once wrote that I met someone who changed my life. It was a conversation that reframed how I saw everything. Every conversation has a golden nugget. You just have to find it.

I’m a big believer in stoicism. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. It shapes how I lead.

[00:17:06] Adriaan Kolff: Tell me more about that.

[00:17:08] Yasar Ahmad: Stoicism for me is focusing on the now. I always say “what if” is the door to the devil. If you constantly think “what if we do this wrong,” “what if we fail,” you stop focusing on what you can control right now.

Instead of indulging in vices, you indulge in virtues. Good habits. Being present. Looking at things in four dimensions, not just two. Understanding what I know, what I don’t know, what unknowns I know, and what unknown unknowns I don’t know. Accepting that there are things you don’t even know that you don’t know. That mindset is critical in leadership, especially in talent acquisition, where it’s easy to become accusational.

[00:18:40] Adriaan Kolff: The Belgian horse effect?

[00:18:42] Yasar Ahmad: Yes, the Belgian horse effect. One Belgian horse can pull 8,000 pounds. Two Belgian horses together can pull 30,000 pounds. They push each other and multiply the result.

We forget this in recruiting. One good recruiter plus another good recruiter is not just double output. It’s exponential. But one negative person in the team drags everything down. The same nine hires can become seven or twelve depending on team energy, morale, and mindset. It impacts everything: hiring speed, candidate experience, client experience, internal culture.

[00:20:16] Adriaan Kolff: How do you apply that with your team?

[00:20:16] Yasar Ahmad: You regulate your emotions. You’re allowed to be human, but your team should not get emotional whiplash. If you panic, they panic. If you stay calm, they learn calm.

When something goes wrong, we fix it first, then we do a post-mortem. We do not create drama. We are not curing cancer. We help people get jobs. We still hold extremely high standards, but we lead with emotional control.

[00:22:04] Yasar Ahmad: If you could be anything, why not be great? I’m obsessed with being number one or number two in the field. I tell my teams early: if you’re just looking for a job, this isn’t the team. We are here to build something exceptional.

There is no end goal. There is a North Star. You never reach it, but you always move toward it.

[00:22:51] Adriaan Kolff: It’s interesting you say that because we just launched what we call Matchr Magic.

[00:22:58] Yasar Ahmad: Have you heard of the book Unreasonable Hospitality?

[00:23:04] Adriaan Kolff: Yes.

[00:23:05] Adriaan Kolff: We used that philosophy to build Matchr Magic. On one axis, we focus on exceptional impact for our clients. We do that through five principles: say please and thank you, always be on time, do what you promise, do a little more than expected, and finish what you started.

[00:24:07] Yasar Ahmad: I love that. My framework has four parts. Be crystal clear on the desired outcome. Be clear on the likelihood of achieving it and make the other person believe it. Be clear on timing and why you will be faster. And make the effort minimal for them.

When you do that, the offer becomes so strong it’s stupid to say no.

[00:25:13] Adriaan Kolff: When I was younger, I didn’t believe in values. I thought they were just words on the wall.

[00:25:28] Yasar Ahmad: Same here, until I realized they create clarity. I even created personal decision frameworks. When I don’t have full context and I must decide quickly, I ask: Is it a two-way door? Does it automate or complicate? Is it human-shaped?

[00:27:46] Adriaan Kolff: That gives clarity.

[00:28:03] Yasar Ahmad: I don’t believe in mentors. I learn through introspection and building models. I once sat for two hours and asked myself who I truly wanted to be. Since then, I build mental models for everything: leadership, business, parenting.

[00:29:38] Adriaan Kolff: That creates clarity.

[00:30:12] Yasar Ahmad: Even raising children, I use a model. First seven years you play. Next seven years you befriend. From fourteen to twenty-one you consult.

[00:30:23] Adriaan Kolff: I agree and disagree. Values and mission statements only work when people truly understand and believe in them. Elon Musk with SpaceX and Tesla shows how powerful a real mission is.

[00:31:56] Adriaan Kolff: We once said our ambition was to become the McKinsey of recruitment. When we presented it to our team, they rejected it completely. They said, “We are Matchr. We don’t compare ourselves to McKinsey.” That was a huge learning moment.

[00:32:28] Yasar Ahmad: That’s powerful. What is your mission now?

[00:33:03] Adriaan Kolff: Matchr Magic will become the industry standard.

[00:33:11] Yasar Ahmad: That’s perfect. It sets the bar.

[00:33:25] Adriaan Kolff: We now map every touchpoint for our events, clients, employees, speakers, and sponsors. Every emotional moment matters. We design the entire journey, from ticket purchase to the week after the event.

[00:36:30] Yasar Ahmad: That is world-class experience design. It reminds me of top content creators and how they think about before and after moments.

[00:37:52] Adriaan Kolff: Even recruitment can apply this. We are redesigning the offer process. A handwritten card after signing. Making people feel welcome and special.

[00:39:29] Yasar Ahmad: That creates emotional buy-in.

[00:39:29] Yasar Ahmad: It reminds me of 2014. When I was working in executive recruitment at Wipro, we did the same thing. We would send a hamper with wine, cheese, chocolate, and a handwritten note. Candidates would send us photos of themselves celebrating. One guy even came into the office early, before his start date, because he was so excited.

[00:42:24] Yasar Ahmad: Everyone wants to feel like the main character in their own story. If you make them feel special, you win the conversation, you win the hire. That is the biggest flaw in interviews today. Hiring managers often make candidates feel tested instead of wanted.

I always tell candidates: “We wouldn’t invite you unless we wanted you.” That simple reframing increases confidence and dramatically improves interview outcomes.

[00:43:48] Adriaan Kolff: How do you prevent hiring managers from turning interviews into interrogations?

[00:43:50] Yasar Ahmad: You train them. You show them that calm conversations produce better results. You remind them that every interview leaves a lasting impression. You teach them to treat candidates like customers.

[00:45:44] Yasar Ahmad: Words matter more than we think. Yale studies even show temperature affects perception. If something as simple as holding a warm drink changes judgment, imagine what tone and words do. Make people feel seen. Make them feel important.

[00:49:43] Yasar Ahmad: Recruiting is sales. Everyone in business is in sales. If you master making people feel special, you master business.

[00:50:21] Adriaan Kolff: What is the best way for people to connect with you?

[00:50:33] Yasar Ahmad: LinkedIn is best. Search Yasar Ahmad. You can also find me on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook. I run a YouTube channel called The Rules of Work.

[00:51:02] Adriaan Kolff: This was one of my favorite conversations. We forgot the time completely.

[00:51:26] Yasar Ahmad: Same here. I could talk another hour.

[00:51:46] Adriaan Kolff: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:51:58] Yasar Ahmad: Thank you for having me.

[00:52:00] Adriaan Kolff: Awesome.