Linda Mahoney speaks about being the mother of two small children living in Dubai over 20 years ago, when she was faced with a dilemma, to stay and make a business for herself or return to the US. She stayed and built her BetterHomes real estate business from scratch. It now employs 450 employees.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 I had a friend who rented a villa to our family when I arrived here.
00:15 The whole time I was working in the medical field, she kept saying to me,
00:18 "If you ever are looking for a job."
00:21 Well, I didn't think I'd ever be looking for a job until life got in the way,
00:26 which is a failed marriage, really.
00:28 So I went to work for her, and it was just a slow process for three months,
00:32 and then she left.
00:34 And I didn't quite know what I was supposed to do because I certainly wasn't a real estate agent as such.
00:38 I had two children, and I had to make a decision to stay in Dubai and try it on my own,
00:44 which is exactly what I did.
00:45 And that's how I ended up as a sole owner of a company, which was one employee.
00:51 I had never done this kind of thing before, and I had 500 dirhams in the bank.
00:55 But the interesting thing about being younger is that there's not such a fear factor.
01:01 There's sort of nothing you can't do.
01:03 All I did was go out and speak to landlords, find properties.
01:06 Dubai was the right place at the right time, not just for me, for many, many people.
01:12 Expatriates were coming in, and as it got busier in Dubai, the demand was greater.
01:16 That demand created the demand for employees.
01:19 And then I eventually moved into somebody's garage, and then I fixed the garage up,
01:23 and then I hired a lady.
01:25 As soon as I hired somebody, we brought more revenue in.
01:28 So then before I knew it, I had one, and then I had two, and then I had three, then I had five.
01:32 That's how it grew, just bit by bit for demand.
01:35 And that was just simply renting a property on behalf of an owner.
01:39 The moment that they announced sales in the market changed everything.
01:43 That's when we really grew.
01:46 It was around the same time that my son joined the company, because at that point he had grown up.
01:51 I was very, very fortunate, because my son and I complement each other.
01:55 I'm a people person, and he's a strategist.
01:57 Without that, we would never have grown the way we have,
01:59 because he structured the whole growth rollout for 20 years.
02:05 One of the big challenges was that there were global financial crises.
02:09 It was always a worry for a small business, but Dubai rose up and managed to weather those storms,
02:15 and then we're back on a roll again.
02:17 We now have four big offices with roughly 450 employees.
02:22 We have one employee who's been with us 23 years, another one at 22 years, and many, many, many at 15.
02:29 I can't even tell you what that makes me feel.
02:32 Family-owned businesses, if they're harmonious, couldn't be anything better, really.
02:37 I spoke to a landlord bank manager who said, "Everything that's built in Dubai has been built."
02:43 This was, say, 1995, and look at what's happened since then.
02:46 So when you say, "Where would the company go?" Who knows?
02:49 Life is what happens between the plans.
02:53 [music]