SME profile: Summertown Interiors managing director an eco-friendly entrepreneur

The Dutch MD who heads up Summertown Interiors arrived in the UAE more than a quarter-century ago armed only with his degree, his business brain and a desire for freedom.

Marcos Bish at the Summertown Interiors office in Jebel Ali Free Zone, which features a biodegradable floor and windows that reduce the building’s energy consumption. Christopher Pike / The National

Marcos Bish describes himself as an entrepreneur through and through.

The Dutch managing director of Summertown Interiors in Dubai, which creates eco-friendly office interiors, Mr Bish is one of those people you frequently meet in Dubai who arrived in the UAE 26 years ago with little more than a degree in international business and a bucketload of entrepreneurial spirit.

Pondering the unusual path of his career in his Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza) office, Mr Bish is circumspect. “I always wanted to have the freedom to do something for myself,” he says. “If I hadn’t ended up in Dubai then wherever I ended up in the world I hope I would have been doing something entrepreneurial.”

Landing in Abu Dhabi in 1990, Mr Bish spent the first 10 years of his time in the UAE working in the recruitment business, hiring people mostly from eastern Europe and the former USSR to come and work in the Emirates.

At the time, the company for which Mr Bish worked also had a side business selling furniture, something he was keen to get involved with.

“I had an economics degree and had no experience of the interiors business at all, so it was all learning on the floor,” Mr Bish says. “But I was lucky enough to have a boss who believed in me and let me do what I was interested in.”

From selling furniture on a project basis, Mr Bish soon started to see strong demand for wooden doors to fit into the scores of new buildings which were being developed as part of the start of the UAE’s construction boom.

By 1997 he felt confident enough to set up his own company importing wooden doors from Spain, which he sold to property developers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. He and a partner invested Dh300,000 into his new business and never looked back.

“There is a big difference between setting up a business in the UAE these days and doing it back then,” Mr Bish says. “Back when I was setting up Summertown, government offices were a lot harder to deal with. Everyone would show up when the office opened at 7.30am and whoever pushes most got served first. These days things are a lot more streamlined. There is a good system now and a lot of things are online.”

But soon, Mr Bish says, he started to realise that the owners of the high-end shops and hotels he was working for were looking for more. “After a few years we started to see that our clients wanted to get things that weren’t just out of a catalogue. They wanted the door that they saw but they wanted a window in it. I started to see that there was an opportunity for a custom joinery factory over here and so we set one up.”

But bespoke joinery also turned out to be just another part of Summertown’s evolution. With the UAE property boom going at full throttle, by 2003 Mr Bish and his team were tempted into the even more lucrative area of taking on full interior fit-out contracts.

“Some of our clients were more satisfied with the work we did than contractors doing a total fit-out. We were asked ‘could you not do the whole fit-out for us?’” Mr Bish says. “We resisted for a long time because it would mean going into competition with some of our existing clients. But, eventually we did, and set up a fit-out design department in 2003.”

With the UAE property market booming, Summertown enjoyed its own business boom. The company expanded so that it was operating from three offices in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Jebel Ali.

But then in 2008 the business was hit by the global financial downturn and suddenly much of the work the company had been doing dried up almost overnight.

“When the crisis hit we wanted to be loyal to our employees. We didn’t want to let any of our staff go,” says Mr Bish. “It was very difficult because almost overnight contracts were cancelled and there was no money coming in. At one stage we encouraged staff to take unpaid leave and at another point we reduced working hours by 20 per cent rather than fire people and to keep our heads above water. It was very stressful.”

Stressful as it was, Mr Bish succeeded in avoiding any layoffs during the crisis but came out of the experience determined to shape Summertown into a more focused sort of firm which concentrated on its strengths.

“We started to realise that perhaps 25 years ago approximately 20 per cent of a project would be joinery,” Mr Bish says. “These days it is closer to 6 per cent as other materials such as glass, plastic and steel have replaced the wood. So we decided to sell the joinery factory and concentrate on what we are really good at – environmentally friendly interior fit-out.”

“For some time we had identified that it was part of our DNA to be green,” Mr Bish adds. “We built a new headquarters building which ended up becoming the UAE’s first Leed [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] gold-certified building. We realised we needed to drive the business forward to get ourselves a long-term goal and to do that we needed to realise what we were already passionate about and so we made a plan to make the business carbon neutral by 2020.”

Today Summertown employs about 150 staff and has an annual turnover of around Dh80 million. Moreover, of the roughly 30 environmentally friendly fit-outs completed in the UAE over the past decade, Mr Bish estimates that Summertown has been involved in 10 or 11.

“It was a steep learning curve,” Mr Bish says. “When you go for ‘green’ interiors, there are three areas that are challenging. One is documentation; there’s a lot involved. Second is sourcing materials: you’re using a lot of products within a certain radius. If you start flying and shipping them it’s not very green. Third is the fit-out, or construction, itself.”

As part of this Summertown’s own corporate office includes a biodegradable floor, the company makes effective use of windows to mean that it uses just 7 watts per square metre of lighting (rather than the conventional 25 watts per sq metre), the only paints and glues used in the fit- out did not give off gases and it attempts to minimise cooling in its air-conditioning system.

And, alongside its strong environmental focus, Summertown has also built up its own Corporate Social Responsibility programme, which also involves ensuring staff enjoy reasonable salaries as well as running healthy initiatives and team-building exercises.

But, despite his success in building his business, Mr Bish says that those setting up small business in the UAE are still finding it tough to get funding from banks and backing from government.

"There is a lot said about how much SMEs contribute to the UAE economy, but I'm not sure that they are always valued that way," he says. "The reality is that there really isn't much support for small businesses in the Middle East.

“We all know the contributions that small businesses make, but it seems that large companies are more supported by the government and by financial institutions. If anything it seems to be getting harder.”

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