Necessity is the mother of ingenuity” reads the old proverb. Tough times sent Najah Jaroush Abdouni back to her roots and her business blossomed. The year was 1992; the country was ravaged, the economy plummeting, Najah Jaroush Abdouni was 36 years old, in debt, there wasn’t money coming in and she’d just given birth to her third daughter. “We had to calculate the cost of everything then,” Abdouni remembers. “The salon in the house was falling apart.” Her husband, who had previously worked in the clothing trade, left for Brazil to work with his family in order to earn money. “So I had to create on my own,” Abdouni declares with persisting conviction. What she had to work with then was a degree in agricultural engineering, alongside the simple market insight that, at the time, no one was working in the field of landscape architecture. A friend of hers was looking for help to build her garden and Abdouni took the job. She checked out books at AUB as a refresher, practiced with a few architects to get her hand comfortable with the trade and committed herself to the first project. And then the second. And soon, for her newly established company Tassamim, Abdouni recalls, “the word of mouth ran very fast.” “There weren’t many women working at this time, and even less so in this field,” she continues. “And I was there working with my hands: I drove the rototiller myself, I dug the holes and did the planting. It was somehow remarkable for people to see. Why was I doing this, people wondered, when I had laborers to do the work? But I wanted to try everything myself before delegating to the foreman that I acquired later.”  Today, Abdouni works on ten to fifteen large projects a year – some as much as 10,000 square meters – and commands three landscaping teams with four employees each full time, in addition to a score of seasonal laborers. Her only expansion stemmed in part from the reputation of her father. Abdouni remarks that he worked at the local sugar factory in the Bekaa, where he was “respected, unbiased and secular.” “Whenever clients heard my name, they consequently thought of my father’s way.” And she has launched a second business as of 2002: C-Green, a sod growing company that came about with her expertise and a partner’s capital that she reports is growing at a per annum rate of 25 percent. “Let me draw you a graph,” she illustrates. “I started with less than nothing in 1992. By 1994 I had paid off my debts and could handle my daughters’ tuition. By 2000, I could travel, and put my daughters through AUB, and start getting involved with social outreach. Now, I don’t need to worry about life expenses, and we’re planning for our retirement.” Her family, friends and neighbors rallied around. Cousins joined the company, and her husband took over management. Like freshly laid grass seed on well-cared for soil in the late spring, additional roles spread out around her core businesses. She was organizing agricultural fairs in the Bekaa, managing mushroom growing operations led by the Ministry of Agriculture, recruited by AUB to act as their landscape contractor, recruited at a vocational center to teach orphans her trade, recruited to coordinate continual learning courses for adults, taken on as the agricultural consultant for the Lebanese Golf Club and joined the Lebanese League for Women in Business. Her newfound roles reflect her personal creed: “People talk about the so-called ‘life-work balance.’ But it’s actually the life, work, and social responsibility balance. It’s not a balance if you’re satisfied with work and family alone. You need to recycle your knowledge throughout society.” Despite the success, Abdouni regrets the time she missed with her daughters when they were young. “I used to convince myself that it was quality time that mattered with my children, not quantity. But that’s bullshit. I believe that as a mother, there should be quantity, too.” “Yet on the other hand, my daughters somehow eased things for me, Abdouni says. “They take pride in what I do. They’re involved in my business, and one of my daughters is now getting her degree in landscape architecture. I’ve thought this might become a family business.”   This article was originally published in the  November/December 2012 print edition of Entrepreneur Levant with the headline: The constant gardener.   Photography by Hassan Shabaan

The Constant Gardener 2014 - Feb - 22

Source : The Constant Gardener | Entrepreneur Middle East