Managing Director (International Events Partners)

To start off, I saw on the website that you and Raymond Cahill initiated IEP. How was this conceptualized and what do you consider the biggest milestone since its inception?

Well the simple answer to that is “who doesn’t want to be there own Boss?”

Both I and Ray have known each other for many years and this was a concept that had always appealed to both of us. Over the years we had given much thought to this idea and as we had both been working in the conference and exhibition business for some time the logical progression was to go out on our own.

Then in 2003 the opportunity emerged, we decided to strike while the iron was hot and we launched IEP with offices in the UK and Egypt.

I’d have to say our first major milestone was organizing the Egypt Invest 2003 event. Many of the business books that you read tell you that the first 24 months are the most important. IEP was not the exception to the rule. In launching our first event we look to address the investment climate for Egypt. More or less straight forward you might have thought but you would be wrong.

At the time that we were launching this event the investment climate was very cold and not a lot of people had a lot to say about it making it even more difficult. I think that if we were looking for a real test of our skill and abilities that we had gather over the years then this was it. We tackled the issues head on and we brought together a collection of renowned expert speakers and without any government representation host the conference here in Cairo.

But while there were negatives to tackling this conference, there was also many positives in the form of the support of several leading companies that sponsoring the event, such as BG Egypt & Moodys and we also received tremendous support and encouragement from the business community here in Egypt.

Even up until the morning of the opening we were still very much on tender hooks but by the end of the first day it was clear that the event had been an immediate success. Since then it has paid tremendous dividends for us a certainly established IEP here in the market, as a serious force in the world of conferences.

Since then, has the success of your other conferences been directly related to the success of Egypt Invest 2003? And how do you measure the success of the conferences?

I would say yes and no to that question. Egypt Invest did establish IEP here in the market but I would have to say that over the subsequent years it has been hard work, perseverance and professional events that have kept us successful.

Internally we measure our success, I suppose, through the number of delegates and the amount of interest an event generates. Since 2003 IEP has seen both increase dramatically for all of our events both here and outside Egypt. In doing Egypt Invest we meet many people who were impressed at the style and content of the event and from here we have been able to build a solid stable of investment related events numbering six in total in addition to running other events for different industry sectors.

I think that the pinnacle of this success for us was hosting the Duke of York at Egypt Invest 2005 which was a bit of a coup for us and the show.

But in order to keep the numbers increasing and the quality of the delegates high you have to put an event together that is very professional and relevant. Not just a conference but an event that allows all participants both speakers and delegates to address the issues that are relevant to them.

You have an office in London and one here in Cairo. Why did you choose Cairo as your base for developing these conferences in the region?

This is a question that many people over the years have asked us. Why did we chose Egypt as a location and for us the answer has always been simple and will continue to be and that is the Egypt’s location in the region and its business facilities are second to none. I mean if you look at the time zones that you are next too you can see that it is perfectly located for companies doing business in the region , and it is economically viable as well to establish a company here.

As a sales person, it’s all about timing for us. Egypt as I have mentioned has the perfect location: by perfect I mean that it is only two hours behind London and two hours ahead of Dubai. I am sure that many readers will agree that selling to the Middle East from London can be incredibly difficult – it’s almost like selling to the United States from London, it just doesn’t come together. We knew that to be a success here, we needed to have a base in the region to allow us that freedom and ability to act quickly and accordingly on information.

We could dress it up any way you want, but Egypt is the center point for the region. It has strong routes of access for the two markets that we operate in, Africa and the Middle East. Hop on a flight in Cairo and two hours later and you can be in Dubai, Tunis, Beirut, Tripoli or Khartoum.

Egypt is also a very cost effective country to set up your operations, compared to other locations you could look at for the region. And to a certain degree we have found Egypt to be a user-friendly country.

Do you have plans to open any other offices?

We’re currently working at setting up an office in Khartoum. An unusual place you would have thought we have already successfully organized the Sudan Invest 2005 event and through this we see Sudan to be a huge growth market for the future.

We’re also organizing the Africa ICT Investment 2006 conference in Tunisia but we are not committing to an office there just yet. But again Egypt is a location that can allow us to service our regional conferences and exhibitions effectively.

What’s the process in developing a new conference and its host country?

The time line for putting a conference from though to reality can vary depending on many variables. As with everything if you have the right factors then it can be done in a very short space of time. On the other hand if you don’t then it can take much longer.

For IEP we are always looking to bring new events into the markets that we operate in. The first step is to access the market and view the trends. If you can see a pattern emerging then the next step is to develop a program that we would distribute to a select number of the business leaders for their comment and give us the feedback that this initial agenda is addressing the right issues. Once we have passed this stage we would begin to canvas speakers, government support and supporters such as trade associations and publications from the relevant sector.

When the speaker and supporters commit to the event, we would develop a website and begin marketing the event on a much bigger scale to sell it to sponsors.

To give you an example, of how IEP establish events in a host country I will take the recent Road Safety Conference that we organized here in Cairo. From the initial concept that we had to staging the actual first year’s event took 18 months.

Most people asked if we were absolutely crazy to tackle a problem that has for too long be accepted as part of life here in Egypt. We disagreed. And we set about to talk to companies and the worlds leading authorities on the matter and found their enthusiasm and support very forth coming. Having amassed the necessary support we went and spoke with the Ministry of Interior and the Minister of Transport here in Egypt and explained to them what we were doing and received their backing and support.

We then in conjunction with some key people in Egypt and abroad developed an agenda for the two day event that would address road safety issue here in Egypt. And so Road Safety was born. The success of this approach was in the first year we had over 40 international and local speakers and 545 international and local delegates attend in 2005.

The other factor is that we have to keep in mind, is that each event that we build has longevity for the company in order to allow us to grow through strong products.

Africa ICT Invest is the latest conference to be organized, in November of this year in Tunisia. What are the main aims of this event?

The Africa ICT Investment Conference 2006 will follow up from the highly succesful WSIS 2005 event that took place in October last year in Tunis.

With still an enormous amount of work that must be done to bring Africa up to the levels of the industrialized world, many within the industry are now asking how quickly will this be achieved and to what extent is it going to depend on the amount and speed of FDI being channeled into the ICT industry?

As a growth market for the Telecom sector world wide, Africa has huge potential. In 2000, Africa - which is home to one in 8 of the world's population - had in just one in 50 of the world's fixed line subscribers, one in 60 of the world's mobile cellular subscribers, one in 70 of the worlds' personal computers and only 1% of the worlds' Internet users. There are nevertheless strong grounds for the view that this will increase dramatically in the coming years. Many countries in the region are on the road to sector reform and foreign investment is now being actively encouraged across the continent due to the growing privatization and liberalization that is being progressively introduced.

Since then the growth has been remarkable — the African market is expanding at nearly twice the ace as Asia’s — and has confounded telecom and investment analysts and even service operators. As recently as 2003, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) forecast that there would be only 67 million users by the end of 2005.

This explosion in mobile subscribers, now outnumbers fixed-line subscribers in a number of African countries - and by the time the Africa ICT Investment Conference 2006 takes place, the trend will be widespread. Internet uptake in many countries in Africa is on the rise too, and there is great potential in Africa for technology leapfrogging or made possible by transition economics.

The Africa ICT Investment Conference 2006 will provide a strong mix of speakers and investment papers outlining the promising new and practical approaches been seen to investment problems and, to some extent possible, with some investment case studies that have been successfully implemented. The conference will also have to address the potential problems and pitfalls of investing in Africa and more specifically in individual countries

Let’s talk more about Egypt Invest. This will be the fourth year of the event – what are some of the changes you anticipate for this year’s conference in December?

In 2003 we really took an overview of the investment climate in Egypt. In 2004 we looked at Egypt: ‘open for business’. In 2005 it was ‘your next big business opportunity’. For 2006 Egypt Invest will have to tackle issues that other events will not pursue. As it stands all other conferences for this market that are looking at to discuss reforms.

This is something that we’ve looked at in the past and from our own experience we have to ask the question, what is the reform going to do and how is it going to push Egypt forward? What we feel we should be asking instead is asking if Egypt is ready for this changes?

The pace of reforms is just staggering; political, social, business. There is now aspect of life here in Egypt that hasn’t been affected by the changes that have come to the country and are coming.

I know form the initial feed back that people are again getting excited about the event again for this year.

So does the government reform change your strategy at all in your conferences?

Not fundamentally. Don’t get me wrong is does have a very big bearing on how the content of the event is laid out. But does business wait for the government to decide their strategy for them or do they develop it themselves? I think that we can agree that sometimes government has to listen to business in deciding what it is that needs to be other factors that we have to look at each year that we run the event is what has happening in the business sector, regional influences, factors that have slowed business, how are the domestic businesses developing markets. what are people talking about, what are the next issues that are affecting business, such as the privatization last year.

I think with the way the Middle East is going, everything is moving so quickly right now. I think Dubai is forcing everyone to move so much faster. They want to build things that people haven’t thought about yet. So that has an effect, it affects here as well. So we’re just very conscious of what everyone is talking about and these connections that we’ve made both inside Egypt and outside Egypt. We tapped into them and from our own general background we can focus on what will be the hot issues.

From your experience and you knowledge of foreign investment, what do you anticipate as the biggest challenge for bringing in investment to Egypt? We’ve talked about the strategy of specializing in an area, but do you think Egypt has any obstacles it will have to tackle first in order to bring in more investment?

I would say that the layers of bureaucracy have to be streamlined. At Egypt Invest 2003 someone said something to me and it has always stayed with me: Money goes where it’s easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Egypt, or America – you have to make it easy for money to come in. The bureaucracy here has to be tackled and seriously addressed otherwise I think that for the future it will have a hard impact on FDI. I mean in the UK you can walk into a company’s house in London, fill out the necessary forms, pay 100 pounds you set up a company, and off you go later that day with your company. The next letter you get is from the Inland Revenue saying we know where you are, and we’re going to get any money due off of you.

I think that for Egypt, the figure we’ve heard is that 600,000 jobs a year have to be created. But where are they going to come from? I think that for the future a of this incrediblely Small and medium sized enterprises? And if it is SMEs it has to be that simple – to want to set up a company, and to set up it. Where people want to try something, they can, like what we did here. I think that’s what Egypt has to look at, and then of course targeting one or two specific sectors.

Do you think there is any sector that isn’t being tapped enough?

I think from a personal perspective I would say that sales offices should be targeted. This goes back to what I said earlier about Egypt being located in a position that allows your company to have a location in the perfect time zone allowing you to access to Europe and the Middle East. And I think that possibly more regionally orientated sales companies could benefit from being located here.

As chairman of IEP, and someone who has overseen many investment conferences in several countries, what do you enjoy most about leading IEP?

I read somewhere once that the only easy day was yesterday. This is something that has always stuck in my mind over the last number of years it true of owning and running IEP.

Owning your own company means that you are the one that makes the decisions. Gives the direction and ultimately reaps the rewards or the penalties.

But I think that I would have to say that the most enjoyable thing about running my own business is that every day brings new and different challenges. One day you’re talking to a minister the next day you’re trying to get your catalogue to the printer. There is no set routine that you can settle into you have to on your toes and expect the unexpected at all times.

It can be very tiring and difficult, but I have to say that it has been and I am sure continue to be one the most rewarding experiences that I have had in my life.