Paris Norriss, a 30-year old Dubai-based entrepreneur, says he was left with €3 (Dh11) in his pocket and flight back home to the United Kingdom three weeks into his first attempt at building a business.
It was 2008, and having abandoned any hope of getting a dream job at Goldman Sachs, Mr Norriss had decided to throw himself head-first into a venture in Dubai that would involve selling financial products straight after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
“I left university in 2008 when the financial crisis happened,” says Mr Norriss. “Everybody I spoke to in the city, they’d all just fired 8,000 people. I told myself: Doo you really think you are going to get a job? So it forced me into thinking a bit more about entrepreneurship and setting up businesses because I realised getting a job in the banking sector wasn’t going to work.”
More than a dozen ventures later, which involved him selling insurance in Oman, and failing at many others, Mr Norriss found himself back in Dubai in 2012, a city which from the start he had pinned his hopes on as a gateway for growth. In his latest venture as the founder and partner in the regional branch of the teacher recruitment agency Coba Education, Mr Norriss says he has distilled the lessons learnt from watching the financial crisis unfurl before him.
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“Education is growing every year,” he says. “When the next 2008 happens and banks are going bust, when the equivalent of Lehman Brothers happens, people will still be educating their children. It’s always growing and growing with population.”
And the proof, he says, is in the pudding at a time when the UAE economy is beginning to show signs of strain amid the biggest drop in the price of oil since 2008. Since last year, Coba Education has struck partnerships with 30 schools in the UAE and has found jobs for more than 60 teachers. And business is set to get even better after the company landed a government contract to supply 150 teachers.
Investment in education is an activity that is taken very seriously in the UAE and it is an area that the federal government continues to spend on despite the drop in oil revenues. Private schools are also mushrooming as investors see an opportunity to capitalise on a keenly felt shortage of school places.
A record 21 private schools will open in Dubai for the next academic year, more than the total for the past two years, according to the Knowledge and Human Development Authority. The private school regulator said there was enough demand for the schools, but they would need to find their own niches to succeed.
The Abu Dhabi Education Council’s private school master plan projects a pupil population growth of about 5 per cent annually, reaching about 280,000 in 2020. About 230,000 pupils are registered in 187 private schools across the emirate this academic year.
As well as supporting education, the government is keen to support small and medium-sized enterprises such as the one Mr Norriss runs. But while companies can benefit from tax-free status and relatively cheap office space, Mr Norriss says that start-up costs are too onerous and incorporation turnaround time is too long, especially for entrepreneurs with little seed capital who need to start businesses as quickly as possible. He says he spent Dh55,000 to incorporate Coba Education and that it took him six months to get the business up and running. And once up and running, Mr Norriss says he had to spend about Dh13,000 for each employee, mostly for visa and medical insurance costs as well as for a desk and computer. In the UK, he said it would take him the equivalent of Dh1,000 and 45 minutes to get incorporated.
“If you applied those costs to Mark Zuckerberg when he set up, Facebook wouldn’t exist because they didn’t have that money. They were students and they started it with mates in a dorm room. So for SMEs, for the idea of getting something started from nothing, you can’t do that. You need a certain amount of money.”
Still, Mr Norriss isn’t too concerned as he has been fortunate to overcome the hurdles to get his business going, even though he feels that younger people trying to cut their teeth should be given more of a chance to succeed, considering how vital SMEs are for the local economy.
So fast is Mr Norriss’s own business growing – a company that is in essence itself a franchise of a UK-based firm – that he is setting his sights on further regional and then global growth. He also has a vision of a day when teachers can easily access opportunities around the world via a single online resource.
“There needs to be a global network of teachers,” he said. “So teachers in the US can go teach English in Beijing and a teacher in Mandarin can go teach in the UAE. At the moment, we cover a few countries, but my vision is to have an office in most of the major countries of the world.”
mkassem@thenational.ae
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