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Looking at Issmat Al-Akhali today, you can feel the aura of a self-assured and confident gentleman, someone who is rooted to the value he brings to the business community of Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada overall.

But his journey, like many immigrants, wasn’t always smooth sailing.

It was not common for Yemenis to send their children to school abroad. Only a privileged few could afford it without a coveted government scholarship or sponsorship by a locally operating foreign entity, such as Canadian Occidental Petroleum (CanOxy/Nexen). After graduating high school, I requested a delay to my mandatory military service and applied to several universities abroad. I selected Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and arrived in 1999 to start my degree in Computer Science and Business Administration.

For Al-Akhali, it took some adjustment to go from living in a conservative Muslim country to a co-ed university dorm, as did keeping up with the rigorous academic standard of his degree. He managed to persevere and ended up finishing his degree, in addition to being heavily engaged with many extracurricular and volunteer activities during his time at university.

“Ultimately,” he chuckles, “it doesn’t always matter what degree you graduated in because you may end up working in a field that had nothing to do with what you studied.”

He managed to establish a baseline of work experience that allowed him to gain his Permanent Residency as a Provincial Nominee of Nova Scotia. He talks about the “vicious cycle” of not being able to get a job without experience but employers not wanting to hire anyone without prior experience, a roadblock many international graduates and newcomers to Canada face even today.

“Somebody has to take a chance on you, and the network and connections you build while in school are crucial to this.”

Al-Akhali says being an entrepreneur is in his blood. He comes from a business background on both sides of his family, yet he never wanted to join the family business as he knew at least one of his three younger brothers would fulfil that role. He said this was one of his main motivations to remain in Halifax and establish a different track for himself in the city.

“At that time my prospects were low. There weren’t a lot of opportunities. In fact, I was packing my bags and nearly ready to move to either Toronto or Calgary where most of my peers were before I got my job offer. Halifax is one of those places where there’s a lot of potential, a lot of space for new ideas to be brought in, but unfortunately, a lot of people like me who have had that exposure to bring in new ideas, eventually leave for bigger markets.”

As soon as he was established in a stable job, he started looking for ways to nurture his entrepreneurial spirit. One of his first “little” companies, as he calls it, was Kick Media.

He and a friend from university installed digital screens in airport taxis, an idea he had seen in Asia and the U.S. The screens brought in revenue from advertising, and he says while he found good traction, this first business was a way to get his feet wet and understand how to do business in Canada.

“I would advise anyone who’s starting a business for the first time, especially immigrants, start with something small to cut your teeth on so, you cannot lose a lot of money if it doesn’t work out.”

Al-Akhali, familiar with the practical realities, never left his fulltime job but he also started doing international consulting projects on the side. After his term ended as acting CEO of EduNova, a co-operative of education and training providers in Nova Scotia, he decided to start his own business and Blacksheep Projects was born.

“I started working with companies on how to expand internationally into the Middle East specifically because that’s my area of expertise.

“While I was doing that, some investors approached me saying they wanted to get into student housing in Canada. Being a former international student, and being aware of the challenges, I was able to set up a study for them to determine whether they should invest their money in this venture or not. And after a few months they were still unsure but at this time I had done the feasibility study and I knew I wanted to do this,” he remembered.

“So, I said to them if you’re not going to do it, I will do it on my own with my own partners. If it fails, you’ll know you’re right and if it’s successful then you can join me as partners and we can expand this business and start building other student residences,” he said.

At that time, university housing was being managed by universities and there were no private companies providing that service.

“So, I was the first to do that. And that’s why there were some questions whether this will be something successful, whether parents will trust it, whether students will be attracted to it, but it’s definitely very, very popular, very successful.”

Al-Akhali says that while purpose-built student housing was a new concept in Canada back in 2015, it was a very popular in Europe and the U.S. where a lot of student housing is privately managed.

In the last five years, he’s seen his Granville Hall student residence explode, although the pandemic has delayed a lot of their expansion plans, including into Charlottetown. “We have long wait lists every year that we can’t fill.”

The 30-room residence on Granville Street houses students during the school year and is available to tourists in the summer.

He says the owner of the building was developing another site downtown, but the apartments were going to be out of the price range for students. Al-Akhali, not wanting to miss out on this business opportunity, took this moment to create Halifax’s first fully automated hotel right in the heart of downtown. 

“Tourism nearly died in the pandemic and now that it’s back hotel rates have nearly doubled, creating a lot of barriers to access for people. So, I’m always looking for ways to give people a great experience within their budget. Focusing on building the IT infrastructure and having an automated check-in process has allowed us to offer a competitive pricing structure compared to other hotels in the area.”

An accomplished entrepreneur in his own right, Al-Akhali admits he still faces immigrant guilt from time to time, carrying the weight of his decision to settle in Canada as opposed to many of his friends who eventually went back to their home country to support the causes in Yemen.

“Were my friends braver than me? Yes, absolutely in some regard because they went back to contribute to a cause I deeply believe in and some of them lost their lives in the process. For me, I believe I can help my family and my country by being a role model for what discipline is and how success can be found by having the right mentality.”

His advice to current and future aspiring immigrant entrepreneurs is to leverage your unique advantages.

“If you’re hungry for having your own business, then bring that hunger and don’t be shy. Be aggressive, pursue what you want to pursue. I think a competitive advantage that immigrants have compared to many locals is that locals don’t always have that drive. They know they have an extensive network of support and family to lean back on. Many of them see the path to prosperity in working a regular job, because that’s what they see their peers do,” he said.

“Whereas immigrants come from a very different environment, where they see that the path to prosperity is self-reliance. They see that people who don’t own their own business are always the ones most vulnerable.”

 

“So, if someone comes here from that mentality, they already have an advantage over others because they are more aggressive, more resilient, they will pursue what they want to pursue and they’ll find a way. And … if they lose everything, well, they never had anything to start with! So, they’re back to where they started. And that’s fine.”

That is why, he concludes, that most of the folks that start successful businesses come from immigrant backgrounds. Al-Akhali is excited for the continued growth and expansion of Halifax and Nova Scotia as a destination and reiterates that now, more than ever, Canada needs more workers.

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