We always hear about entrepreneurs and businessmen who had it rough at the beginning, only to experience great success later on. Talal Abu Ghazaleh, chairman of the Talal Abu Ghazaleh Organization (TAGorg), also known as the Arab Organization for Global Professional Services, began as a teacher and translator while studying at the American University in Beirut as he struggled to support his family living in Lebanon. Thirty-five years after starting his own business, TAGorg is a behemoth spanning accounting and auditing, intellectual property rights, educational consulting, management advising, professional training, legal services, and much more. Wajih Halawa sat with Mr. Abu Ghazaleh to learn more in this exclusive interview with Jordan Business.

 

 As the chairman of TAGorg, you have built a significant portfolio of activities over the past 35 years, and you had a difficult beginning as a self-made man. Can you tell us about your childhood and how you started your career?

I believe that I was lucky to have suffered. Some people don’t realize that in suffering there is great potential, because if you are deprived for any reason - politically, financially, socially or otherwise - and if you set your mind in the right direction, you will find that the only way to survive is for you to excel, by being better so you can be treated better.

I happen to be a Palestinian refugee. We were forced to leave Palestine in 1948 on a cargo ship, and found ourselves in the Lebanese village of Ghaziyyeh. The closest school to our village was a two-hour walk away in Sidon and, having no transportation, I had to get up each morning at five o’clock and walk to school, whether sun or rain, wind or snow.

You cannot imagine the advantages of exercising for four hours daily. But this hardship also deprived me of many luxuries I couldn’t afford, most of which are bad for the health anyway. Instead I ate healthy food: bread, olive oil and thyme (zaatar), which we used to pick ourselves from the mountain. Intellectually, this walking was an advantage as well because it allowed me to review what I had studied the night before, meaning this time was not wasted. Believe it or not, I drew a career path for myself during these walks. I decided I wanted to build an Arab organization; I wasn’t sure what field it would be in, but I wanted to prove to the world that we are equal to, if not better than, international organizations. Now, 50 years later, I can say with pride that Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which handles registration of copyrights, patents and trademarks and related services, is the leading intellectual property rights (IPR) organization in the world, something most people do not know. This is a field of specialized professional services, not something capital intensive where we can collect assets or build things. In spite of our market limitations, we decided to work in other parts of the world, and we now have a network of 52 offices from Montreal to Shanghai.

I wanted to be the exception to the other kids, but in the right way. We have a lot of suffering in our part of the world, but that suffering is, in a way, a  blessing. Obviously, I could not afford to go to school without a scholarship, so that meant I had to excel in order to get one. And there was only one scholarship offered by the UNRWA for the top Palestinian student in all of Lebanon. I had to be number one or else I could not have attended the American University of Beirut to continue my education. It’s that simple. Instead of sulking and feeling depressed, you need to look at the problem and do what needs to done. People who don’t suffer are underprivileged because they don’t have to work on themselves as hard.

 

 

 

 

When did you conclude that you were going to become an accountant and auditor?

After writing some 300 cover letters for vacancies, I got my first job in an audit firm. I have a suitcase full of hundreds of rejection letters from companies that did not take me on. Some of the people who signed those letters worked for me later, but that’s because they were good people. I learned from a wise man who had asked for his tombstone to read: “Here lies a man who hired people that were better than him.” Every person in this organization is better than I am in his particular field. I’m just a coordinator, leader, conductor, father, or whatever you want to call it. If that person is not better than I am, then he or she does not have a place here.

 

 How did your business expand to span public accounting, various types of auditing, tax consulting, and from thence intellectual property rights (IPR) and outsourcing?

Accounting was accidental because it was the only job that I could get at the time. I was at a Time-Warner conference in San Francisco back in 1969, and one speaker was talking about intellectual property rights - something which was total Chinese to me. It triggered my natural student instincts and I started learning about IPR, reading books and checking on societies. When I started my firm in 1972, I decided I would work in IPR as well as accounting, so I actually started both at the same time. I borrowed half a million dollars from a bank to launch the firm. Our gross revenue at year-end was a mere $5,000. I went to the bank again and said I needed another half a million dollars. I told them that if they gave me time, I believed I could make that money back. So they lent me more money, and the next year we made $50,000. The third year we made almost $500,000. In five years, we broke even, and I started advising governments on how to develop laws that protect intellectual property as an engine of economic development. It was a process of learning, motivation, hard work and investment. For the past five years, we have been growing at a rate of 30% every year, and now we serve 40,000 clients all over the world. We are the largest IPR organization in terms of number of employees, number of clients, number of entries, and volume. It is a professional service where financial size is not measured in terms of contracts, but our business now is in the hundreds of millions.

 

 

Where do you see the market in the Middle East today? Aren’t we behind in terms of IPR and other fronts?

We are moving in the right direction. The region will witness an unprecedented boom over the next five to 10 years, in spite of the wars and the vicious aggression against our nation. We have learned to survive and to prosper during the most difficult times. Look at Lebanon: even during the years of the civil war, if you wanted the best of anything, you could still find it there.

Some of the highest IT and general literacy rates in the world are in Palestine. Ninety-eight percent of people under the age of 25 are literate, even under occupation. I’m counting on the availability of technology and the accessibility of the Internet to allow Arab youth with few resources to develop themselves into highly competent, well educated, knowledge workers.

 

 

How can we continue to develop the IPR market and its regulatory framework?

The Arab world has moved in the last 20 years faster than the developed world. Let’s not keep persecuting ourselves. We have the fastest growth in IPR protection anywhere in the world. In every single Arab country, there are laws protecting patents, trademarks and copyrights. There is room for development, but that applies everywhere. We did not use copyright infringement and piracy to develop our technology base. Israel, on the other hand, is one of the leading IPR pirates in the world, according to the Special 301 Report from the United States Trade Representative office.

 

 

 

What about the outsourcing component of TAGorg?

We try to do most of our work internally because as a large organization we need to provide services for our own use, but also to provide them for our clients. When we started with our first Web site, we outsourced it, but we realized no company could provide us with the service we wanted. Now, we have 20 people in Web development alone. They are fully employed to develop and design our Web sites, as well as sites for our own clients, especially governments. We start with ourselves by finding the best people to do things for us, so that our clients can rest assured that they are receiving the best quality.

 

 

 

Let’s talk about the Talal Abu Ghazaleh College of Business (part of the German Jordanian University). Where does your input come in?

This is the first partnership I know of anywhere between a private organization and two governments in creating an educational institution. We are very proud that we have been given this honor. This is a place where we can provide the outsourcing services we talked about; what we’re teaching at the college,  what we’re doing here in the company. We are fully in charge of administering the college and are simply required to comply with the requirements of the Council for Higher Education.