Born salesman finds his forte with Dubai telecoms business

Had it not been for the Iran-Iraq war, Raad Jaboori Al Sheikh might never have founded Metelco, the telecoms that operates out of Media City in Dubai. Now the Iraqi wants to come full circle and expand into his homeland.

Raad Jaboori Al Sheikh has a long-term ambition of returning to his home country Iraq. Reem Mohammed / The National

It was probably inevitable that Raad Jaboori Al Sheikh would start his own business, and that it would be focused on the Middle East.

The 47-year-old Dubai-based entrepreneur comes from the Hannah Sheikh family of southern Iraq, a leading merchant group with an 80-year track record in business in the Basra region. Its expertise was in real estate, shipping, agriculture and construction, and he might have simply gone into the family business were it not for the Iran-Iraq war.

Mr Al Sheikh’s father moved the family to safety in the UK and the young man started looking at other, less traditional business areas for his career.

“I always wanted to be in sales, right from the time I did my postgrad course in management studies. I enjoy selling things, and I’m good at it. Typically sales people are paid a basic salary plus commission, so it’s as close as you get to running your own business without actually doing it. I think that appealed.

“But I get a buzz out of that relationship with clients, meeting the requirement, closing the deal.

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After a flirtation with the mortgage advisory business in the early 1990s, Mr Al Sheikh moved into the telecoms business “the boom industry of those days”. He was part of a team that distributed hardware and software for giants of the IT industry like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, in a sales network in the UK and Europe, selling to big UK retailer like Dixons and PC World.

Then after a few years came what he describes as the “big move”, when he joined the UK arm of a US company called CTI Group. This company was (and remains) “a global provider of innovative carrier-grade software solutions and services which empower organisations to gain strategic competitive advantage from their unified communications data”, but in short it helps other big organisations manage their telecommunications and data requirements.

It was the first company to develop a system, Proteus, that was to prove vital to Mr Al Sheikh’s budding entrepreneurial career.

“It’s all about call management. Big companies have extremely complex telecoms needs – billing, itemisation, individual breakdowns of calls – and it makes sense for all that to be done by somebody else, a specialist rather than the user itself.”

He had a good time at CTI. – “I was salesman of the year in 1999, I’ve still got the cup somewhere” – but other opportunities beckoned, in IT systems in the City of London. A holiday in Dubai in 2002 led to a chance encounter with an established player in the telecoms market, and a job offer.

Two years later, Mr Al Sheilkh set out on his own as the regional distributor for CTI, his old firm that was keen to add the Middle East to an expanding list of overseas offices.

“I always wanted to run my own company, and this gave me the opportunity to do that. I had the contract as CTI regional distributor. I was the sole owner and got to choose where the offices were and staffing levels. It suited me perfectly,” he says.

That was the origin of Metelco, of which he is now managing director and owner.

The first six months were hectic. “I spent a lot of time getting to know the partners in the region, just travelling round to meet people. But I had to get the office set up too. I was never tempted to set up with a local partner. The aim was always to be in a free zone. That’s where we started off 11 years ago, and we’re still there. I’m very happy with Media City. The services and locations are all good. It’s expensive, but it does what you want.

Equally significant, Mr Al Sheikh has never taken any outside finance, preferring instead to rely on his own capital and cash flow to fund growth. “We’ve been fortunate, I suppose, in that we’ve always been in the black and we’ve funded expansion through our own resources, so I’ve never had to deal with the problems of SME finance,” he says.

However, like other SMEs, he has to juggle the financial priorities of running a small business with care. The main costs are salaries, office rent, trade licence, visas, health insurance and other general expenses, but he singles out rent as the most significant variable the company faces.

It has not so far, however, caused him to rethink his location in Media City. “Some firms I know have moved to Jumeirah Lakes Towers, but with five people, including me, rent was never that big an issue. Just not worth the cost of a move,” he says.

One of Mr Al Sheikh’s motivating factors is, of course, financial. “Like any other businessman, that’s what it’s all about at the end to the day. If you’re not making money, what’s the point?”

But he has another long-term ambition of returning to Iraq: “I’d like to break into the raw market in a big way. Of course, security is an issue, but it’s getting better. It’s my home country and I’d like to be part of its reconstruction.”

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