Ramia El Agamy is the Editor-in-Chief of Tharawat magazine, the global publication for family businesses, and a product established by her family. In this episode, Ramia shares her experience being part of a family business. She talks about her transition to leadership, how business decisions are made within her family, and how she successfully works with her parents and sisters on a daily basis.
Ramia also shares how her family shifted their business model following the economic disaster in 2008, and how they continue to reinvent themselves today. We also cover current family business trends.
Ramia shares five lessons learned for family business success. Here’s a sneak peek. Listen to the episode or read the transcript below for details and examples:
- Don’t speak on behalf of family members
- Accept and have respect that your family members are experiencing the business differently than you
- Have patience
- Remember that everyone learns and communicates differently
- Don’t use brutal honesty to vent private matters
In this episode:
- Meet Ramia El Agamy (1:09)
- About the family business and Ramia’s leadership (2:32)
- Ramia’s experience working with her family (9:47)
- Communication and boundaries in the family business (11:37)
- Shifting the business model (13:20)
- The pressure family business (22:10)
- Five lessons learned (24:33)
- Brutal honesty – not an excuse to be mean (35:11)
- Trends in family business (40:38)
- How to find Ramia (43:22)
Resources from this episode:
The Family Business Voice Podcast
Right click and “Save As” to download this episode.
Meet Ramia El Agamy
Ramia Marielle El Agamy is the Editor-in-Chief of Tharawat magazine, the global publication for family businesses and a product established by her family.
With an emphasis on family business education and research, she has helped expand her family business’ activities from Dubai, UAE, across the Middle East and now works with family business associations around the world to bring best practice to this knowledge field. Ramia’s passion is to work with her own family that has offered her a uniquely exciting entrepreneurial career and much love and support.
Her main focus is her role as the co-founder of Orbis Terra Media, a content solutions and publishing house based in Switzerland. As a Director of her family‘s enterprise, Ramia has helped expand its activities globally and work alternately in media, cross-border entrepreneurship, and family business.
Ramia holds a MSc in International Business and Management from Manchester Business School (UK) and is currently undertaking her PhD in family business CSR practices at the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). Born and raised in Switzerland, Ramia M. El Agamy is of Dutch-Egyptian descent and currently lives between Bern, Switzerland, and Dubai, UAE.
Notable & Quotable
It’s harder because you love them…these are the last people in the world that you want to disappoint. —Ramia El Agamy
The moment that you’ve created the safe space within your family business to be brutally honest, then success I would say is almost inevitable. —Ramia El Agamy
Sensitivity and pragmatism have to be married when it comes to being successful. —Ramia El Agamy
Accept that everyone is having a fundamentally different experience of the family business than you are. These are different people with different histories having different perspectives of this one thing, which is the business. —Ramia El Agamy
[My sisters and I] grew up in the same house and we did not have the same childhood—we have different notions of what our childhood was like. Now if you think about that, then how can you assume that you’d have the exact same way of looking at something as complex as a business venture? —Ramia El Agamy
In the family business I don’t think it’s kind to use the brutal honesty as a means to actually vent resentment that you have about something else. —Ramia El Agamy
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