Entrepreneur Chahe Yerevanian
COVER
FEATURE
Chahe Yerevanian took his family’s struggling real estate development business and turned it into one of Lebanon’s biggest players. Here’s how the company remodeled from the bottom line up.
By Eliot Stempf
Chahe
Yerevanian
Reconstructing business 40| Entrepreneur October 2012
T
he turn of the millenium bore ill for the three brothers of the Yerevanian family, Vahe, Chahe and Serge. Ara
Yerevanian, their father and founder of the family real estate development firm, passed away after months of fighting cancer – and having led the family through a host of other struggles besides.
Ara had shuffled his family between Paris and Lebanon with the ebb and flow of conflict in the civil war, and eventually landed his family in Canada. The war hardly could’ve come at a worse time for Ara; just three years before the calamity began in ‘75, he’d been elected a member of the Lebanese parliament.
Yet Canada cast its own set of troubles on the family’s fortunes. The recession of the late ‘80s hit the real estate development partnership they’d established with the
Armoyan family, a successful ArmenianCanadian clan. The threat of bankruptcy drove the Yerevanians back to Paris in 1990. Only the conclusion of the war offered a reprieve: In
1995, the family returned to Lebanon.
Ara marked the return with a whole new venture: the development company SAYFCOAra Yérévanian and Sons. Their focus was to provide affordable housing. “Since the ‘60s and ‘70s my father had chosen the middle income bracket,” Chahe says. “His slogan was ‘a home for everyone’; he believed that since the government couldn’t help provide housing, he would take the task on himself.”
Serge, the youngest, was still in school; but Vahe and Chahe joined their father. Vahe was in charge of managing the construction, while Chahe was to cover sales and marketing.
Business finally began to pick up for the family.
From 1994 to 1998, they report
FEATURE
Chahe Yerevanian took his family’s struggling real estate development business and turned it into one of Lebanon’s biggest players. Here’s how the company remodeled from the bottom line up.
By Eliot Stempf
Chahe
Yerevanian
Reconstructing business 40| Entrepreneur October 2012
T
he turn of the millenium bore ill for the three brothers of the Yerevanian family, Vahe, Chahe and Serge. Ara
Yerevanian, their father and founder of the family real estate development firm, passed away after months of fighting cancer – and having led the family through a host of other struggles besides.
Ara had shuffled his family between Paris and Lebanon with the ebb and flow of conflict in the civil war, and eventually landed his family in Canada. The war hardly could’ve come at a worse time for Ara; just three years before the calamity began in ‘75, he’d been elected a member of the Lebanese parliament.
Yet Canada cast its own set of troubles on the family’s fortunes. The recession of the late ‘80s hit the real estate development partnership they’d established with the
Armoyan family, a successful ArmenianCanadian clan. The threat of bankruptcy drove the Yerevanians back to Paris in 1990. Only the conclusion of the war offered a reprieve: In
1995, the family returned to Lebanon.
Ara marked the return with a whole new venture: the development company SAYFCOAra Yérévanian and Sons. Their focus was to provide affordable housing. “Since the ‘60s and ‘70s my father had chosen the middle income bracket,” Chahe says. “His slogan was ‘a home for everyone’; he believed that since the government couldn’t help provide housing, he would take the task on himself.”
Serge, the youngest, was still in school; but Vahe and Chahe joined their father. Vahe was in charge of managing the construction, while Chahe was to cover sales and marketing.
Business finally began to pick up for the family.
From 1994 to 1998, they report