Tag Team Champions

For these Meinhardt executives, investing in human capital is paramount to business longevity.

- Germaine Cheong

No opportunity is too small when it comes to business. En route to Dubai recently, Meinhardt group executive chairman Shahzad Nasim, 67, ran into a client that the engineering group had been courting for some time. The client gave him a seemingly impossible task: Draw up a proposal to build a shopping mall in Saudi Arabia and mobilise a team for a presentation by the time they touched down in two hours.

Recounting the incident, Omar Shahzad, Nasim’s son, tells The Peak: “He did it, even though there was no guarantee that we would win the project.” Well, they did.

For Shahzad, 37, it illustrates his father’s unwavering dedication to his work – even after nearly 40 years in the industry. “As he never took work home, I didn’t know about his professional attributes until I started working with him. I’ve come to learn about his enormous passion not just for the job and company, but also for engineering.”

Seven years ago, Nasim, then group CEO, acquired Meinhardt in a management buyout from Victoria Meinhardt, daughter of the group’s late Australian founder, Bill Meinhardt.

When Shahzad joined his father in 2010, he boldly expanded Meinhardt’s network in the Middle East, even though the region was reeling from the global financial crisis and an inflated Dubai market. From just one office in Dubai with 60 staff,