Abbasali Merali: A family business entrepreneur

I am Abbasali Merali. Currently, I work at my family business, which is an international commodity trading firm. We specialise in the trade of agriculture.

I think a uniqueness of this course, in particular, which I guess I found particularly attractive as compared to other courses, is that it has this sort of blend of part-time learning, part-time working, or, in my case, sort of full-time working. And it has this good sort of middle point as well, where you have the mentors as well kind of bridging that gap.

You study two years. You can work on your venture at the same time. And each and everything that you learn, I found myself already applying it to my full-time job and applying it to my family business. So I think that’s the uniqueness of this is that you get the opportunity to immediately apply what you learn.

Something in particular that really stood out to me in my first year of learning was the strategy course that we took. We learned about niche strategies, price strategies, focus strategies. And through being a part of this course, I was able to identify the strategy that was right for our family business. And now I hope that, in the next year, I can start to implement it and perfect the strategy.