Mahdi Hanna is the Director and Owner of Specialized Concrete Repairs & Strengthening Works at VENUS Engineering. With exceptional experience in the construction field, Mahdi Hanna and his company aim to provide the best services to clients with enhanced quality, value, and durability.
He started his own company to fulfill his dreams and put his ideas into action. His company focuses on offering. He thinks it’s crucial to have a reliable team to achieve goals. That’s why Mahdi Hanna thinks that human investment is a must for business achievement.
He is highly ambitious, patient, and optimistic because he thinks these factors help business growth and continuity. That’s what keeps his company paving the way to success. Venus Engineering also has a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Let’s learn more about Mahdi Hanna and his company below.
Mahdi Hanna, please explain the background of you and the company in detail.
I have 33 years of professional experience in the construction field, including specialized unique applications of concrete repairs, strengthening, and rehabilitation for various structures, assisting clients in identifying the defects, and proposing the most optimal technical solution for concrete structures. Currently, I am the Director/Owner of Specialized Concrete Repairs & Strengthening at VENUS Engineering, a part of Strong Force Group of companies based in Dubai, GCC countries, Eastern Europe and Australia.
I am responsible for projects requiring special strengthening techniques and installation methods. My duties include developing, producing, and executing complex structures in strict compliance with high quality and safety standards and procedures.
During my past experience, I was involved in many projects in the Middle East Region, Egypt, Jordan, and Eastern Europe. I had an active role in the development of various businesses.
About My Company
VENUS Engineering was established in 2007 in Dubai to deal with concrete repairs, rehabilitation, strengthening, and retrofitting for various types of residential, industrial, and commercial buildings in the UAE. VENUS has built a high reputation for project completion, meeting the needs and requirements of a variety of clients. VENUS operations have developed high-performance procedures governed by a “Quality Control Manual” that meet the special needs of minimum disruption dust noise nuisance during operations to maintain a safe work environment.
At VENUS, we have a strict Health and Safety policy that eliminates the risk of construction hazards. We have a vast knowledge of construction methods using the most advanced methodologies according to international standards and codes. It includes the selection of materials which can ensure our intention to provide our clients with the best service in terms of eliminating the cost within the budget and time consuming for completion.
VENUS has a well-established company and can work in a varied range of expertise for both public and private sector projects. We provide construction services on commercial structures, civil projects, residential projects, and all manner of human habitable dwellings and structures. We provide high-quality, professional construction services in a wide variety of areas.
What are your goals?
Our goal in VENUS Engineering is to enhance and develop the services we are providing to our clients in terms of durability, quality, and value. We are keen about our staff keeping them very close to our vision, believing in their ability to give their best to our clients.
We are not only looking to satisfy our clients’ requirements and needs, but we always look after them to keep us close to them in their future projects. Every project we are implementing is a success story to us. Our goal is to offer the best services to our clients at all times.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/company right now?
Our strength comes from our teamwork. We believe that everyone in our company has the talent, ability, or skill to make an environment succeed. Success is a pure reflection of teamwork. I see my success in my team members.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
The business is a collaboration between the management and the employees. As a manager, you cannot reflect your ideas and dreams in growing any business without the cooperation of your team. Setting the goals and objectives need a good staff to convert the plans into reality.
Our pure vision concentrates on investing in human beings, which are the real value to maintain steady growth. We’re where we are today because of the right selection of professional people, a healthy environment, and management support to all members to maintain continuous learning and development.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
First of all, I had a managerial post earlier, where I discovered that it didn’t fulfill my dreams. Therefore, I decided to make my own business where I can put more effort and build my own structure where I can fit.
I believe that success is not a word you can just say and be proud about. It is an action, continuous learning from the past, failures, reading, analyzing the facts and making the right decisions, being optimist all the time. Besides the real success, we did not explore it yet. We are on the way to do more and more.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The real challenges are when the business goes up and down. The business path looks like a ship in the sea. In the expansion of the business, the ship is sailing smoothly and successfully through the path. At the same time, in crises, you need to be very careful in making the decisions to preserve your company from sinking.
We have definitely explored many difficulties such as The world recession in 2008 inward and during the recent international crises caused by COVID-19. I can say that we have overcome both crises in consolidating our resources and making the right decisions to keep us going.
On the other hand, there are always challenges in the market regarding competition with other companies with the same trade and business. In VENUS, we believe in our strengths and abilities and look forward to differentiating ourselves from others in consolidating the business by executing more activities in-house to control the cost quality and providing the client with the best services.
Besides transparency in closing the deals with our clients, giving us a chance always in gaining the client’s trust. Building trust with your clients is considered the remark of success.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Patience, ambitiousness, and being optimistic at all times will ensure the success and continuity of the business.
Mahdi Hanna, what makes you excited about Mondays?
Meeting new people, supporting your staff, continuing in the same harmony gives a new meaning to your work. Every Monday, we start with new things, inquiries, new projects, solving problems, and making decisions. Every Monday carries something different we are excited about.
Mahdi Hanna , What do you value most about your culture and vision?
The culture is obtained by experience. To create your own culture and have a clear vision as a manager, you need to spend loads of quality time reading and learning more about your trade, your value, and exploring the difficulties. It helps to create a real value of the business, explore the real meaning of success and failure, and identify the difference between them.
No matter what you have failed in life, you need to learn how to stand again and again to fulfill your dreams. Our vision in VENUS is to maintain the smooth execution of contracting services providing high quality and safety standards. Besides, we believe that no job or task is more important than the worker’s health and safety.
Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
Challenges always keep the person ready to give his best to succeed. We explored the real meaning of being innovative and creative in many projects. We have been asked many times to develop solutions we have not experienced before, which allowed us to create solutions. In Engineering, nothing is impossible, and the engineer’s duty is breaking the impossible concept to a possible and feasible solution.
So far, we have succeeded on many occasions in coming up with unique strengthening solutions for many structural reinforced concrete elements in a very tight and difficult situation where our team succeeded in proposing a creative solution that was not implemented previously anywhere. We have strengthened many buildings with fatal mistakes experienced by main contractors, where they asked our intervention to sort out the problem to keep the structure safe.
We have also executed many re-structuring and retrofitting projects to convert the use of the building from residential to the public, where the loads are much more and need special treatment to be safe and durable. Our engineers took the mission from the design stage until handing it over. We have executed structural repairs for many old monument buildings in the UAE to extend the e-service life for those buildings.
What are your company’s strategies, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
We look forward to developing our professional methodologies in construction. We are open to bringing new technologies to continuously enhance the quality of work, keeping us unique in giving the best services in town. We value the competition in the market as a healthy way to boost the business for the companies having the same size.
Our strategy always keeps learning and values the mistakes in order to avoid them in the future; this healthy manner keeps us focusing on improving the business further. Perfection cannot be achieved 100%, but we are trying to be very close at all times.
What are the key values that helped you overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership?
Being a team leader, not a boss, when you are leading the team in a very professional manner and friendly environment, you can always, as a manager, boost your members and get the best from them, preserving the continuous growth and success for every member of your team who will be reflected directly on the company growth.
Personally, I am not judging any of my team members for incidentally making a mistake. People make mistakes; otherwise, no one learns. As a manager, you have to appreciate people’s efforts in their work and give them chances to prove themselves and grow.
Mahdi Hanna , How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
Every company has a cycle. Normally the phenomena of any company growth are going into an inclined linear growth until reaching the peak. The manager’s role is to maintain steady growth, enhancing and developing the services to prolong the life cycle of the company.
Diversifying the business is the right way to keep growing and succeeding. For the last two years, in our company, during the COVID -19 crises, we have created a new structural steel division to diversify the business. We have used our staff to strengthen the division and initially establish the new division.
Then we employed the right staff to develop the business. Now we have succeeded in having two active divisions, with different staff, working simultaneously and collaborating among each other to develop and grow the business in UAE.
Where is your leadership going, Mr. Mahdi Hanna? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
I focus on developing the business by supporting the team members working with me, enhancing their enthusiasm to succeed. There is nothing impossible in the entire world; every success story starts from a thought, the good manager who can reflect the thought and dream into reality. Competition is always there; professional people can look forward to proving themselves in leadership by being distinguished from others.
The future is welcoming a smart generation who has to learn how to be distinguished from succeeding. It is not about education. The new generations are educated, but this fact is not enough to succeed. Nowadays, science is focusing on developing AI (Artificial intelligence) to replace many ordinary jobs with robots. The smart life became a reality, making the challenges more in business life. Smart people have to find a way to be eminent in competition with AI in the future.
Also, as a manager, when you adopt the latest technologies in hand and provide them to your staff, you will improve and enhance their capability in competition in the market. It can enhance and save their efforts and time in the work company to handle more work simultaneously. These efforts can be reflected as a good service provided to our clients in saving on project duration and budget.
What services/solutions or products are offered by your company at par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services.
We are in VENUS Engineering, providing the most optimum solutions to our clients to fulfill their requirements, using the advanced technologies in our business with high quality according to international standards and norms.
We are focusing in the coming years on developing our own products and methodologies in business to provide the market with an added engineering value to compete with other products and companies in the market. We are working to have everything related to our business to be consolidated. All our services must be designed and built in-house so that nothing will be outsourced to any subcontractors.
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