“I started my journey as an entrepreneur without a mapped out plan, initially. I had come back from College in Canada, and joined a troubled division of one of our family business. After some failed attempts to revamp the business model, I decided to move on in life and do something which I really enjoyed and something that could keep me going in life. I had never thought of getting into the restaurant business before but since I was very particular about what I ate and how I wanted my food at every meal, the decision to get into this business seemed like destiny. Just like any other journey nothing came easy, for starters this business required a lot of capital and just to convince my father to merely invest in a new project was not an easy task. One thing that worked in my favor was that one of my uncles was running a couple of restaurants in Dubai. I went to Dubai and worked under his supervision and ran the restaurants for 9 months. On my return I was more clear-headed as to what exactly I wanted to get into. Everything in life is like a lesson and I take every failure as a learning, so I put everything in perspective before I started Bamboo Union. One of the biggest learning from my retail experience was that location can and should never be compromised upon. So it almost took me another 10 months to find the perfect place for this project. The toughest time during construction work was Summer Ramzan period where fasting seemed like almost impossible, till the time we opened doors for public. That’s when I realized the real intensity of running a restaurant. I can only thank God for the kind of response that we got. But as this happened, me and my team just worked for almost 14 hours a day non-stop and mostly without food as we had no time to feed ourselves. During this time I almost lost 10 kgs. There is no greater reward to see all your hard work pay off like it has so far. Our focus from day one wasn’t to grow our sales. Honestly some days I almost forgot to check the sales figures but our aim was to serve the best Pan Asian food in Lahore. This thankfully has worked out well, and we have customers that have been coming to us from day one and they still feel great about having our food. The great thing about this business is that you have direct access to the customers and ninety percent customer satisfaction has kept us going. The working hours are crazy in this business but as long as our customers are happy Team Bamboo Union is more than happy to put in a few more hours :)” Raza Ahmed, Owner, Bamboo Union