Zak El-Ramly was well on his way to what might have been a promising academic career teaching engineering at Ain Shams University in Cairo when, on June 5, 1967, war broke out between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
That event set him on a path that would eventually lead him to Richmond and a successful career as an entrepreneur and founder of ZE PowerGroup Inc.
Though his training was as an engineer, his company's success has been in an area in which he had no expertise: enterprise software development. And what started as a one-man power trading consulting firm in 1995 eventually morphed into a software company that specializes in data collection and analysis, with branches in New York, London and Singapore.
Employing 200 people locally, about a quarter of whom are software developers, Ze PowerGroup's flagship product – ZEMA, a program that collects and analyzes data for energy, commodities and financial markets – is used by some of the world's largest Fortune 500 energy companies and banks.
It also operates a small engineering division specializing in building power transmission and distribution lines and stations – a hangover of sorts from El-Ramly's first career as a BC Hydro engineer.
Born in Port Said, Egypt, and raised in Cairo, El-Ramly had been working toward a PhD in engineering and was being groomed for a teaching position. Though the war with Israel lasted just six days, the country was destabilized, which interrupted El-Ramly's studies.
Always at the top of his class, however, El-Ramly knew he would have no problem getting scholarships anywhere in the world and decided to immigrate to Canada.
"I decided to take the long route," he said.
He spent a year in Kuwait working as an engineer at an oil refinery, then came to Canada in 1969 on a student visa. He chose Canada, he said, because it seemed to be a blend of the two countries he admired most: Britain and the U.S.
El-Ramly attended Carleton University, where he completed a master's and a PhD in engineering, then worked as a researcher at the university before coming to Vancouver to take a job with BC Hydro in 1977.
Starting in an entry-level position, he spent the next 17 years working his way up the ranks, before moving over to BC Hydro's new power trading arm, Powerex, where he eventually became executive vice-president of marketing.
While at BC Hydro, he was responsible for implementing demand-side management: reducing power consumption through energy efficiency.
"Eventually, some of the work that he started got carried on and became the Power Smart program," said Tony Lau, manager of policy, codes and standards for BC Hydro's Power Smart group.
"He's an outside-of-the box thinker, so that's why I think he's been successful, and he's not scared of doing new things."
At Powerex, El-Ramly was in on the ground floor of a power trading market that was developing out of deregulation in California and Alberta. But in 1995, when he was passed over for a senior executive position, he decided it was time to start his own business and hung out his shingle as a consultant.
The newly deregulated power market had created a demand for someone who understood energy commodities and trading, and he was making money "almost instantly."
"The plan was that, they're all going to deregulation, but they don't know what deregulation means," El-Ramly said. "I know what deregulation means, so why not have a consulting [service] that trains companies to move into a competitive market?"
El-Ramly grew his company with the help of his daughter Manal, who is also an engineer, and sons Aiman, Waleed and Nader.
"It started as a family affair," El-Ramly said, "but it grew very quickly."
The company's growth has been steady, but perhaps slower than it might have been, were it not for El-Ramly's aversion to debt and losing control to outside investors.
"If you borrow, money comes with control," he said. "I decided to maintain the decision-making ability. We make money every year. We moved from one person to 200 people without borrowing a cent from anybody, including the banks."
Like stock markets, energy markets generate a lot of transactional data, which is cumbersome and time-consuming to analyze. Power prices are affected by everything from politics and weather to gas to oil prices. But when El-Ramly went shopping for software that could collect and analyze massive amounts of data, he could find nothing that suited his needs, so he hired some developers to create a system for him.
"We couldn't find a product that would do that, so we dreamed it up from scratch," he said. "We just made a database of all the information related to the operation and trading in energy and commodities."
He initially developed two software products: one for portfolio analysis and another for data management. But he got some good advice when he was told to forget about commodity portfolio analysis – there were other players in that field – and focus strictly on data management.
In 2001, ZE Power launched ZE Market Analyzer (ZEMA), which collects information on commodity prices, weather, stream flows – anything that might affect energy prices – and helps predict where and when energy will be needed and helps set prices.
"That took off," El-Ramly said.
Because ZEMA is used by some of the largest energy traders, businesses analysts and oil and gas companies in the world, El-Ramly has had to expand into the U.S., Europe and Asia, starting with branches in New York, North Carolina and Houston. Two years ago, El-Ramly opened an office in the U.K., and in July he opened another in Singapore.
Having a global reach suits El-Ramly on a personal level, whose only real hobby is travelling, for both business and pleasure.
"My wife [Salwa] and I love travel," he said.
When not working or travelling, El-Ramly is given to reflection. He recently compiled some of his observations on life, work and business into a slim booklet of aphorisms, which include:
•"A person's smarts can often be more apparent by the questions he asks than the answers he gives";
•"Plan your life/career to take off like an airplane, not a rocket – rockets move faster but explode at the end of their trip";
•"We globalized trade, travel and the use of the Internet. We also globalized porn, terrorism and economic crises. I am not sure globalization worked the way we wanted it to work"; and
•"You do not have to work hard if working smart will do the job."
But it's not just his observations on life that El-Ramly wants to leave behind. He has had offers to sell his company but sees it as a legacy – a living repository of everything he has learned about business – which he wants to pass on to his children.
"I knew that business knowledge is something, but it's not something you write down," he said. "I knew that I had certain business logic, so I wanted to leave it to my kids. I built this company in order to leave my knowledge behind." •
