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Welcome to the Women of HubSpot, a podcast celebrating the voices shaping marketing, technology, and the ever-evolving HubSpot ecosystem. Hosted by George B. Thomas from Sidekick Strategies. Each episode brings you the stories, strategies, and superpowers of the women driving this industry forward. It's their time. It's their mic. This… is Women of HubSpot.
Welcome to the Women of HubSpot podcast, the show that celebrates the voices shaping marketing, technology, and the ever evolving HubSpot ecosystem. Hosted by George B. Thomas from Sidekick Strategies. Each episode brings you the stories, strategies, and superpowers of the women driving this industry forward. It's their time.
Intro:It's their mic. This is Women of HubSpot.
George B. Thomas:All right, we're back with another episode of Women of HubSpot, and I'm super excited to keep this train going. These have been some of the most fascinating conversations I've had. I've learned so much along the way about, well, what people love about HubSpot, the world that they navigate as far as women empowerment, success, all sorts of things. And to think that this all started a Super Bowl conversation, me, my daughter, the Philadelphia Eagles, him having an all woman team and seeing how she was excited about that. I went to LinkedIn, no strategy, and just said, Hey, if you know a woman of HubSpot, tag them.
George B. Thomas:The post went crazy. The post now has turned into content and a podcast, and it's just a joy to be here. So, Ranya, how are you doing this morning?
Ranya Barakat:I am very well, George. I am excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
George B. Thomas:Well, I'm excited that you're here too, because otherwise it would be a very boring episode. And so here's the thing. I'll I'll warn you. We're gonna go on a little bit of a journey. I've noticed that some of these questions are peak questions.
George B. Thomas:Some of them are valley questions. But there's a lot I think that we can learn about your journey And and it depends how far back you wanna go. But let's go ahead and kick into this and I'll ask you the the first question here. If we could go back in time, a DeLorean, a time machine, a a phone booth, whatever you wanna do. And we met young Ranya just starting out.
George B. Thomas:What would we see? And also, what would she be most surprised by about where you are now?
Ranya Barakat:Let's go with two options. First option is let's go all the way back to seven year old Ranya, and what you would see is a very playful, high energy, cheeky little girl who knew, I don't fit in here. And if you go back and talk to her, you can just let her know, It's okay. Be your authentic self. And that would have helped a lot.
Ranya Barakat:If we go as far back as 2013, which is when I became a HubSpot partner, what you would see is Ranya, also very cheeky, very high energy, only this time not in Kenya as a little girl, but in Chile, in Latin America, who had just moved to Chile, didn't know anyone, didn't speak a word of Spanish, but had to survive.
George B. Thomas:Wow. So Kenya to Chile, and then a new location had to figure out the language, had to survive. And so, and this is, you're basically starting to work with HubSpot, correct?
Ranya Barakat:In 2013. Yeah. That was when.
George B. Thomas:As partner? Yep.
Ranya Barakat:In '20 Okay.
George B. Thomas:So almost, let's see, what would that be? Twelve years? Thirteen years now you've been doing this? Okay. All right.
George B. Thomas:So along the way, this journey, we're talking twelve, thirteen years. And if we go back to seven, a long journey, who are some of your biggest inspirations or mentors along the way?
Ranya Barakat:On the HubSpot side, there's a number. The ones that have really left sort of a mark with me and they are a huge reason of our success with HubSpot, I'll list them out for you. David Torres, we were very fortunate to work with David back in December 2013. He did our onboarding with us, so everything HubSpot. Dan Tyre, he worked with me.
Ranya Barakat:I met him actually in our first inbound in 2016. I remember seeing this guy, a lot of people were going to say hi, I had no clue who this person was. I remember walking up to him and I'm like, hi, you look famous. Who are you? And he fist bumped Dan Tire, worked with Dan year after year after year in many different ways, had him over in Santiago for a hug, did boot camp with him, became a boot camp academy instructor with him.
Ranya Barakat:So a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff with Dan Tyre. I'd also say Mally Diaz. She was a phenomenal, phenomenal woman in HubSpot, actually if you want someone for your list. She was our channel consultant at the time, worked with her four or five years. And then when we pivoted out of LATAM and into NAAM, definitely hats off to Ali Rokovic, who's now Ali Cox.
Ranya Barakat:She was our CAM when we broke into the NAM market. One more would be Jose Martins as well. He took over from David Torres and he really helped us scale. And what I like, with Jose, one thing that really struck out is he was one of the very few people that I've worked with probably in all of my career that knew how to push me, how to get more out of me. For that, I'm really grateful because it kept, you know, bursting my bubble, which is wonderful.
George B. Thomas:I love that you had a list. My brain goes to it takes a village, Right? And I also love that to have that human in our life that knows how to, like, kind of poke us or point us in the right directions or make us rethink, those are the mentors. Those are inspirations that kind of keep us going. I love that.
George B. Thomas:And Dan Tire, by the way, OG. Miss him tremendously now that he's retired from HubSpot, but he has been a force to be reckoned with in the ecosystem without a doubt.
Ranya Barakat:Oh,
George B. Thomas:okay. So I feel like even outside of the HubSpot side of this, there's been a journey. And so again, we're kind of going into, Ranya, some of these maybe valley questions. And the first one that I'll ask is, have there ever been any hurdles or biases that you've had to overcome in your career? And if so, how did you navigate them?
Ranya Barakat:Oh, great question. There's been a number of hurdles that I had to overcome on this twelve, thirteen year HubSpot journey. The first one was when we had just moved to Chile, became HubSpot partners. There were two HubSpot partners in Chile at the time. So the first thing we did was we went and met them like, hey, how are you?
Ranya Barakat:We're also HubSpot partners. You know how the ecosystem was that brewed. And one of them actually was, I'd say, fuel to our success because his exact words were, do you speak Spanish? We were like, no. Do you know anybody here?
Ranya Barakat:We were like, no. He's like, oh, you have no chance of succeeding in HubSpot. And I heard that and in my mind I was like, watch me. Yeah. Just just because of that statement.
Ranya Barakat:So I'm very grateful that he said what he said because that was like fuel to keep going, keep going. You can do it. You know, it's tiring opening a HubSpot agency and running and growing and scaling. And so that was one hurdle that I had to overcome where we had to find a way where not speaking Spanish and not knowing anybody, we could still be a successful HubSpot partner. And the way we did that was I used the fact that I don't speak Spanish as an advantage rather than a disadvantage.
Ranya Barakat:So that was one, definitely. The other one was it started in 2018. So we had grown the agency. We were diamond at the time, on our way to what is now called elite. And we had reached that level where we were doing a lot of enterprise, so banks, insurance companies, universities.
Ranya Barakat:And Latin America at the time in the martech space or CRM space is a very male dominated industry. And so going in as a woman who at the time, by 2018 I did learn Spanish, but I had this weird accent. I'm a physically large woman. I look different, I act different. Going back to seven year old Ranya.
Ranya Barakat:So there was a hurdle of breaking that male dominated industry where I'd be sitting in these big boardroom meetings, eight, nine, 10 men in suits and there's me. So that was a hurdle and I what I how did I break it? I just stayed focused on what value am I adding? What am I bringing to the table that is this board of directors does not have on the table, and that worked well.
George B. Thomas:Okay. Those are great. So there's a couple of things, like, I wanna pull out of there. One, everybody watching this or listening, the fact that you focused on value. Let me let me just focus on the value.
George B. Thomas:Let me focus on the words that are about to come out my mouth because that's what it should be about. But also, I love that in your first story, you were like, tell me I can't do something and watch what happens. Like, that right there tells me a lot about you just as a as a woman, as a human in general, because I do have one of those stories where a math teacher in the ninth grade told me I'd never amount to anything. I said, okay, watch me. Just just watch me.
George B. Thomas:So I I love this so much. Okay. So let's keep moving forward. Have you ever faced a moment where you felt underestimated, maybe even overlooked, out of place. And this could be in the industry, this could be before HubSpot.
George B. Thomas:And and when you kind of pinpoint that moment, like, how did you handle that feeling of, you know, underestimated or overlooked or out of place?
Ranya Barakat:I have a few. I know one is tied to the HubSpot industry, one is not. So the first one is underestimated. We had a HubSpot client in December 2018, huge client. Don't need to mention names, so I don't get in trouble.
George B. Thomas:Right. Right. And
Ranya Barakat:the POC was the type of persona that would underestimate you as a partner. Know, there's a specific type of client that is like that and we kept raising the flag, raising the orange flag, red flag,
Ranya Barakat:hello, hello, we don't work this way, we
Ranya Barakat:don't work this way. And this was an enormous client, as in 20 portals type client. And because I was so underestimated, not only me actually, this persona kept underestimating our whole team, That was actually the first client that we fired. And it was such a crazy story because it was like revenue wise, it was a lot of money you're leaving on the table HubSpot MMR. Oh, it's a lot of HubSpot MMR that's going to impact your tier.
Ranya Barakat:But it was like and the way I see it is when you're in the service industry, if partner HubSpot partner and customer are not on equal sides of the table, this relationship is not gonna work. I don't care how big you are. I don't care who you are, it just doesn't work that way. So how did I overcome that is I walked out of that relationship very proudly. And the other one would be in my first job when I graduated from university, I worked corporate at the time and it just so happened that I had a quite a serious job, like I was the general manager in a really big internet service provider that had a lot of digital products.
Ranya Barakat:And I managed to grow revenue year after year after year. Remember by year four I started to feel like, okay, I'm good on my job, but my soul is a little bit empty. And then I remember I had our annual meeting with my boss who was the CEO, and I was walking them through the growth, 300% growth. And typically what I was hoping was, oh, well done, 300%, that's awesome!
George B. Thomas:Right.
Ranya Barakat:But the response I got was, oh, why isn't it 400? There we go. Your reaction was exactly my sentiment. I closed my laptop. I shut the screen and I said, you know what?
Ranya Barakat:I quit. And I resigned and I walked out and I've never worked corporate ever again since. So again, underestimated. The outcome is if I do feel underestimated, I will try to understand why. But if it reaches a point that it's not something related to my performance and it's more just a personality difference, which is okay because people are different.
Ranya Barakat:If it's not for me, I'll walk out.
George B. Thomas:I I think there's there's power in the understanding of, like, when it's not a good fit, when you need to make a pivot, and both of your stories kind of lean into that. What I really love about the first one is you said these words, well, it could affect our tier. And my brain goes, or it could affect your team. And and I think you're the type of human that you're about growth, you're about humans. And it's like, I'd rather affect the tier than the team, the humans that I have to, like, work side by side with.
George B. Thomas:And and I love that as far as being able to pull that out as as as a nugget of wisdom of people who are in any space that can kind of understand, like, yo, when it's time to go, it's time to go. And just Exactly. Dude, it's about health, mental, physical, spiritual versus like the grind.
Ranya Barakat:Spot on. Yeah, I love this. You nailed it. And I'm a really big believer that not all revenue is healthy. Even if it's like, you know, a lot of revenue, well, guess what?
Ranya Barakat:If we're being bullied and Yeah. I'd rather not have it, you know?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. At the at the end of the day, you gotta wanna wake up the next morning and actually enjoy what you're doing. I love this. Okay. So talk me through a moment in time where you had significant failure or a setback.
George B. Thomas:And what did you do and what did you learn from that?
Ranya Barakat:So in 2011, I used to live in a beautiful part of the world, my home country, Egypt, South Sinai. It was like literally the perfect place to be living by the Red Sea, scuba diving, everything is wonderful. And there was the Arab Spring. And because where I lived was a tourist destination, kind of like what's going on in the world today, if you're in an area with social unrest, tourists aren't really going to go there. So the failure I think was I waited three years before deciding to move on because I was holding on to but it's going to come back, but it's going to come back, but it's going to come back.
Ranya Barakat:And the reason I call that a failure is in those three years my life sort of went on pause because you're just waiting for something that's beyond your control. And I think had I made that decision earlier, probably I would have been a HubSpot partner three years earlier. You know?
George B. Thomas:Oh, it's man, that one hit me, like, right in the right in the heart. Like, I hope people who are listening or watching this realize, like, are you in a place in your life where your life is on hold because you're believing something that might never happen? Okay. So we're gonna crest up the hill a little bit, get out of the valley questions. What does empowerment mean to you, and how do you pass that on to others in your field?
Ranya Barakat:Oh, I love that question. Empowerment to me means enabling an individual to have a soft or hard skill to be able to navigate any situation. So for example, how do I pass that on to my team? I manage a global team now and what we do is every week we have short bursts of coaching sessions and those coaching sessions are usually soft skills, not hard skills, so that this individual can feel comfortable and confident to be able to navigate the different scenarios that we are faced with in a HubSpot ecosystem.
George B. Thomas:So you've defined now and even given an example of what you consider empowerment. Can you share a moment in your career where you felt especially empowered or proud of what you achieved?
Ranya Barakat:Oh, yeah. Definitely. A couple of ones that sort of have stayed with me and I I feel really good about them. One of them is in I remember I was at Inbound. It was our second inbound, so 2017 no.
Ranya Barakat:2018, our third inbound because we were Diamond at the time. So we got invited to the VIP party.
George B. Thomas:Oh, there you go. Yep.
Ranya Barakat:Right? And in that VIP party, Brian Halligan walked up to Izzy, who's my partner and also my partner in life, and said, so who are you? And we were like, We are living proof that HubSpot can help businesses.
George B. Thomas:There you go.
Ranya Barakat:He was like: What? And so we told him our story, like: You know, we moved to Chile, we didn't know anyone, we didn't speak a word of Spanish, da da da da da. And we became a HubSpot partner and we built our whole business using HubSpot and being a HubSpot partner and the outcome is we are now in this room talking to you. And the outcome of that, what I'm sort of really proud of us is I think something clicked within because I was then invited to go to the HubSpot twelve twelve internal meeting to share our story. And so that kind of made me feel like, oh, okay.
Ranya Barakat:So if we can do it with HubSpot, then I can definitely enable all of our customers to grow because I did it. Yes. Literally from scratch. Like, we set up the agency working. We didn't even have furniture.
George B. Thomas:I love that so much. There's something very powerful about a Brian Halligan moment in in your HubSpot kind of career. I've had a couple, you know, Brian Halligan sightings along the way. So I totally get what you're throwing down where you're like, and now I'm talking to this guy. So that's that's absolutely amazing.
Ranya Barakat:And it's like I'm talking to this guy, and I got invited to this thing, and I'm just a nobody.
Ranya Barakat:And I didn't even know how
Ranya Barakat:to spell CRM. I didn't even know what a CRM was.
George B. Thomas:And what's fun about that moment is and I hope you realize this, and I hope the listeners and viewers realize this. If you've got invited into that room, you have transported yourself from a nobody to a somebody. And and it's time to, like, just stop, turn around, and look at the historical journey that got you to that point to be able to say say those things. I love it. Okay.
George B. Thomas:If you could change one thing about how women are supported in this industry, what would it be?
Ranya Barakat:Don't position women as part of the diversity group. And I'll give you a really good example of that. I was having a chat with somebody the other day about how structured and they're bored and this person said to me: Oh yeah, but you know, I just realised our board doesn't have any women and it's not very diverse. And it just struck me that why does woman go under diverse? Because in reality you need masculine energy, female energy, and the world can't function without the other.
Ranya Barakat:So I don't think women should be a category as an extras kind of thing, but, like,
Ranya Barakat:you know what I mean?
George B. Thomas:I do. I do. Okay. I love that. That and that is the first time that that has been the answer, but I love I love that direction.
George B. Thomas:There's so much we could unpack with that. Let's let's let's move forward though because this is called the Women of HubSpot. So I had to throw at least one HubSpot related question into the interview. Are there any particular tools, strategies, trends in HubSpot that excite you right now?
Ranya Barakat:I'm a big fan of Commerce Hub and everything that comes with us because that seamless sales to finance, you know, with a few clicks is just mind blowing.
Ranya Barakat:Yes. It's so underestimated, like but it's huge.
George B. Thomas:Yes. I totally agree
Ranya Barakat:with you.
Ranya Barakat:There's that one. I don't wanna go down the whole AI route because I don't wanna go there. I'm a big fan of the sandbox updates.
George B. Thomas:Yep.
Ranya Barakat:Oh my goodness. Like, that
Ranya Barakat:is like, yes. Oh, MCP.
George B. Thomas:Yes. Yeah.
Ranya Barakat:Firing to that one.
George B. Thomas:Yep. I I love it. So MCP sandbox up you're also kinda you're showing me a little bit of the nerdy side of who you are and what you do when you mention those as well. But I do agree with you on the Commerce Hub because just blows my mind how many people haven't adopted it to, like, fix that historically dysfunctional part of getting paid or allowing people to easily pay them. So, okay, let's let's do a little bit of a left shift, right shift, whichever direction we go here.
George B. Thomas:How important to you is networking with other females or just networking in general? And do you have any strategies that you use to build connections?
Ranya Barakat:Very, very important. You know, if you're an entrepreneur or within the ecosystem, Community is huge, so networking is huge. I network the typical attendee inbound, those type of things, the events online, offline. I also network by being an active participant in the HubSpot ecosystem, like running a pug, running a hug, pugs and hugs, throwing events, joining things like the women led sales group. Like within the HubSpot ecosystem, there's a lot of networking opportunity.
Ranya Barakat:I would encourage everybody to leverage it, be a part of it, join it. It will help you learn. It will help you grow. It will help you understand. It will help you realize that you're not on your own in a lot of the things that we feel we struggle in.
Ranya Barakat:So big, big, big fan for networking. That's for sure.
George B. Thomas:I love it. Okay. You've had what sounds like an amazing career, a very interesting life, by the way, if we think about all the traveling in different places and hurdles you've gotten past. Ranya, what has been the most rewarding aspect of your career so far?
Ranya Barakat:Showing my daughter that a woman does not have to be a stay at home mom. A woman can be a business owner. It's okay to be bossy, also known as tenacious, if it's not in a male driven context. Basically, of leading by example in what I would hope my daughter would understand of the role of woman in working society.
George B. Thomas:So good. I I couldn't help but think about my daughters and be like, I hope they hear this part. Like, this that was really good. So let's keep on the advice train. Let's keep on, like, you you as mentor here for a second.
George B. Thomas:What advice would you give other women, your daughter, other women, my daughters, whoever, who might wanna choose this type of career path in HubSpot or agency, or just, like, being an entrepreneur or business owner?
Ranya Barakat:Yep. Gender is irrelevant is what the advice I would give them. Whatever what it is you wanna do, whatever industry it is, be it sports, be it CRM, tech, coding, AI, whatever what it is, don't ever feel that because you're a woman or you're female that your gender is actually something that works for or against you because it's actually your brain and what you know and how you use it and how you position that value. And I think gender is something that is indoctrinated to have women feel like, oh, you're a woman, step aside, and men to feel like, oh, we're so on top of it. So if we can strip that and just focus on what is common between male and woman, it would be our brain.
Ranya Barakat:And what can we do with that brain? That's the sky's the limit. You know?
George B. Thomas:Man, hashtag fire. I I have I'm sitting there listening to you, I'm like, so true. The brain and the spirit. And and not to get all woohoo on anybody, but, like, the essence of you as a human versus the, like, exterior container. Like
Ranya Barakat:Spot on.
Ranya Barakat:Okay. You're going deep, George. You're going I'm I'm trying
George B. Thomas:to just tip my toe into it, but not go all the way there. I'd like I'd to let people take their own journey kind of on some of those things. So here here we go. Here's a good one. By the way, we're we're going to start kind of landing the plane a little bit with these last couple of questions.
George B. Thomas:Again, you've you've had a great journey. You've come a long way. I'm super curious, like, what are your long term goals from here?
Ranya Barakat:We took the playbook and exhausted it. And what I mean by that is we started in LATAM, full marketing agency, dumped the marketing service in 2018, pivoted to the CRM and tech partner, moved to NAM without actually being in NAM, hitting elites in NAM with a tiny team, moving to EMEA, getting acquired by one of the biggest HubSpot partners out there. So it has been a good run, I'm really grateful to have been on that run. My long term goals is I want to do something like in the future that's a give back to the ecosystem and community. Be it working with other partners to help them understand, well, how do you grow a women, for example, women led agency, if that's important.
Ranya Barakat:It's like the form of the give back. Like I feel what's really special about the HubSpot ecosystem is that community. And the ones that have been doing this for a really long time, if everyone gives back to people who are coming in fresh, I think that will keep it really helpful, really healthy, sorry. Apart from outside of the HubSpot ecosystem, my long term goal is to have a farm, grow my own vegetables, have my own chickens, have yoga retreats, have a juice bar, a salad bar, while helping people. Because whether I help them with the CRM, whether I help them understanding how to grow a successful company that's profitable, or whether I help them, you know, do yoga postures or feel less sad when they are sad.
Ranya Barakat:Feels good?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. I man, I I feel you. It's funny because I don't feel so weird about myself right now because you're literally like, I'm this tech person in a tech industry. And by the way, I wanna farm, and I wanna get back to, like, the natural thing of, like, life, which I have literally said, I feel like my retirement is I'm gonna be on 40 acres, and I'm gonna be a pastor without a church, meaning I'm just gonna be helping humans have a better life. And it it yes.
George B. Thomas:So connected with that. Okay. Okay. Okay. First of all, I've learned a lot about you.
George B. Thomas:So this this question will be very interesting to see where we land. What's a surprising or little known fact about you that people might not expect?
Ranya Barakat:I'm quite shy.
George B. Thomas:Get out of here.
Ranya Barakat:Yes. There's a part of
Ranya Barakat:me that is very shy.
Ranya Barakat:No one believes me when I say that, but there really is a part
Ranya Barakat:of me that is very, very shy.
George B. Thomas:Wow. I I mean, you've killed this interview. I would have never guessed it. And especially going to inbound, which, I mean, I get it. You can be an introvert or be shy and be in the inbound space, but it's it's so like lights on energy out for most of the time.
George B. Thomas:Wow. Okay.
Ranya Barakat:Yeah. There is a part of me that is very, very shy. And every time I say that people your reaction, like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I promise I am.
George B. Thomas:Well, the good thing is it was surprising, and that's what the question asked for. Okay. Ranya, finish this sentence. Success to me means blank.
Ranya Barakat:Showing up my best every day that I can.
George B. Thomas:Period. That's it.
Ranya Barakat:Yeah. Showing up of my best, be it in my career, in my role as a mom, taking care of my dog, as a partner, life partner, whatever it is, success to me means I woke up today, I showed up on my best, I did my best, and tomorrow I'll do even better.