Profile: Mustafa Mohammed

MUSTAFA Mohammed does not like eating alone.

At work, he will invite his staff to have dinner with him.

This habit raised eyebrows in Pakistan, as did his introduction of female sales staff in the more conservative 1990s.

“If I have to eat on my own I feel like the world is coming to an end,” he says, over lunch.

“Ask my wife, she hates it. She will pretend she’s eating.”

Welcome to the extraordinary world of Mustafa Mohammed, the hip hop-loving, Rolls-Royce driving, wheelchair-bound healthcare entrepreneur behind a multi-million pound chain of dental practices and scion of an influential family in Pakistan.

The managing director of Genix Healthcare and Sparkle Dental Labs was born near Faisalabad but bred in Yorkshire.

He made the headlines in August when he opened a £1m manufacturing site in Leeds to help reverse the flow of British dental laboratory work being outsourced to the Far East.

The new Sparkle lab offers manufacturing and training facilities as well as opportunities for apprentices.

Mohammed is a proud exponent of UK manufacturing and says Sparkle has created 50 jobs to date.

“This lab will keep on expanding and taking on more people and will look at exporting in the future,” he adds. It stands close by some logistics warehouses for easy distribution.

He is looking at the United States, home of the biggest healthcare market in the world.

“The biggest benefit we have got in Great Britain is our brand. We don’t play on it.

“Germans play on the German brand. Why don’t we do it? We should be so proud.”

Mohammed has plenty of experience of international trade. Genix Pharma, the Karachi-based family business he led in the mid to late 1990s, operates in nine countries across South East Asia and West Africa. It will soon enter a tenth.

Mohammed’s story begins in 1969 in a village called Sharifabad. He was the eldest of three sons. Aged two or three, he was struck by polio.

Village elders gave his parents the choice of putting him in a mosque, but they would not consider it, so the boy underwent various treatments, including electro-convulsive therapy.

His parents decided to send Mustafa to England with a loving aunt who adopted him.

They settled in Elland, West Yorkshire and Mohammed had no contact with his mother and father until he was 16.

He went to school in Brighouse, but claims he “wasn’t the brightest kid on the block”.

He did a computer science degree in Sheffield, created an Urdu word processor working from home and then got a job with aviation firm McDonnell Douglas as a computer programmer.

In 1995, his father called him back to Pakistan.

Mohammed started looking after the family firm, Genix Pharma, a drugs manufact- urer.

He made some important strategic decisions; the firm exited a partnership with a US firm, stopped trying to compete with rivals on price and broke into new markets with high-end products, from antibiotics to painkillers.

Mohammed built a new manufacturing site and Genix became the first pharma company in Pakistan to employ female sales representatives.

“Sex sells, in a way. It worked and now everyone has got them,” he says. With his habit of eating with factory staff, he attracted quite a lot of attention.

“I was quite lucky, because the Taleban hadn’t entered Pakistan at that time. I was just taking what you have here over there.”

His health deteriorated in Pakistan and the young man in calipers became increasingly dependent on a wheelchair. His father asked him to return to England.

Mohammed tried property development for a few years and “failed miserably... and lost a huge amount of money”.

In 2005, he saw queues for a dental practice and spotted a clear supply and demand opportunity. He researched the dentistry market and bought a practice in Garforth.

He refitted the building and branded it as Genix Healthcare. That was the first. Now he has 24 clinics across Britain, with combined revenues of £15m.

He says he has plans to open more, although the price for dental practices has shot up and he is reluctant to borrow money.

In the meantime, he has moved into manufacturing with the launch this summer of Sparkle in Leeds.

Beneath the self-deprecating charm and perfect teeth, Mohammed is clearly a sharp individual.

He attributes his drive to his late father, Chaudhry Mohammad Sharif, who passed away at the age of 72 in April this year.

“He wouldn’t let the disability come in front of me,” he says. “He was my energy.”

Mohammed adds: “He started out as a traffic warden and when he ended his career he was the third most powerful person in Pakistan.

“His ethos was never, ever lie. Towards the end of his career the last four or five prime ministers of Pakistan were his friends. He was known extremely well and respected.”

He credits his father as a key motivation in his business career; he also cities seeing people flourish and providing the right service.

“My bank manager would really hate me for saying this, but money has never really motivated me,” he says.

Mohammed rates England as the best country in the world.

“Everyone has got equal opportunity,” he says. “Nobody needs anything.

“It is so nice to see people flourish. Nobody needs to know anyone to do anything. You have got everything here.”

But he admits to frustration at some members of the Muslim community who “abuse” the country and want to bring in sharia law.

He comes to the question of religion. “Years ago when I worked in a dyeing and printing plant, I realised that the green colour that I see isn’t the green colour that you see. That’s why you have machines.

“That’s how all religion is. Every religion is an interpretation of what we see.

“All religion is like a pizza. The base is the same. You have got to be good.

“You must treat everyone right. You must not do things wrong. It’s the topping on the top. You have got to understand and respect each other.”

He says the new generation of Pakistanis living in Britain has to tell the elders to “wake up” and frequently debates the issue within the Asian community.

“Pakistan is moving forward to so much,” he says. “Why have the elders here in this country not moved forward?”

His ethos on life is to treat people fairly. “Some will take the mick, but the majority of the time you will do okay.

“If people try to make every single penny from every single game, it’s a short game.”

Twitter: @bernardginns

Mustafa Mohammed Factfile

Date of birth: May 1, 1969

Education: Computer science degree

First job: Writing an Urdu word processor

Holiday destination: South Beach, Miami

Music: Jay-Z

Book: Jack Welch

TV: Boston Legal

Car: Rolls-Royce Ghost

Suit: Ahmed Bham of Karachi sends me four suits every three months

Most proud of: My dad