CAIRO: “I love the creativity and sense of ownership that being an entrepreneur provides,” said Ahmed Shabana, founder of online pharmacy AgzaKhana.com. Sitting behind his desk on the second floor of his family-owned pharmacy in Mohandiseen, Shabana is constantly thinking of innovative ways to expand the business. As easy-going as he is business-savvy, Shabana embodies true entrepreneurial prowess. In addition to two family-owned pharmacies in Cairo and AgzaKhana.com, he is also the founder of PharmerRecruit.com, an online recruitment portal that sets out to link the saturated market of pharmacy graduates with the pharmaceutical industry. Just 24 years old, Shabana has several accomplishments to his name; but his business sense began much earlier. From a young age, he was intrigued by the budding e-commerce field. At the age of 12, he began buying groceries online from the ABC supermarket in Cairo. Even though delivery time took nearly six hours, he was quite impressed with the concept, planting the seed for his future business endeavors. “From that point on, I fell in love with e-commerce,” he said. It seems his entrepreneurial spirit may be somewhat genetic. His grandfather dropped out of school at the age of seven to begin working, and founded in the 1950s the well-established cheese company, Shabana Cheese. “My grandfather was a major source of inspiration … I really admire what he was able to accomplish,” he said. AgzaKhana.com, which launched in September 2008, is not only a novel concept in Egypt, it goes a step beyond by providing free consultations to customers. From Sunday to Thursday between 10 am and 5 pm, customers can ask a pharmacist about their symptoms and what medication or beauty product is best to meet their needs. The online pharmacy's business model is based on being the middleman, the meeting point between retailers and customers who use the website. With 25,000 visits per month, Shabana was confident that his online pharmacy would succeed because, for example, some people may be embarrassed to buy certain products at their local pharmacy. But one major obstacle he has faced is retailers' lack of understanding of the value such a service can provide. “Retailers think that it would be a waste of their employee's time to monitor the website for orders when they could be doing something else; many lack vision regarding the internet's potential,” he said. Shabana believes his online recruitment website will be equally successful. As a former employee at GlaxoSmithKline in Egypt, he noticed that the company had trouble finding qualified talent, and struggled with a high turnover rate. To him, this represented a golden business opportunity, which gave birth to PharmerRecruit.com, scheduled to launch this July. “Based on the success of the website here in Egypt, we hope to expand its presence to the Middle East and eventually extend our reach worldwide.” Still, he is aware that most employers in the pharmaceutical market are traditional in their hiring practices. “Employers still go the traditional route by recruiting at universities and at job fairs. They have yet to fully integrate and have faith in the online recruitment model.” He has other projects in the pipeline as well, including a social networking website focused exclusively on the Middle East. It would be analogous to existing sites, offering the ability to ‘friend' others, such as on Facebook, as well as providing information about events, hotspots for dining and other places for going out on the town. “The concept is still very much in the development phase, and although there are others in the region — companies with deep pockets in fact — trying to create similar platforms, I want to just give it a try and see what happens. I have nothing to lose,” he explained. To drive more customers to his online pharmacy and recruitment websites, he plans to use the social network site to advertise, thereby interlinking them together. To further expand his family's pharmacy, he said, “I'm toying with the idea of creating our own label for beauty and pharmaceutical products, focusing on more basic things such as common colds, for example,” he stated. His positive attitude and risk-taking approach have been key to his success so far, but still he recognizes that in Egypt, “much needs to be done to stimulate the desire to become an entrepreneur.” Nevertheless, he feels that the culture of entrepreneurship is growing, and that the right tools need to exist to encourage it further. “The government should offer a grace period on taxes for online start-ups; also, management training would be instrumental in helping young entrepreneurs better run their businesses,” he recommended. For other young, aspiring Egyptian entrepreneurs, his advice is simple: “Do what you like, even if it means doing something that you dislike to get to where you want to go. And above all, patience is key.” This article is part of a monthly series on promising entrepreneurs published in Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Endeavor Egypt. Endeavor is an international non-profit organization promoting high impact entrepreneurship in emerging countries as the leading force for sustainable economic development.
