Head of Quality
Within a few years of graduation, Seema Shetty (BSBA’03) had won a Time Out award for her first upscale restaurant, in Abu Dhabi. She’d also founded a healthy food company, opened a second restaurant, and served as a director for her family’s healthcare business. The pace hasn’t really let up. Today, she’s still involved in her food businesses, is starting a nonprofit education venture, and is vice president for corporate excellence at NMC Healthcare, the private healthcare provider founded by her father. Shetty tells us about starting new companies—while also improving established ones—and doing business in her native United Arab Emirates.
When Seema Shetty launched Abu Dhabi–based healthy food company BiteRite in 2005, she balked at the idea of paying for expensive managers. Instead, the capable young entrepreneur took on most of the high-level responsibilities herself.
Shetty didn’t even hand off her duties when her first child was due, because she assumed she could manage a baby and the company without a maternity leave. When reality set in, she stepped away from BiteRite to spend time with her infant daughter, leaving her young staff without a leader for many months.
“When I came back, it was a big mess,” she says. “Our quality had dropped. Our sales were driven from other sources that weren’t linked to the purpose. We lost a lot of good clients.”
Shetty was running several traditional restaurants at the time, but they didn’t suffer the way BiteRite did. “All of those are self-sustainable,” she says. “Where your time is required is in a niche market, in innovation. So, I think BiteRite lost ground at a very fundamental time.”
The experience changed Shetty’s approach to hiring. “If you look at the businesses I became involved in after that,” she says, “I made sure all of them were put under the right kind of people, and those people are paid for the amount of knowledge they have.” Skimping on staff to save money, she says, is a risk she’s no longer willing to take.
It’s one of the many lessons Shetty has learned over her diverse career, which has included opening a fine-dining restaurant, launching BiteRite, and holding a number of managerial roles within NMC Healthcare, the largest private healthcare provider in the United Arab Emirates.
Shetty is vice president for corporate excellence at NMC and is responsible for driving constant improvement within the company. She aims to ensure that NMC—which has expanded significantly from the single New Medical Centre her father founded in 1974—remains a pioneer in the UAE’s healthcare sector while providing consistent, top-quality care at its network of pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals.
Excellence has always been a focus at NMC, Shetty says, but it was never the purview of a particular department. “It was driven bottom-up.” The company recently decided to take a top-down approach so improvements could be shared among all its facilities, and Shetty was asked to head the new department. Since then, she’s been working to find gaps, share knowledge, and measure results. The model is still a work in progress, she says, but it’s already making an impact.
“Excellence now has become a culture,” she says. “People look at audit as a system of judging where we stand, but we now look at audit as a way of seeing how to improve, to get better.”
Shetty, who studied entrepreneurship at Questrom, says that improvement and innovation have been at the heart of all of her endeavors. She launched her first business a year after graduating from BU. She was working in business development at Xpress Money, another of her family’s companies, when her father approached her with an opportunity. The owners of an Abu Dhabi hotel wanted a high-end Indian restaurant in their building. Shetty’s family already owned a chain of more casual restaurants, and her father knew of her keen interest in the food and beverage industry. “He said, ‘I know you really like these things, so if you can negotiate a rental agreement that makes business sense, then I will support you in this project,’” says Shetty, who serves on the advisory board of BU’s Alumnae Leadership Council—Middle East.
She threw herself into the work, opening Zari Zardozi inside Le Royal Méridien hotel in 2004 and earning Time Out magazine’s award for best Indian restaurant in Abu Dhabi in 2007. By then, Shetty had grown her hospitality business to include Al Ain’s FoodWorld, a multicuisine restaurant, and BiteRite, which offers catering and personal meal delivery and operates several healthy-themed cafes.
BiteRite was born, says Shetty, of her overindulgence in the rich foods at Zari Zardozi. Within a year of opening the restaurant, she had gained weight and was diagnosed as prediabetic. At the advice of her mother, the group medical director for NMC, Shetty visited an endocrinologist and a nutritionist, but she was unimpressed with their advice. When her mother asked to see the nutritionist’s diet plan, Shetty had to admit she’d thrown it in the trash. “My mother told me, ‘If you’re doing this, chances are other patients are doing it, so figure out the solution.’”
“I’m a total foodie at heart,” says Shetty. “I love everything that’s not good for the body. So, I had to come up with a solution that would convert me.” She asked chefs and doctors to work together to create healthy, appetizing meal plans for her. The new diet worked so well that Shetty founded BiteRite. The company’s meal plans—which can be tailored for a variety of lifestyles, whether managing weight or building muscle—include breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and snack options. Once customers sign up, they get meals, from pumpkin and kale salad to chocolate tart, delivered daily. BiteRite also has a line of chocolate bars and jams.
Shetty’s BiteRite work often brought her into NMC’s hospitals, and she soon found herself taking on roles there in patient education and then in employee training. She helped set up a central training department for NMC that offers realistic simulations of medical procedures. “What happens in UAE,” says Shetty, “is we source talent from all over the world.” NMC created a simulation center, she says, to standardize the care provided by such a diverse medical staff.
When Shetty returns this spring from her third maternity leave, she plans to place her food and beverage companies in others’ hands so she can focus on NMC’s corporate excellence initiatives and on a new philanthropic venture aimed at educating girls in her parents’ native India.
Unlike her return from that first maternity leave, she’s expecting a smoother reentry. Shetty now surrounds herself with a diversified team with a variety of strengths, but she aims to hire only those who are dedicated to the purpose of her project. She believes employees are happier—and are more likely to make good decisions—when they understand and are committed to a company’s purpose. Entrepreneurs in particular, she says, should speak of their vision often. “People need to feel connected to what they are doing,” she says, “and this starts with the founder.”
Shetty also believes it’s important to seek out mentors who can offer solid advice and frank assessments of her performance. Throughout her career, Shetty’s most trusted advisors have been her parents. Her father, B.R. Shetty, immigrated to Abu Dhabi from India in 1973 with a pharmacy degree and little else. He has since grown a business empire that spans healthcare, pharmaceuticals, hospitality, consumer-goods distribution, and finance. “He is an action person,” Shetty says. “He sees a need, and he’ll fill the need. That need may result in profit, or it may be a philanthropy need. He’ll execute it, and he’ll get it done so that it lasts forever.” While her father prefers to work independently, says Shetty, her mother, C.R. Shetty, is a collaborator. “She is consultative. She wants to make sure everybody’s on board,” Shetty says.
Shetty knows she shares her father’s upbeat attitude, his willingness to take risks, and his genuine concern for others’ needs. She’s working to cultivate his boundless energy, along with her mother’s ability to make wise, far-sighted decisions. Shetty also recently pledged to stop using the word “but” because she felt she was using it too often to make excuses. This call to personal responsibility “is just for my own self-improvement and self-development,” she says. “I think this is one of the things that has helped me grow.”
