Meet Noura Al-Otaibi: founder of Rawd Business Community, an online platform that aims at empowering women, encouraging female entrepreneurs to better identify what suits them, providing them with practical content, and enhancing cooperation. Before setting up this community, Al-Otaibi found herself going through a period of failure that she explains shaped her life for the better.
According to Arab News, Al-Otaibi decided a few years back to quit her job in the public sector to start her own business, giving up the security of a salaried position for the uncertainty of self-employment. For two years and a half, Al-Otaibi’s life was turned upside down as she discovered that venturing towards being an entrepreneur was harder than she anticipated. It involved months of not knowing the business world well, what path to choose, how to manage and market her business, how to proceed with necessary paperwork, and so on.
However, Al-Otaibi explained to the news portal that she never regretted the almost three years of trials and errors, saying that the challenges and failures she faced proved to be “a beneficial experience that taught me lessons I could never learn in any college.”
Quickly moving on to the next phase in her journey, Al-Otaibi decided to pursue different courses and enroll in training programs, in order to have better direction with where she wanted to head to career-wise. It was in the very first course she enrolled in that Al-Otaibi realized the important role a woman could play in other women’s lives.
Driven by a deep belief in female empowerment, Al-Otaibi decided to explore the idea of replacing competition with collaboration, initially implementing her idea in meetings and gatherings with her course mates to share knowledge. Then, Al-Otaibi began linking female entrepreneurs to decision-makers in order to help them find solutions to existing issues.
As her idea to enhance collaboration succeeded, Al-Otaibi decided to establish Rawd Business Community, which she describes as not just an online group but “an actual community where everyone is ready to cooperate with one another.” Al-Otaibi’s community provides essential services to female entrepreneurs, such as law or consultancy to guide them through finishing paperwork, legislation and rules, effective planning, and so on.
“I want to serve womenfolk. I believe that as women we don’t have to work in isolation. Cooperation is the key. That is why I am planning to have a mixed-gender community in which we can benefit from each other and support each other in business. No one can succeed alone,” she explained.
