In 2008, the financial crisis had the business press chasing quarterly damage and quarterly recovery. Family businesses were doing something slower and harder. They were keeping their people, their suppliers and their obligations intact at a point when very little else stayed intact, and almost none of it was reported.
Dr Hischam El Agamy had begun his entrepreneurial journey in the 1990s. Along with his wife, Antoinette, and his three daughters, Farida, Ramia and Shereen, he recognised the questions family businesses were wrestling with: who takes over, who has a say, what is kept, and what is changed.
The El Agamy family launched Tharawat Magazine in the Middle East that year, and it was reaching a global readership within two years. Committed to original content, it began in print, added a website, then a podcast, and is now published entirely digitally.
Women in Family Business followed in 2014. Family business coverage still arrived, almost without exception, through the men who had inherited the company, and the women running, financing and governing these firms were largely absent from the record. The second platform was built to become a leading source for and about them.
A global resource on family enterprise
Tharawat covers the parts of family business that general business coverage tends to skip: how a company passes from one generation to the next, who gets a say in it, and what it takes to build on something somebody else started. Since 2008 that has added up to hundreds of family business stories from around the world, and over 150 episodes of the podcast, The Family Business Voice.
Celebrating the women leading family enterprises
Established in 2014, Women in Family Business is a platform for women who break barriers, challenge norms, and redefine leadership in family enterprises and beyond.
