For Falah Mustafa, a former academic at the University of South Wales, the decision that set him on the path to eventually having his own company was a bold move.
“I had the safest job in the world as a university lecturer,” Mr Mustafa says confidingly, sitting in the interview room in the Mussaffah office of Advanced Pipeline Services, which uses new technology to refurbish used and broken water and sewerage pipes.
“My wife used to say to me, stay in a stable job. But life is a different thing. For me achievement, job satisfaction – this is more important.”
Born in Iraq to Iraqi-Turkish parents, Mr Mustafa worked as a civil engineer in Iraq and a university lecturer in the UK before moving to the Gulf in the 1990s to work as a construction project manager.
Then in 2011, a conversation with an old university friend from Iraq who had emigrated to New Zealand and set up a pipe repairing business led Mr Mustafa to decide to take a leap of faith and set up his own business importing a high-tech form of German pipe repair technology to Abu Dhabi.
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“We were just three people. We rented a room in Khalidiya and bought the equipment. I can say that I spent a big proportion of my life’s savings on this business. At the beginning it was really hard. We did not pay ourselves salaries, or paid very low salaries. We did it because we believed in the business,” he says.
Mr Mustafa’s big plan was to import to Abu Dhabi a revolutionary new technique named CIPP (cured in-place pipe) for repairing old pipes.
The process involves cleaning the broken water, sewerage or gas pipes with a high-powered jet of water and inspecting the pipes using a CCTV camera inserted through the pipes.
Then a resin saturated tube made of polyester or fibreglass is inserted into the damaged pipe and inflated until it fills the broken pipe. Then after another quick CCTV inspection, a strong ultra-violet light is pushed through the pipe, curing the polyester so that it fully coats the pipe and effectively fully replaces it.
“Often the idea of excavating the entire pipe is out of the question because it causes problems for cars, for pedestrians and other services such as electric wires. That is why in the West they developed technology to get over this problem,” Mr Mustafa says.
Mr Mustafa points proudly to the fact that in the five years in which it has been operating in the UAE, Advanced Pipeline Services has completed almost 20 kilometres of pipe repairs in Abu Dhabi and Musaffah, often giving customers big cost savings compared to other methods.
But such methods require a large upfront spend on technology and heavy spending on staff training and retention as well as the need to educate government and private clients.
“It is a lengthy and difficult business to convince people,” Mr Mustafa says. “At the beginning of 2011 we had to do mock-ups free of charge. We brought in old pipes and connected them and then we brought the materials from Germany so that we could do sample pipe curing in front of consultants and clients. We took a risk saying we’ll do the work for you, you can pay us if it succeeds, if not don’t pay us.”
Mr Mustafa says that the hefty investments required have made it difficult to operate the business as a stand-alone SME – something which meant that at the end of last year he agreed to sell 60 per cent of the business to a large Musaffah-based local maintenance company.
“We can be good at technology and very good engineers but the business side is for big players,” Mr Mustafa says. “There are costs – you may have a payment delay, you may need to buy a technology immediately, you may need to prove yourself to get a product approved. All this needs investment.”
lbarnard@thenational.ae
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