04/13/2024
Alberta - Qatar: Two Years and Two Weeks
From David Howse, President, Matterhorn Business Solutions.
Randomness and ambiguity in action… My marketing career started in 1993 and since then I've worked on 100s of projects. Every few years there seems to be a random connection of events that leads to something bigger.
The start of this series of events began in 2007 in Lethbridge (at the U of L) where I became friends with a person who eventually introduced me to a business instructor opportunity at MRU (in Calgary). I’ve taught marketing at MRU for the past 9 years (2015-present) and this experience opened the opportunity to teach marketing and entrepreneurship in Doha, Qatar (CNAQ/UDST). I moved to Qatar in 2018 and returned to Alberta in 2020.
While all of this was happening, I was running Matterhorn (core competencies are marketing, business plans, and feasibility studies).
In 2020, when I returned to Calgary, Matterhorn was still going strong but the kinds of phone calls I was getting started to be more about business plans and feasibility studies. In this past year (2023-2024) I completed two feasibility studies for separate Indigenous groups and a full-day business plan training seminar for Indigenous women entrepreneurs in Whitehorse.
In 2023, Alberta leadership visited Qatar to discuss many things including energy, infrastructure, education and transportation. As a side note, back in 2018, when I registered my son in elementary school, I was surprised that Qatar had licensed Alberta’s curriculum to teach at some of their schools. There are several ties between the two regions.
Now, in April of 2024, I’m back in Doha for two weeks to present for two separate Alberta business groups. The reason I was given the opportunity was (1) I am an Albertan with strong familiarity with Qatar (2) Some of the Indigenous business projects I recently worked on, had indirect connections to other businesses (unknown to me at the time) and they wanted a good presenter for their Qatar trip.
One thing I’ve learned in the past 30+ years is, you never know if a project is a one off or if it will lead to other events. Generally, if you have some marketing skills, there’s no such thing as a one-off project, every project is a springboard - you just have to be ready when you land.
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