Pal-Think concludes its radio series on entrepreneurship

Within the project “Strengthening the culture of tolerance, freelance work, and entrepreneurship in the Gaza Strip”, Pal-Think for Strategic Studies concluded a series of radio episodes it carried out in partnership with Alwan Radio and with funding from the Atlas Network.

In the third radio episode the institution hosted a number of founders of entrepreneurial projects that arose in the Gaza Strip, with the aim of presenting these young entrepreneurial models, the most important challenges that faced them, and how they overcame them.

At the start, the engineer Suzan Atallah spoke of the first stages of her founding of the Veranda company for garden design, explaining that the company began with the idea of planting house roofs, with which she took part in one of the competitions specialised in business incubation; after the incubation she presented her idea at a number of exhibitions to people who began accepting the idea, which was new to them — reaching the founding of her own company.

For her part, Maha Abu Sido, founder and manager of the Kinar company, mentioned that her company specialises in designing heritage clothing, but she widened its service and brought embroidery and Palestinian heritage into many household pieces such as picture frames, home corners, and gifts for the different occasions — adding that one of the causes of her project's success is that she did not content herself with Gaza's market but broke into the Palestinian and Arab market.

In his intervention, the engineer Mohammed al-Nakhala, founder and manager of the Surprise company, said he began his project through developing his passion for making handcrafted works and offering them as gifts people exchange among themselves — affirming that one of the most important obstacles that faced him at the start was finding a permanent premises to display the works of his team, which began with four people, until he succeeded in finding a place he divided between a showroom and a workshop in which eight people work today.

The guests affirmed that they benefited at more than one stage from the services the business incubators offered them, especially at the project's start and its development stages — stressing that the funding side was not the cornerstone of achieving their success; rather, the consultations offered them played a fundamental role in fixing their projects' success across their different fields.

Among what the meeting's guests agreed on is that electronic marketing counts among the most important elements of projects' success, for it contributes to the speed of reaching the customer everywhere — stressing the importance of the entrepreneur's capacity to develop the project's idea in keeping with the market's need, guaranteeing the keeping of their customers.

The entrepreneurs mentioned that the principal cause of the failure of start-up entrepreneurial projects is the entrepreneur's reliance on the financial support the institutions supporting this kind of project provide, and their neglect of developing their projects to yield them money and become self-funding — advising young people wishing to establish their projects to be patient and not despair at the first obstacle facing them, especially during the first year of the entrepreneurial project's life.