We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Reha Habib. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Reha below.

Reha, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

I started the design studio, Reha, LLC. an architecture, interior architecture and interior design practice in 2016. I was the first and only employee at that time. I began working on a large scale hotel project and the scale was too large to be able to complete the design work alone, so I collaborated with a talented friend and designer, Eliana Candeias on the project. I approached that first big project as an outsourced collaboration since I did not yet have an in-house team. I also had a couple other small projects that came along that I worked on solo. It was very difficult to manage several clients and design projects alone so I started to collaborate with another Architect, Ramy Takla around 2018. During this time I shared an office space with another small company to be able to receive clients and suppliers and to have a creative space to do my work in. In addition, I hired an outsourced Lawyer and Accountant for the administrative support of the company.
I hired my first in-house employee in 2018, and continued to get new and interesting projects. During this time I worked very long hours, including nights and weekends. Even my personal vacations were filled with work. I faced a lot of challenges with clients, managing their expectations, and balancing the creative work with the management, administrative side of the business.

I made plenty of mistakes along the way, including working on some projects without strict contracts that outlined my exact scope of work. This created problems with clients demanding and expecting extra work not within my scope, also I went through some instances where I completed the design work and never received my full payment. Creative work requires a lot of time and energy and therefore after one incident where the project was fully executed (where construction was finished) and the client refused to complete the payment I decided I needed to re-evaluate the business operations so Hossam Shawky joined the company as Managing Partner in 2019. I realized that I could not grow a thriving creative business while trying to do everything design-related as well as financial and administrative tasks. I came to the conclusion that it was grow or break from wearing too may hats. Hossam came from a background of Asset Management and financials and was a perfect addition to help the company grow. Since then we have hired full time employees and outsourced talent, established an office in the center of Cairo and grown our range of clients.

Today we continue to grow, and have completed several successful projects in Egypt, several projects in the USA as well as a project in Dubai.

Reha, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Reha Habib, I was born and raised in the USA. I studied Architecture at the University of Minnesota where I received my bachelors and Masters in Architecture. In 2009 I moved to Cairo to work for a boutique design firm. I started Reha, LLC, a multi-disciplinary design office specializing in architecture, interior architecture and interior design in 2016. Since then we have completed and worked on a unique range of projects from boutique hotels, 5 star hotels, restaurants, offices, retail, private villas, private apartments. We are very talented in creating unique and functional spatial solutions for our clients, while making the outcome aesthetically beautiful. We are great at creating new and interesting spatial experiences to elevate our clients projects. We offer full design services relating to architectural design as well as interiors. We also offer full support during the construction phase in the form of artistic supervision to make sure our client executed projects are aligned with our vision. We work worldwide and love new challenges.

I am the most proud of our ability to create very unique and meaningful projects that are all conceptually based. Our team is quite small but the quality of our design work is highly competitive with firms of larger scales. We are very thorough, detail oriented and skilled in our field. We fuse global concepts into our work to create timeless and beautiful projects.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

What really helped build our reputation was mainly dedication. Showing dedication to our clients and their projects. Going the extra mile to make them trust our design skills, and offering support and solutions when projects faced any construction problems. Abiding by deadlines promised to the client in the initial contract is a huge factor in gaining the clients trust.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

Yes, we have started designing furniture. In the past, we would design custom furniture for projects and then it would be a one-off item. We would put lots of energy and resources into designing a table or a furniture product only once. So we decided to start designing bespoke pieces that we can sell and also use in our own design projects.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rehahabib.com
• Instagram: reha_llc
• Facebook: Reha Design Studio
• Linkedin: Reha Habib
• Other: Email : [email protected]

Image Credits
Nour El Refai