An entrepreneur to truly admire

The word entrepreneur is used liberally these days but sometimes it really is a fitting description.

Recently, the title World Entrepreneur was awarded to one Mohed Altrad and his rags to riches story is one that I found both humbling and inspirational, not just for UK entrepreneurs but for anyone.

The location for the annual awards was glitzy Monaco, playground of the super-rich jetset. It couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to the town where Mohed Altrad grew up, Raqqa in Syria, now the stronghold for the Islamic State terror group.

Here Mohed, a Bedouin who isn’t actually certain how old he is according to his interview with the BBC, started with absolutely nothing. His birth was the result of the rape of his mother by a tribal chief. She died having him. She was 13 and had already had one son who was murdered by her attacker.

Brought up in poverty, he had to battle for an education as it was expected that he would become a shepherd. In the end determination and a thirst for knowledge led him to university in France and a PhD in computer science. He set up first a company making portable computers and then, with a keen eye for giving people what they need, he used the capital from its sale to turn around the fortunes of a small scaffolding business that was haemorrhaging money.

Thirty years later, the Altrad group is made up of 170 companies employing 17,000 people around the world with a ￡1.3bn turnover.

Interestingly, Mohed believes in financing business growth out of cash flow. He reinvests earnings so as to avoid the financial markets and becoming ‘a prisoner of the banks’. It’s an ethos that has served him well. Not only is he a hugely successful businessman but he finds time to write books on economics and his autobiography is recommended reading for French schoolchildren.

Previous winners of the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year title include Peter Bronsman, the man behind the Swedish Kopparberg cider business, and Hamdi Ulakaya, a Turkish immigrant to the US who created the largest yoghurt brand in America. From a standing start in 2007, by 2013 Ulakaya’s company’s turnover topped $1bn.

Their achievements are to be admired and emulated but if one thing stood out for me from the BBC interview with latest winner Mohed Altrad it was his assertion that he wants to make the people who work for him happy.

"If they are happy, they are more efficient, better performers, they have a better life." That – he says – is what companies ought to aim for. "If I am happy, I work well."

Surely a lesson for entrepreneurs wherever they are in the world.

https://www.matthewsanders.info/an-entrepreneur-to-truly-admire/