Meet Charbel A. Zeaiter

I founded a company, took it to a $22 million valuation, and sold my stake for 7-figures.

I'm Charbel, I've been building companies since 1988, and building the people who build them for just as long.

A deli in Glebe that became Lindt's biggest retailer in the southern hemisphere. A cafe in Redfern that Time Out named one of Sydney's five best. A streetwear label that landed in the first Australian edition of Vice. Academy Xi, Australia's first UX and service design school, which trained thousands before I sold my stake in 2019.

The path to success is the same path where we meet failures. I started an environmental venture that collapsed in public and taught me more by crashing than any other lesson.

I didn't learn business from a textbook. My businesses and collaborations taught me:

+ Risk, vision, money, customer experience and storytelling in a deli. 

+ Brand, marketing, online sales, social media and legal prowess in a cafe. 

+ Design, contracts and supply chains in a streetwear label. 

+ Innovation, tech, user experience design, service design, team building, culture and scale in my agency. 

+ Transformative coaching and personal transformation as the founder and first coach at Academy Xi.

+ And Faster Zebra is where I bring everything together and coach the next round of entrepreneurs.

38 years building businesses, with 13 coaching people how.

See how I coach Read the record

Academy Xi · 2013 to 2019

My first education company started as a Saturday class in the back of my agency.

I was hiring two junior designers and interviewing sixteen people. By the fourth portfolio I'd stopped looking at the work, because every candidate had designed the same imaginary bike store from the same stale curriculum.

The problem was clear: design and tech schools were teaching people how to do the same work.

So I started an education company, wrote the courses and taught the first classes myself, on Saturdays and weekdays in the workshop room at Velvet Onion. I wrote each week's content the week I taught it and adjusted before the next class. That class became Academy Xi, Australia's first User Experience Design and Service Design school, taught in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Singapore.

More than 8,500 people came through paid courses, intensives, workshops and hackathons while I was there. I wrote the curriculum, designed the learning, taught the students, and trained the instructors who taught the rest.

A complicated idea becomes easier the moment someone shows you one step at a time.

The one thing I'm built to do is take something complicated and make it simple enough to understand and apply. I strip out the theory and the jargon, then break the path into moves you can use today.

Every move and every action has a reason. It builds understanding, produces something real, and sets up the one after it. Confidence comes from evidence: you did the work, you saw what changed, and you know why the next decision matters.

I don't expect anyone to understand a whole business before they start. I give you one clear move, let you use it on your own idea, and help you build the judgement to choose the next one.

• Say it in plain language.
• One practical move at a time.
• Apply it to your own business or idea.
• Look at what changed, and why.
• Build the next stage from there.

Live group coaching

I created Faster Zebra, and I'm leading the coaching.

I created the four-season year from what I've learned in 38 years of building businesses and 13 of direct coaching. I lead the live calls myself and bring in expert mentors when someone else knows a thing better than I do.

The goal: build a sustainable, revenue-generating business. And build yourself in the process.

The community is mixed on purpose: every age & stage. 

That's where judgement actually transfers, sideways from someone a year ahead and downwards from someone twenty years ahead. You can download information. You can't download a room.

From startup to scale-up.

Every season produces two results.

First is the business: a working business, a clear brand, paying customers and structure to grow.

The second thing is just as important: you. Something in you has changed changed: your judgement, your range, your nerve and your deeper sense of self.

You've practised explaining an idea, asking for feedback, testing an offer, and answering for it when it didn't work. Most importantly, you've launched a viable business.

The seasons repeat and evolve each year because the work stays useful. A first-timer and a twenty-year operator can run the same activity against different businesses and both get something worth having.

Built, sold, and occasionally sued.

My CV is less a list of titles, and more of a record of what I've done. Here's a sample, and what it taught me.

• Swiss Deli, Glebe · 1988I was twenty-one with a rundown shopfront and six blocks of Lindt. As they sold, I added more, until we stocked every version Lindt made and became their biggest retailer in the southern hemisphere. Thirty cheeses became a hundred and forty, each with a story-card I wrote myself. It ran until David Jones noticed.

  Taught me money, customer experience, story telling, and how to build a business based on evidence and obsessing over customers.

• The Love Project · 2003A subversive, politically charged streetwear label I started with my brother during the Iraq war. Fists reading LOVE LOVE across the knuckles. No ad spend and no PR, and it still landed in Vice Australia's first edition and the best stores in Sydney and Melbourne.

  This taught me attention, creativity, a point of view and what happens when you don't have contracts in place. Ouch.

• Moose General Store, Redfern · 2010My cafe in an old butcher's shop, named one of the five best in Sydney by Time Out, known for killer brownies and boozy marmalades and customisable granolas (the first of its kind in the online space). The online business got the attention of Sanitarium over the word "granola". I took it to court alongside other makers and we won, because you don't get to own a word the whole country already uses. Then a noise complaint brought the council, eighteen mismatched tables became four bolted to the floor, and the freedom that made the place work was gone.

  This taught me brand, design, irreverence, more about customers, the first foray into social media, and my first online business.

• Velvet Onion · 2001, revived 2013My design and innovation studio, now Velvet Onion & Friends, still running in Sydney. Five challenger brands for IAG, Australia's largest insurer. OneShift, its first client, grew 3,800% and later sold for eight figures. A media engine that made $2 million in its first year for one of Australia's largest independent media companies.

  Taught me customer experience design, service design, innovation, and how to leave capability with the teams after we've trained them.

• Academy Xi · 2013 to 2019Australia's first UX Design, Service Design and Growth Marketing courses, and one of its first practical UX and innovation schools. Thousands trained. Raised across three rounds: a $275,000 pre-seed, a $1.1 million seed and a $2.25 million Series A. General Assembly sent a cease and desist from New York, I asked which parts of UX they'd invented, and they dropped it. I sold my stake in 2019 for seven figures.

  Taught me how to turn what I knew into something that changed the career trajectory of thousands of people.

• Alt Saints · 2020From serial founder to cereal founder. An environmental venture I raised over half a million dollars for, ranged in supermarkets, before it met COVID, a two-cent margin from a supermarket giant, and my own mistakes. I hired ahead of the evidence, ran too many experiments, and handed a critical decision to an expert against my own judgement. He was wrong. It was still my call. It pivoted into the project that seeded Momo & Yeti, Dino Loco and Kith9.

  Taught me everything, everywhere, all at once, and as much as it hurt, Faster Zebra was born out of the wreckage.

The skill was never the sector. It's how you read a problem, frame the opportunity, build the answer, and make it hold up commercially. That's the thing Faster Zebra hands forward.

Evidence

What people say about learning with Charbel.

A teacher in South Australia working with 17 to 24 year olds bought three different Kits. One buyer bought a Kit for herself, and a second for her son.

Selected press, talks and conversations

More than three decades tends to leave a trail.

Also writes

Stories and provocations.

Beyond Faster Zebra, I write fiction under Febble Flim & Family, including a six-volume urban fantasy Momo & Yeti and the worlds of Dino Loco and Kith9, and non-fiction under The Unfuckery.