Ghada Abdelkader, senior VP at Crescent Enterprises: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the business community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of business questions for fun. Speaking to us this week is Ghada Abdelkader (LinkedIn), senior VP at Crescent Enterprises. Edited excerpts from our conversation below.

If I’m asked who I am, I’ll typically start with what I do and where I’m from, but at my core, I’m a human being who’s trying to do her part and to live a better life for me and the people around me. I started my career with PwC in Cairo as part of the deals team, then moved to Dubai in 2007 during the period right before the global financial crisis when everything was at its peak, working as an investment banker.

It was a natural progression to want to take more ownership of the investment decisions and manage full transactions myself, build portfolios, and grow companies. This is when I moved to Crescent Enterprises. It was at its early stages where there were only a few investments and operating businesses. The company had a vision of building and growing a diversified portfolio of businesses and investments spanning across multiple sectors.

I don’t like routine in my work, even though I’m pretty routine in other aspects of my life — I wake up at 6am every day, eat the same thing in the morning, have the same snack at the office, because I don’t like to think about these things. But for my day job, it would kill me if I do the same thing over and over again every day. That’s where it clicked with Crescent Enterprises, because I was able to take things on and think outside of the box and broaden my experience.

When I joined, our portfolio was mostly infrastructure assets in things like ports, logistics, and healthcare, and private equity investments, and then shortly after, we started looking at venture capital as an asset class, and backing startups and entrepreneurs, particularly in the MENA region, when venture capital was still at a very nascent stage.   

That was really exciting for me — to build a diverse venture capital portfolio and manage private equity investments and operating businesses. I’ve been there now for 13 years, and I could still be considered one of the newbies on the team. We have people who have been here for over 50 years.

That’s the thing about family businesses. With Crescent, they managed to retain that family ethos and reflect it across the organization, while still being very institutionalized. We have an investment committee that has more independent members than executives.

Now I’m heading the CE-Invests platform, which focuses on growth equity. When we started investing, we identified a gap in capital required by mid-market companies that have been operational for some time, and require capital to scale. We deploy anywhere between USD 25-75 mn per transaction, targeting significant minority stakes to support and accelerate their growth through strategic guidance, robust governance, and our strong global network.

We’re looking at the GCC, predominantly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as India and Southeast Asia. We really like the India-GCC corridor, and we did that with a recent investment in India-based Flipspaces, where the concept — of end-to-end design and build for commercial and retail — is a great fit for this market.

After I wake up at 6am, I hit the gym — and of course, my coffee comes with me wherever I go. Then I change and go to the office, and when I’m back home, I usually have dinner with my kids. I try to take parts of the weekend to focus on relaxing, and I always tell my daughter that we’re so lucky to live in a place that’s 15-20 minutes away from the beach — for me, that’s the best way to disconnect. I also enjoy podcasts and music especially on my commute — sometimes it’s business topics, but sometimes I listen to anything just to disconnect.

I learned a lot early on — without really being aware of it at the time — from my mom, who’s a civil engineer, and she used to work on site a lot of the time. When I was little, I would go with her sometimes to the site during my school breaks, and I remember telling her she’s a different person at work. Working in a male-dominated field, I saw how confident and decisive she was, and I think observing that had a bigger impact on me than any advice could have. The idea that women couldn’t do certain things never really existed in our home—she proved that every day through her work and at home.

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