We hired new people to cope with the growing workload at the agency in Dubai in addition to Cyril Peter, who had been hired to assist me on Unilever. Nazli Shah, an experienced Pakistani client servicing lady, was brought onboard as an account director and Jean-Jacques Schwenzner one of Intermarkets Lebanon’s art directors, was seconded from the Beirut agency to be our creative director. He decided to retain the freelance agreement with Howard Paul. The agency by this time needed an accountant, so we hired a Lebanese by the name of Nicolas Majdalani and a young Lebanese lady named Fida Houri, a graduate of AUB, to act as our media department head, assisted by Samir Salem.
As the size of Intermarkets UAE grew, our current office contract came closer to expiration. Our UAE partner invited us to move the agency to the Juma Al Majid head office building in east Dubai at a locality called Hor Al Anz in Deira. The multi-storey office building was located on the side-road that leads from the Dubai to Sharjah motorway into the heart of Hor Al Anz. Our allocated office space was on the ground floor of the building. After almost a month of our settling into our new office, the receptionist called me to announce that there was a UAE national in reception by the name of Juma Al Majid, who wanted to meet me. I dashed to the reception, welcomed Abou Khaled, who I introduced to the receptionist and all the staff to avoid a repeat of the awkward situation we’d just experienced, and invited the partner to my room, where we served him the Lebanese coffee that he liked. The visit was a short courtesy call, during which we chatted about the business, our increasing government formalities, and if we were receiving adequate support from his department people.
This first surprise visit became a pattern. Abou Khaled dropped by the agency unannounced, and often accompanied by foreign visitors. One day – following a visit he had paid to our office in the company of the export director of Casio Calculators – I went up to his office to ask him about his impressions of how we welcomed his surprise guests, as I was keen to know the reason behind these visits. Smilingly, he thanked me for our ongoing and warm hospitality, explaining that he loved to take his overseas visitors on a tour of his offices, but always ended up feeling frustrated. He fell into the same mistake, knocking on doors only to find bored male employees with loose neckties sitting in rooms full of cigarette smoke who often forgot to stand up and welcome his guests. At that stage, he changed the route of his tour and began descending to the ground floor, where he showed his guests a livelier environment of young people (both males and females) who had smiling faces and whose creative work was not only on their computers, but on the agency’s walls.
