Exclusive Interview With Dr. Hanan El Basha – Founder, The Business Doctor
- Feb 27, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 28, 2022
Dr. Hanan El Basha is the Founder of The Business Doctor, a boutique business growth advisory firm headquartered in London, UK. She is an Empowering Business Strategist supporting aspiring entrepreneurs and SME business owners build and grow sustainable and profitable ventures through practical actions and strategies.
Dr. Hanan has approximately 25 years of professional experience, most of which spent within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) including 11 co-founding and running startups herself. She is also the Senator for Egypt with the World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF), the Co-Director of the Founder Institute – Doha Chapter, the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator, and an Advisor with Loyal VC.
Dr. Hanan is a holder of a Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) in International Business specializing in “Internationalization for the Sustainable Growth of SMEs” and an MBA in Marketing as well as being an Accredited SME Consultant.
She hosts her own podcast Empowered to Grow. And, Dr. Hanan has been dubbed “Dr. Feel Good” and even the “Oprah of the Middle East” following tens of appearances on webinar and podcast discussions talking about topics that constitute her mission: empowering women in business, startups and SMEs, sustainable growth, entrepreneurial mindset, and wellness. Inspired from her own healing journey, she is passionate and dedicated to the topic of health and wellness built on learnings from her certifications as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach and a Metabolic Balance Coach.
Dr. Hanan El Basha, Founder, The Business Doctor
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I am Hanan El Basha, an Egyptian living in Qatar with my husband and our 11-year old son. I am a Third Culture kid having been born in Kuwait and a long-term expat having lived ¾ of my life away from my home country Egypt. I have been shaped by being raised, and thereafter living, in a multicultural community that enabled me to connect on a core, human level with everyone I cross paths with. I am passionate about learning, enabling, communicating, sharing knowledge, and facilitating transformations which have gradually translated into my professional mission. I believe that I am a perseverant person with unwavering determination once I set my heart and mind to working towards a specific goal. These personal traits were pivotal in my academic pursuits as I earned my bachelor's, master’s, and doctorate degrees in spite of quite a few hurdles including health scares. They have also shaped me into a lifelong student, and permitted me to keep an open mind to my learning and professional exploration such as moving from completing a doctorate degree in business to enrolling in a health coaching certification and transitioning from a corporate career to co-founding four businesses across a number of industries. To relax, and reach a state of flow, I love building Lego sets, puzzles, and painting by numbers.
What is your business name and how do you help your clients?
I am the Founder of ‘The Business Doctor’ and I like to think of myself as an Empowering Business Strategist. The Business Doctor is a boutique business growth advisory firm headquartered in London, UK, providing services to select clients in the Middle East, Europe, and North America delivered via a distinguished team of experts across the globe. The Business Doctor services focus on supporting sustainable growth for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and implementing prosperous entrepreneurial infrastructure for start-ups. What makes our offerings unique, is that our focus is not only on supporting our clients with the most practical, and tailored strategies and solutions towards achieving their subjective goals, we also place special emphasis on empowering the person behind the business as a human and as an entrepreneur. I also have active roles with World Business Angel Forum (WBAF), Founder Institute, and Loyal VC which I utilize to support aspiring and existing entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystems within the Middle East.
What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
With a vision to actively advocate for and empower women to build strategically aligned and profitable businesses, The Business Doctor’s mission is to support SME and start-up leaders build profitable, sustainable businesses that positively impact their customers’ lives and their economic ecosystems. That would include those looking to address the business’ bottlenecks, capitalize on growth opportunities, and using internationalization to grow and scale the business.
Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
Everyone in my life inspires me, including me inspiring myself! When I stop to reflect on everything that has happened to get to this point in my life, I take a moment to appreciate myself and the work I have put in across the years. I also acknowledge and pay respect to every person whom I crossed paths with who influenced me, positively and negatively, as they contributed to the evolving version that is the ‘me’ of today, and for them I am grateful. I am also inspired by the great Maya Angelou’s advice that when I know better, I strive to do better. And I have used this to work towards becoming the best version of myself that I can manifest; advice I pass on to our son at every opportunity.
What is your work inspired by?
I am inspired by the notion, that translated into my business’ slogan: Empowered You, Empowers Others. I believe that each person is at the center of a ripple impact effect; and you get the choice in whether that impact is a positive one or a disempowering, negative one. If you happen to be transmitting positive empowerment, then you are empowering the next person who impacts their direct circle, and that could be one person or a million people (accommodating our digital footprint reach nowadays). Hence, once I set out to work with one person, I am actually setting the intent to positively impact that person and the magnitude of their ripple effect, be it their family members or their economy at a whole. And that inspires me to keep doing the work, and putting in the effort to reach, and positively influence, as many people as I could.
What are your goals for your business?
My goal over the next 5-7 years is to support 100,000 women across the globe build their sustainable and profitable passion business with thriving lives alongside. That will entail building solid business foundations as well as fostering entrepreneurial mindsets geared towards finding and capitalizing on opportunities. I am also putting in the work supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Middle East on a number of fronts, hoping for further enablement of womenpreneurship, augmented efforts of financial inclusion, and reduction of gender disparity.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
A coaching session back in March 2018 with David Foster, which happened to be my first coaching experience ever. He stopped me 30 minutes into the session to highlight that I had been using this statement over and over again without noticing: “…(not) good enough…”! This was the biggest AHA! moment of my adulthood. I realized that up until that point, 2 weeks before officially earning my doctorate degree, 20+ years of professional experience, and 2 months shy of my 40th birthday, that I had been living my life racing to achieve and to accomplish out of lack, and in pursuit of external validation. From that point on, I have been on an exploration journey transforming my initial need for external validation towards a desire for internal gratification and fulfillment. I redefined my subjective success parameters accordingly. And, I found my calling in supporting my friends and clients work on that switch for themselves too.
