Faizal’s Story

Instead of using environmentally unfriendly air conditioning, for example, a radiant cooling system pumps chilled water through a branch network of German-made plexiglass-pipes running under Tulah’s floors, maintaining an ambient temperature throughout the complex. Meanwhile, clients that will spend $1,000 a night for room, board, and treatments, will dine deliciously on the produce grown in Tulah’s surrounding organic farm and in its hydroponics center, as the underlying aquifer is safeguarded through a multitude of water-management best-practices.

Even more important is what is happening on the inside. Tulah’s ultimate mission is to completely reimagine our approach to health and wellness and way of being, a center of excellence where the links between psyche and soma are taken seriously in a reinvented healthcare process minutely overseen by Faizal and his team of medical and spiritual advisors. In essence, Tulah will marry the best of ancient healing practices engaging the five senses – such as the massages and herbal-oil remedies of India’s 5,000-year-old Ayurvedic medical system – with the data-driven rigors of 21st Century Western medicine and science.

Completely reimagine our approach to health and wellness and way of being

That means everything from advanced CT- and Dexa- scans; pathology- and bloodwork- lab analysis; and laparoscopic (keyhole) surgeries; will all take place in Tulah’s own state-of-the-art medical facility. Sports injuries and restorative therapies will, meanwhile, be aided by hyperbaric oxygen therapy, Wi-Fi-powered fitness technologies including gravity-free treadmills, and the latest ultrasound equipment. 

But the hard science and data, profiling a client’s health issues, will all have a higher purpose: to compliment and guide science-proven alternative treatments such as Chinese acupuncture; Ayurveda’s system of diagnosis and treatment, including chakra-clearing massages and vegetarian diets; and the crucial mind-calming that comes with the rigors of yoga, meditation, and psychoacoustics found in ancient Buddhist and Hindu practices.

There is a lot more here than meets the eye. Tulah is located just 20 miles from a luxurious 200-bed, hyper-modern hospital Faizal built under the patient-care model and guidance of Cleveland Clinic physicians, where local doctors are now using robotics during routine orthopedic surgeries. It’s all part of Faizal’s grand plan to disrupt the global health-and-wellness industry.

Tulah wellness center

Fusing together the best of both Eastern and Western medical systems

Faizal believes environmental beauty and holistic mind-body practices, mostly found in the East, lift the spirit and mind and greatly aid healing, even though such techniques are often airily dismissed by Western Medicine. “If you're in a dungeon of a hospital, with no light, how will the doctor treat you?” he asks rhetorically. Conversely, alternative treatments are frequently faith or superstition based, rather than science-based, and that, too, needs a correction. Faizal’s grand ambition: unleash a 21^st Century wellness revolution by fusing together the best of both Eastern and Western medical systems, thereby creating something entirely new in the process. Tulah has, as an example of this fusion at work, a unique Sound Solarium that generates the precise tone and frequency that is often created during mediations and chanting and is science-proven to calm the mind.

Faizal, for all his calm demeanor, is hyper ambitious. A serious business strategy stands behind his vision. Tulah will be the Formula One version of his car on the street. Once his showcase is established, his goal is to roll out 100 mini-Tulahs around the world, so that clients returning to their respective homes have a community version to visit for periodic rejuvenation stays. In other words, Faizal imagines that Tulah will ultimately become a luxurious global health-and-wellness brand producing calm minds and serious riches.

A skeptic might easily dismiss Faizal’s grand plan, until they realize the serial entrepreneur has already made a couple of fortunes upending established industries. Born into a Muslim family in Calicut, Kerala, his father was a rice trader who went on to become a prominent regional businessman. Always the rebellious middle son, Faizal went off to earn a second engineering degree at Bradley University in the U.S., before settling in Dubai with his new wife, Shabana, after they visited the desert-dusted outpost on a 1995 holiday.

Dubai at the time was a provincial trading post wholly dependent on the oil and gas industry, nothing like the modern metropolis it is today, which is why back then Faizal figured the United Arab Emirates needed a manufacturing base. His vision was to create “the mother of all industries” – a local foundry. Faizal started out modestly as a scrap-metal trader, with seed capital provided by his father and supplying raw scrap to his father’s steel mill in Kerala. He was, however, allowed to keep 40% of the trading profits, to build his own business, and his core work-related philosophy – don’t exploit others, always give back to the community – instantly took root even in those early days.

Faizal started out modestly as a scrap-metal trader

For example, Faizal took the time to share his technical know-how with the uneducated scrap collectors, teaching them how to make more money sorting the heaps of metal into steel, lead, copper, and aluminum piles, before selling the scrap on to specialists. “They said, ‘This man is good,’ and started giving me back loyalty and first rights of refusal.”

And so he proceeded – giving back at every step of his journey. Between 1997 and 2007, Faizal reinvested all his profits back into his business, eventually building a world-class casting factory making valves for the oil-and-gas industry, all using a unique vacuum furnace that eliminated the casting impurities found in older technologies. In the process, he also vertically integrated an industry that up until then was dominated by Western firms assembling parts made cheaply in other parts of the world.

Tulah wellness center

Faizal won customers because his valves were of the highest technical quality, but it was his proximity to oil-and-gas customers in the Gulf and his low labor costs that allowed him to also undercut $500,000 valves being assembled in Europe with a $300,000 product sourced locally – and still maintain a huge margin. Not surprisingly, his business exploded. Ten years after Faizal founded Emirates Techno Casting and turned it into a 24,000 metric-ton plant, he sold the debt-free company on in a two-stage process, first to the Dubai government and then to Tyco, netting him his first $400 milli

The thing that really changed his life, however, was not ETC’s sale, he claims, but the Shabana & Faizal Community Center he built for his employees several years before he sold the company. His metal-works employees were mostly uneducated and from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Faizal and his wife Shabana, now working in ETC’s human resources, started to regularly have breakfast with their employees and began to learn how bleak their lives had been back home. They discovered the employees knew little about their backgrounds or how basic things in the world worked; many couldn’t even fill out the customs and immigration forms needed to return home.

His creed: don’t exploit others, always give back to the community

So Shabana and Faizal spent $5 million of their profits building a highly attractive community center with health facilities, yoga classes, entertainment and sports centers, a massive library, all while offering up a cascade of educational opportunities. Faizal made it compulsory for each of his employees, while on his pay, to get 45 minutes of education every day, basic lessons about life and its values, often passed on through inspiring tales or movies. More than anything he wanted his employees to dream of a better life for themselves and their children. He couldn’t stand the idea their children might grow up the same way.

“I think that is what changed the whole company,” he says. “We were seeing our employees in their entirety, not just as cannon fodder.” Word spread – treating uneducated staff in this way was largely unheard of in the Gulf states – and the buzz led to the Ruler of Sharjah, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammad AlQasimi, scheduling a 15-minute tour of the factory. The Sheikh wound up staying for four-and-a-half hours, and ETC’s innovative reputation ultimately led to Dubai Holding buying a share of the company.

“All this happened,” Faizal says, “because we really took care of our employees and gave knowledge back to the country. The experience really taught me a lot about what success is. It’s really about giving unconditionally back to the world. All religions say, ‘when you give, you get.’ I strongly believe that. Even our subsequent successes were all because of that.” 

And there were subsequent successes. As ETC was sold in stages between 2008 and 2011, Faizal and Shabana set up KEF Holdings, to manage their investments, and a parallel family foundation to oversee their “give back” to the world. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t womanize,” he says. “But I do love working with people. I said to myself, ‘What am I going to do with this money?’” 

Their mission was to refurbish dilapidated public schools

Part of the answer was returning to Mother India and investing in its massive educational needs. Public schools across the country were in a state of frightening disrepair. Classes were often held in cracked and leaking buildings; playgrounds were dustbowls; canteen cooks were ladling out lentil gruel as they had for a century; and the fly-filled toilets were revolting. “More than the teachers, more than the syllabus, it was the whole crumbling educational infrastructure that was the problem.”

So Faizal’s and Shabana’s mission to refurbish dilapidated public schools – in the 2.5 months when the children were out on summer break – led to them retrofitting, with prefab technology, a showcase 120-year-old school; which led to a mass remodeling program for 966 public schools; which led to KEF Holdings next immensely successful business.

KEF Infra, created in 2014 on a 42-acre campus, rapidly became the world’s largest integrated offsite manufacturer of prefab construction. The massive plant, highly automated and robotics driven, went on to build corporate headquarters, a chain of canteens, and a string of cancer centers. In 2018, just four years after it was created, Faizal sold KEF Infra for an undisclosed sum to Katerra, a U.S.-based offsite construction firm owned by Japan’s SoftBank, creating a new company that had $3.7 billion in billings at the time of the merger.

Tulah wellness center

Now, Faizal has the health-and-wellness industry in his sites. Tulah is, with good reason, the cause closest to his heart. Every year, the entrepreneur and his wife retreat into a Vedanta Ashram to meditate. Faizal, even when working, rises at 4.30 AM every morning to perform 1.5 hours of yoga and meditation as the sun comes up.

When COVID hit and the world was forced into retreat, Faizal and his family were saved mentally by the health-and-wellness spa they had built into their home in the UAE. “Our mind has to be pure for us to be healthy and happy in life. Most of people's problems today is the unhappiness of a cluttered mind. So, you need to remove the clutter.”

That is when the vision of Tulah took hold in his imagination. With Mohammad, his personal masseuse of the last 14 years, Faizal and his other staff spent their COVID time reimagining holistic mind-body treatments, such as the hybrid Ayurveda-Hamman massage, scrub, and wash down they created and which he receives at the end of the day, on a heated table of his own creation.

Tulah is my most passionate project. It’s going to change the way things are delivered in healthcare today. We’ve really got to start looking inside, at what we are doing. The world is in such crisis. The point of Tulah is to reimagine the world – differently.

The views expressed are those of the interviewee, not UBS.

The information in this discussion has been prepared by, and reflects the opinions and various investment views of, the speaker. UBS has not independently verified such information and does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. This information is being provided to you for your information purposes only and does not constitute a recommendation or an endorsement by UBS of the author, the securities or views stated herein. Any specific securities discussed should not be considered a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any particular security. You should not assume that any investment in any of the securities was or will be profitable. Any information presented is general in nature and not intended to provide individually tailored investment advice.

No affiliation, association, sponsorship or endorsement is suggested or implied by UBS to any person, entity, company or organization appearing, featured or mentioned in the interview, although UBS may have or have had a relationship with, or may provide or have provided products and/or services to, certain persons, entities, companies and/or organizations mentioned herein.

© UBS 2023. All rights reserved. UBS AG.