The classroom and the businesses it prepares people for

My career did not begin in a university. It began in 1997 on the floor of a showroom in Beirut, selling appliances part-time while I worked through a commerce degree. Over the next four years at the same firm I moved into sales management and then into auditing, which is where I first saw the gap between what a set of books says a business is doing and what the business is actually doing. A year of national service followed, in an administrative role within airport security.

In 2004 I moved to Windsor, Ontario and joined an accounting and advisory practice as assistant manager. The work there was the most useful education I have had: preparing business plans for clients, management consulting, financial statements for tax and banking, audit follow-up, advising owners on restructuring and profit planning. Unglamorous, and relentlessly clarifying. You learn quickly which management ideas survive contact with a payroll and which ones do not.

In 2010 I joined the Islamic University of Lebanon's Faculty of Business and Economics at the Tyre campus, where I stayed for nine years. I taught strategic management and its graduate counterpart, human resource management, operations management, SME management, leadership, marketing, international management and feasibility studies, at undergraduate and graduate level, in English and in Arabic. I supervised graduate research projects and coordinated management courses across the faculty.

In 2019 I moved to the Beirut campus, and in 2020 I was appointed Head of the Management Department. The role was administrative in the way department headships always are — budgets, scheduling, workload, resources — but it was also the first time I was responsible for the quality of an entire programme rather than my own courses. I led faculty recruitment, evaluation and professional development, directed curriculum modernisation, and ran accreditation preparation and quality-assurance review.

Eleven years, two campuses, one university.

I returned to Canada and to independent consulting, advising small and medium-sized enterprises on business plans, growth strategy, market assessment, feasibility and operational improvement, and working with entrepreneurs launching and scaling new ventures. That practice continues today as CedarBridge Consulting.

Since 2023 I have been Professor of Business and Management at the Zekelman School of Business at St. Clair College, and since 2026 Sessional Professor in Business Analytics at the University of Niagara Falls Canada, where I also supervise graduate capstone projects. Teaching in Windsor while consulting in Windsor has a useful effect: the examples in my classes are current, local and real, and my students can tell the difference.