In Conversation

With Nancy Awwad

That is probably the hardest question because I have never been just one thing.

I am an entrepreneur, a strategist, a marketer, a consultant, a mother, a wife, and someone who has spent most of her adult life building things. Sometimes they were my businesses and sometimes they belonged to other people. I have worked in operations, financial services, immigration, consulting, retail, branding and marketing, across the UAE and Canada.

But if I had to describe myself without using a job title, I would say I am someone who sees possibilities. I look at something and immediately start thinking: What could this become? What is missing? How could we make it better?

That curiosity has probably been the common thread throughout my entire career.

Tell me about a moment when you felt something needed to change.

There wasn’t only one.

My life has been a collection of moments when something inside me said, this cannot stay the same.

Sometimes it was professional. I had reached the end of what a particular career or business could teach me and knew it was time to move forward. Other times, life made the decision for me.

One of the biggest changes came when I had to look at my life differently altogether. Suddenly, time wasn’t something abstract that stretched endlessly in front of me. It became valuable.

That changes the questions you ask yourself.

What am I waiting for? What do I still want to create? What am I afraid to try? And perhaps most importantly: if not now, when?

I think that is where this chapter of my life really began. I stopped thinking about everything I had already done and started becoming excited about everything I could still do.

Why has it always been easy for you to start over?

I’m not sure starting over has ever actually been easy for me. I think I simply became very comfortable with being a beginner.

There is a difference.

I have changed countries, industries, careers and business models. I have built things, watched things succeed, watched other things fail, and occasionally had to admit that an idea I was convinced would work simply didn’t.

Starting again teaches you that experience doesn’t mean knowing everything. Experience means knowing that you can figure things out.

I am also not particularly attached to titles. I can sit in a boardroom discussing strategy and later be packing an order, changing something on a website, answering a customer or standing behind a market table. Building a business requires all of it.

Every new beginning gives me something the previous one didn’t have: everything I learned along the way.

So I don’t really see it as starting over anymore.

I see it as starting again — with more information.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Still creating.

I hope I never reach a point where I say, “That’s it. This is who I am and this is all I’m going to do.”

Five years from now, I would like this platform to have grown into something much bigger than a personal website. I want to work with entrepreneurs, professionals and businesses that have something genuinely good to offer but need help figuring out how to position it, communicate it and bring it into the world.

I want to continue writing, creating content, developing brands and sharing what more than two decades in business has taught me — including the mistakes.

And I want the freedom to choose projects because they interest me, people because I believe in them, and ideas because I think they deserve a chance.

I don’t have a perfectly mapped-out five-year plan.

That would almost defeat the purpose.

If my life so far has taught me anything, it is that some of the best chapters are the ones I never planned.