Azizi Developments CEO Farhad Azizi said that many staff were shifted to self-sustaining companies and departments within the larger Azizi Group umbrella
A period of “clean-up” in 2018 that saw Azizi Development’s staff numbers decline allowed the company to focus more on its core business and be ‘healthier’, according to company CEO Farhad Azizi.
In August 2018, a local newspaper reported that “droves” of Azizi Developments staff members left the company after being asked to take significant pay cuts.
In an interview with Arabian Business, however, Azizi said that the staff cuts were a natural result of the company’s fast growth.
“If I give you a glass of water and you run with it, there is a chance that you’ll spill,” he said. “But if you walk with it slowly, there’s a slimmer chance.”
The Azizi chief executive added that the company “grew very fast, and there are needs for a developer.”
“There are so many related companies. You need to be doing mortgages, you need to be doing facilities maintenance, and the real estate part,” he said. “It becomes so big. We felt it was becoming too much.”
According to the company, of the staff members that constituted the 20 percent of staff that left, approximately half went to self-sustainable companies and departments that fall outside the Azizi Developments brand.
“We made separate entities, real separate entities, so that they could [each] become profit centres,” Azizi said. “It was not necessary to have so many directly and indirectly related and connected departments.”
“It was going to take us away from our core business,” he added. “The core business is to find a good location, design it well, give it to a good contractor, sell the property and deliver it in good time. In 2018, we went through a lot of clean-up. Today we are in a much healthier shape.”
During the interview, Azizi said that the company expects “a good year” after sales figures fell in various locations in 2018.
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