Spartan's founder Bilal Munir’s tips for success 

Bilal Munir founded the fitness and athleisure brand Spartan in 2014, at the age of just 22 years. In December 2018, the gym and clothing line became the largest growing athleisure brand with social media presence next to none. Here, he shares his secrets:

Email is too slow:
I avoid email as often as I can. During my day, I’m constantly on the move; the last thing I want to do is to send an email. I use iMessage a lot. At most, I’ll send a small handful of important emails a day.
 
Look to fellow disrupters for guidance:
Outside of the business, the only people I’d ask for advice are inspiring people I train. Founders & CEOs who understand the way that our business works in many ways. They run private and publicly traded companies that are valued in the tens of billions and are incredibly fast-growing. It’s a level up from where we are now. I think a lot of the problems that we have faced during our journey, they have encountered similar circumstances and have managed them well.
 
Don’t throw away the safety net:
Spartan was turning over a quarter of 10 million Rs when I dropped out of university and quit my job as a teaching assistant at a school while also being a freelance personal trainer. Working multiple jobs allowed all of Spartan’s profits to be reinvested; I quit all my jobs at the same time. I quit university, only because I started getting focused and I had to do a lot. It was a case of “Do I want to do this to build a brand? Or do I want to go to university?” That was a decision I had to make. I managed my time with discipline and determination.

Seek out critics:
Starting a business, it’s so easy to put yourself in a position where everyone agrees with you and tells you how great you are. You need to constantly be around people who give you a reality check, people who are better than you.
 
The best hires will come good, even if they occasionally mess up:
I regret not hiring the right people sooner. There will be times when people will fail and you’ll think, “God, I shouldn’t have trusted them with this.” But if you hire people, you genuinely trust, respect and you know are better than you, then over the long run, they’ll do a better job than you.
 
Use social media intuitively:
I never sat down and said, “We’re going to use social media to do X, Y and Z and achieve this for the business.” Social media has always been an organic and natural process because that’s how we are connecting as friends and how we’re following our heroes. It is a really natural way of showcasing the products, brands and communities we are trying to build online.
 

Build lasting online relationships with the people who promote your products:
It’s been seven years that I’ve been doing this and there’s been a lot of brands that have come and gone on social media. They’ve taken short-term approaches to what they do. From the point of view of the athletes we work with, we want to create a real, strong team that speaks to our values. And we work with them for a long, sustained period of time.
 
Get face to face with your customers:
We started our clothing brand with pop-up shops every season and participated in as many local events as possible. We aim to do 10 events a year and I’ll be at the vast majority of them. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have been from speaking to people around the country who are part of the Spartan community and are buying the product. I was in Faislabad once and a guy came up to me and said, “Why don’t you guys make any mesh tank tops?” I said, “To be honest, I’ve no idea.” We went back and made them, and people have loved them ever since.