Case Study of an Entrepreneur- Hesham Tomeizeh

This is a true inspiring story of an amazing simple young person, born thirty years ago in an ordinary Palestinian family, electrical engineer by his profession, who had been trying differently to pave a secure and successful path for his family and his deprived society. Only his passion to develop a large enterprise in his city Hebron, West Bank- Palestine to make every single workers (100 teenagers of martyred families) as shareholders of his community business; actually influenced him to do something different. Few years back, he started his first personal small size business, Al-Taher Partnership Center of Computer in Palestine with his elder brother as his co-partner. He was the first person in his family who thought outside the box by taking initiative to start a business believing on his in-built capabilities and thirst for achieving his dreams. Due to prolonged war, unsustainable condition and significant economic damages to his country by rivals, he sadly shut down his first business and moved to Australia-Canberra with his family in 2016 to explore new venture(s). I met him in September, a month ago while searching for an entrepreneur. “Identifying a particular kind of individual, such as the entre-preneur, is a subjective process no matter how well defined or understood” (Bolton.B, Thompson.J 2004) ⁽¹⁾.

To support his family for providing basic needs of life i.e. food, safety and shelter; he started working as barber in a local shop; just two weeks after he arrived in Canberra. Few months later, both he and his wife secured their jobs in a local Indian Restaurant where his duties merely included dusting and cleaning. The other thing which he could do is watching and self-learning local culture in new working atmosphere. He observed cooking, inventories, marketing and customers’ dealing, performed by his restaurant’s fellows until one day astoundingly, he offered restaurant’s owner to appoint him as assistant chef to prepare traditional South Indian Food. This was purely his commitment, determination, basic drive to achieve and grow that he focused upon opportunities rather than resources and structure.

Arabic the only language he was familiar with, since his birth. His persistence in problem-solving and aptitude of facing difficulties with patience, guided him to start learning English by himself and by communicating with his fellows during his restaurant job in 2016. While explaining about his English learning endeavour, he started laughing and told humorously that for him every single world of English has a specific story and hilarious background. He repeated every new words numerous times to remember and pronounce correctly. To improve further, he also energetically started taking his functional English classes from CIT.

He and his family missed their local traditional foods especially, Taboon, ma'amoul, Flafel, hummus and Kehwa after settling in Australia. They started cooking these traditional dishes at home to satisfy their basic food desires. One day, Hesham had a creative idea to share these traditional foods with local people to see their taste responses and capacity of future selling. He asked his wife and father to help him preparing traditional Palestinian bread (Taboon) and sweat (ma'amoul). Part of team building, he inspired his spouse and father to sell sweet in front of nearby shops and he himself took responsibility for visiting other Asian and Arabic shops to sell bread. On the very first day, he prepared and supplied only ten breads out of which four were sold but he felt it as his first success. To introduce Palestinian sweets in local community, his spouse and father had about eight hundreds small pieces for customers’ free taste.

As Hesham envisioned, more and more local customers attracted towards this new taste and whole family started making these food items daily. Hesham had initiated this for sharing his foods for another social cause i.e. to present his country’s food to locals which later turned into his small business. At early stage, Hesham and his wife kept doing this business in parallel to their jobs in Indian Restaurant. But for the expansion of their own business they left their personal jobs and concentrated on their own food business in Canberra.

On my question about Hesham’s intention to start his own business particularly Palestinian food items, he told me that from the early years of his engineering career, he felt that it was always better to be your own boss rather serve to someone else as ordinary employee. He thinks that doing his own business always gives him new ideas and thus keeps him busy in innovation and improvement which is far better than doing same job every day without any creativity. He is a born Entrepreneur. “Entrepreneurial skills and behaviours can be natured, developed and acquired and that it is possible to improve an individual’s odds of being success. The younger the founder of a business venture, the higher the energy levels and drive, though the less their business experience, management skills, know-how, wisdom and judgment (Chell, E., Haworth.J, & Brearly.S 1991) ⁽²⁾.

He strongly believes that everyone can start his/her own business. It is difficult, time taking and risky path of success but not impossible at all. Only thing which is required for starting and running a business is sense of ownership, passion and self-belief in your idea and cause. Starting from scratch without any external help and financial aid is extremely challenging however, if idea is responsive and value differentiation then it usually makes its position in market quickly. With the passage of time, more and more customers become loyal to your products if you keep innovate and distinguish than other similar products in the local market. He added further that his market analysis and personal perception of his customers’ expectation are major determinants behind the successful selling of his food items. Hesham shared that he questioned himself that if he got used to a few new Australian dishes than there must be evitable chance that local people would like his Palestinian food items as well. It echoes the Bjőrn Bjerke (2007) citation “I am more convinced than ever that entrepreneurship cannot be planned to any major extent in advance, and that planning even goes against the very entrepreneurial ideal. Entrepreneurship is rather about courage and willpower, being venturesome when experimenting and network, and about exploiting necessary mistakes as moments of learning” ⁽³⁾.

Hesham told that integrity, reliability, honesty and positive inspiring behaviour to customers and workers are very important aspects for successfully operating any business irrespective of its size and structure. He told that many people showed their interests to help him and guide him to expand his food business. Hesham always listen, gives weightage to such suggestions and takes those positively. Some of his customers suggested him to supply at their homes (door to door supply) and few advised him to also participate in local social events where more people gather with their families. Hesham remembered that one day, he and his family sold all of his Flafel during one social event outside Canberra where customers were asking even for more. He learnt local business techniques and selling expertise just observing other competitors and listening his loyal customers.

Hesham’s early thoughts of “introducing new taste to local tastebuds” worked and boosted his food business. He still is in the developing stage of his family business due to lack of resources, capital and language barrier. Demand of his traditional food items is increasing every day and to maintain supply at various places, he needs more resources and friends/ family cooperation. Other interesting fact about his start-up that he does not believe on banking loan system and considers it deceptive business trap for small businesses. He suggested to start from small and grow slowly which is lesser risky and safe especially, when too much is already on stack. Hesham thinks that it is always difficult to save during early stage of every business, because major portion of earning to invest again in business. He considered that eighty (80%) percentage of total saving is required to put into business during the first three (3) years and later it reduced to fifty (50%) percentage of total earning up to next two (2) years. He measured this strategy as necessary for growth of his food business in Canberra.

Failing in achieving his capital goals so far and due to limited resources, Hesham has planned to fly to Palestine in coming days to arrange cheap printouts for his food items and to buy necessary ingredients required to make his food items. He will further discuss about designing of his business logo and slogan with his closer friends. Being optimistic, he wants to meet his friends and family members to share his profitable business venture and will try to arrange capital on interest-free loan and learn manufacturing of more traditional Palestinian food items. His primary intention is to find his business supporters on long run. He has also recently contacted local Canberra’s suppliers for the required Arabian food constituents and currently in process of his early order deals. A failure always opens more doors to be stronger and more knowledgeable helping to not repeat the same errors again in life and Hesham further emphasised that a person being more smarter can also learn this by his/her  competitors’ experiences and lesson learned stories.

His main dream is to serve his Palestinian community by establishing a big enterprise allowing at least one hundred youngsters of martyred families for their technical and financial support in which all employees will be shareholders. More they hard work, more everyone will earn in that organisation. His optimistic thoughts, strong conversation and appealing social cause reminds me saying of D. Hisrich, Robert, P. Peters. Michael, a. Shepherd. Dean, (2010) that “an entrepreneur is one who brings resources, labour, materials, and other assets into combinations that make their value greater than before and also one who introduces changes, innovations, and a new order” ⁽⁴⁾. He needs significant capital to start this social project and hence, his secondary objective is to be famous Palestine bread manufacturer in Australia to make additional earning to support his main project.

Hesham celebrates his success with his family by sharing profits and by honouring even small gains that make his big win possible so far. He told that sketching path of success is neither a straight line nor one person’s efforts therefore, we must strengthen team work and encourage ideas sharing. He thinks that celebrating just huge victories does not make any sense to him because prior reaching any big success, smaller achievements must also be celebrated. Currently, Hesham is thinking of buying a food truck through which he can sell more Palestinian food items along with herbal tea and other traditional beverages.

I highly believe on Hesham’s entrepreneurial traits which are more similar to Bjerke. B (2007) findings that “Entrepreneurs have no overall plan for what they are doing, they have no real knowledge of interest in what it means to work in a formal organisation. They don’t apply management skills in any formal sense. They just do what they do naturally. They even have problems afterwards in describing in any detail what they have actually done. They are very humble people and see their colleagues as the main contributors to their success” ⁽⁵⁾. Though he is not a perfect entrepreneur owning all the entrepreneurial characteristics in his personality and business decisions but his high energy, optimistic decisiveness attitude, growth-minded actions, tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty inspire me to believe on his success. “A team might show many of the desired strengths, but even there is no such thing as ‘a perfect entrepreneur’, as yet” (Thomas el al., 1985, p.153)

From his told personal entrepreneurship journey and shared business story, I have learnt that entrepreneur can be any person with high motives to bring change(s) in his life and his surroundings. Entrepreneur is a person who uses risk-taking skills to develop new concepts, business trends and innovate new products/services. Entrepreneur generally fills the space of existing market by taking challenges and transform innovative ideas into products for the combined benefits of society. An entrepreneur is not a person having only passion or ambition but exercising ideas with actions. Entrepreneur must be a person of integrity, enthusiasm, leadership, sincerity, truthfulness and hardworking. Entrepreneur being optimistic never lose hope and always focused on set goals. Entrepreneur’s main strength is passions, consistency, social networking and listening ideas.

References:

1-   Bolton.B, Thompson.J (2004), “Entrepreneurs-Talent, Temperament, Technique”  2nd  ed. pp.43, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinmann, UK

2-   Chell, E., Haworth.J, and Brearly.S (1991) “The Entrepreneurial Personality”, pp.47, Routledge, UK

3-   Bjerke. B (2007), “Understanding Entrepreneurship” p.135, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, USA

4-   D. Hisrich, Robert, P. Peters. Michael, a. Shepherd. Dean, (2010). Entrepreneurship. 8th ed. pp.6, McGraw-Hill, Singapore

5-   Bjerke. B (2007), “Understanding Entrepreneurship” p. preface, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, USA