Part I: “There was instinct and learning-as-you-go, no playbook.” Aramex founder Fadi Ghandour on the limitations, risks and rewards of building a heritage company.

Part one of our two-episode series. Fadi Ghandour co-founded Aramex in 1982 fresh out of studying Political Science in college, an education to which he attributes much of his dialectic thinking. It took tenacity and hard work, but Fadi says that plunging into the complexities of starting a logistics company in the Middle East from the bottom up also required a degree of experimentation and, yes, of naïveté. Aramex took the industry by storm from the get-go and, in 1997, became the first Arab company to be listed on the NASDAQ before going private again and then re-listing on the Dubai Financial Market.

Fadi sets the stage for the beginnings of his prolific career; growing up in a predominantly female household in politicized 1960s Amman, the cues he took from his father, what he learned from taking a company public and the importance of attracting local talent to foster a culture of loyalty and growth.

Links:

Harvard Business Review: How I Did This by Fadi Ghandour