Doing business in Egypt

I find it interesting to look back at the past and reflect upon some of the big decisions which I have taken and examine how well things turned out. I do this both with business and personal decisions and whilst it’s always easy to second guess a call with the benefit of hindsight it’s also a useful learning exercise.
Over the last few months I have had rather more time than usual for reflection, so I have been thinking about some of the things which I did in Egypt and the consequences. To be honest my whole Egypt experience was pretty much a car crash and one I should have walked away from the moment the owner of the business tried to explain to me why it was a good idea to split his loss making restaurant business into two pieces, add in more costs and have two MDs. Although in fairness to him he was making the assumption (heaven only knows how) that there would be no additional costs involved in the split. Anyway, for all sorts of reasons I stayed and tried to make a go of things and whilst I always knew that there was little hope of taking a bunch of loss making units with very poor cash flow and making a successful division out of them I decided to treat the whole thing as a learning exercise and told myself that whatever happened I should be able to add some value.
The one big decision I look back on was the one I made early on when I realised that I was faced with the stark reality that our costs were too high and our sales were too low so I made the decision to try and drive sales. To be honest, trying to drive down costs in an environment where taking people out of the business (especially if you are not up to speed with the Egyptian way of doing things) if next to impossible my sales driving plan was not a bad one and achieved some success. What really hampered me was not having any sort of team around me for a significant period of time which meant that when we did manage to generate extra sales it was already too late.

I’m not going to beat myself up too much about my time out there. The role which I applied for was not the one which I ended up doing and had they been honest with me from the start I would have never accepted the job. That said, SSP was going through a period of change (nothing new there) so who knows what might have happened, in the end it was a case of trying something new and staking the opportunity to experience a different country and different way of doing things. What I will say is that I am a much better leader because of my Egyptian experiences.