Today we’d like to introduce you to Shahriar Bayat.
Hi Shahriar, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My journey didn’t start the way most people would expect. I went to college to become a laboratory technician, but the moment I started my first job, surrounded by nothing but microscopes, I knew it wasn’t for me. I had been laying carpet on the side, and something in me knew that was closer to where I belonged — not in a lab, but building something of my own.
So I went to my dad and asked him for $5,000. That was 1989. I used that money to open my first flooring shop, and I made sure that when I went back to school, my associate degree would be in business — not laboratory science. I had already made up my mind: I was going to be an entrepreneur.
What followed was nearly three decades of building, failing, learning, and growing. It wasn’t a straight line — there were plenty of ups and downs along the way — but every challenge shaped who I became as a businessman and as a person.
Then came the moment that changed everything. I was diagnosed with cancer. And instead of letting that word define me in a negative way, I made a decision: I was going to prove my doctors wrong, come out the other side, and use everything I had been through to help others. That’s how Inner Compass Cancer Foundation was born — not from a perfectly planned strategy, but from a very real, very human experience of facing the worst and choosing to fight.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
If I look back across 37 years of building a business and a life, the one thing I can tell you with complete certainty is this: my greatest growth never came from my best years. From 1998 to 2008, we went from two stores to eleven, from $3 million in revenue to $21 million.
Financially, it was the best decade of my life. But honestly? That was the decade I learned the least.
The real growth — the kind that changes how you think, how you see the world, how you treat people — came during the hard times.
Before that decade and after it, when things were going up and down, that’s when I truly evolved. And these past ten years, with all the experience I had built behind me, I feel like I have grown in knowledge and maturity more than in any other period of my life combined.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is about energy and opportunity. I truly believe that opportunities come around all of us constantly, but whether we catch them depends entirely on the state we are in. When your energy is positive, when you are sharp and ready, you see the opportunity and you act on it. But when you are negative, distracted, or closed off, that same opportunity passes right by and you don’t even notice. I’ll never know how many opportunities I missed because I wasn’t in the right place mentally — and that thought drives me every single day to protect my mindset.
And then there was cancer. That was, without question, the biggest challenge of my life. But even that, I refused to let it break me. I told my doctors: watch me. I was going to make the best out of my situation. As I like to say — I was going to make chicken salad out of it, not a chicken shit. And that’s exactly what I did.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Inner Compass Cancer Foundation exists because of everything I went through. This organization was formed out of a bad experience — it wasn’t a group of visionary friends sitting around a table coming up with a concept. Something bad happened to me, and instead of staying under that ceiling, I turned around and said: I’m going to do something meaningful with this.
My mission is simple: to empower cancer patients, because nobody plans to get cancer, and it almost always happens at the worst possible time. When the world feels like it is closing in on you — when you’re dealing with medical expenses, mortgage payments, not being able to work, worrying about your family — it can feel like an army is coming at you from every direction. That is exactly the moment when a supporting voice, a supporting act, can change everything. I have been in situations where someone showed up from nowhere and offered support, and that person has held a special place in my heart ever since. I want Inner Compass to be that for people.
What sets us apart is something I feel very strongly about. In most charities, for every $6 that comes in, $5 goes to real estate, administration, and executive compensation. That is simply not acceptable to me. I have built Inner Compass Cancer Foundation so that out of every $10 donated, $8 or even more goes directly to the patient — not to overhead. And I intend to keep it that way by automating our processes and using technology intelligently so we never lose that ratio.
To me, success is not measured in dollars raised. If Inner Compass touches the life of one person or one thousand, the mission is accomplished. I already receive messages — sometimes weekly — from people telling me that we made a difference in their lives. And every single time, that means more to me than any financial milestone ever could.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The way I see the next five to ten years for Inner Compass is through one word: momentum. Nothing can stop the power of momentum once it truly begins to build. Right now, we are in the early stages — laying the foundation, being consistent, attracting the right people. But I have seen this pattern before in business. You can stop a wave at its inception, but once it starts pulling, nobody can stop it.
A year ago, nobody would have predicted that we would be where we are today. And if I told you where we are going to be a year from now, neither of us would believe it. That is the power of consistency, collaboration, and surrounding yourself with people who genuinely add value.
What I hope for, more than anything, is that our foundation becomes a force — not in terms of size or budget, but in terms of impact. We live in a tough world, and I cannot fix all of it. But I can do my share. I can make sure that when someone is standing against a wall, not knowing what to do, Inner Compass shows up. And I truly believe that if more people directed the energy they spend on showing off toward actually helping others, this would be a completely different world. That is the culture I want Inner Compass to represent — and that is the future I am building toward, one patient at a time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://innercompassfoundation.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inner_compass_cancerfoundation/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inner_compasscancer_foundation
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@InnerCompassCancerFoundation
