“Happy is the one who gets up every morning to do a job that he is passionate about and that suits him”
A man who shares
“Happy is the one who gets up every morning to do a job that he is passionate about and that suits him”. That is how Nabil Kouhen, 53, describes his role as Managing Director of the Ecole Hôtelière de Casablanca, a member of the CCSM since its creation in 2010. The holder of a degree in hotel management obtained in Toulouse, he climbed the ladder one rung at a time. “To lead a hotel organisation, you need to have gone through every department”, says the man who “spent two weeks washing dishes during his various training placements and can now talk about it to his students without any embarrassment”.
The birth of the EHC
Arriving in Morocco in 1990 after several years’ experience within the largest hotel groups, he first worked as Rooms Division Director for the Salam chain in Casablanca, then a few years later was appointed General Manager within the Le Méridien group in Fez (1999) and then in Rabat at the Hôtel La Tour Hassan. In 2004, during a break in which he discovered teaching, he decided to go into business and founded NK Management, a training and consulting firm that supports private companies in hotel engineering and service distribution. And it was in 2010, driven by this passion for passing on know-how, that he launched the Ecole Hôtelière de Casablanca under licence from the Ecole Hôtelière de Genève, designed to train middle managers in three or five years. Passionate as he is, he himself gives his students their first class on Monday morning, “in order to perpetuate the spirit of rigour and pass on the spark that drives me”, he explains.
Passing on knowledge as a creed
Married and the father of three children, Nabil Kouhen is keen to “nurture other people’s dreams”, true to the spirit of Rotary, where he has been active for 25 years, organising monthly initiatives that promote economic and social development and bring peoples closer together. A man who divides his time between sport and get-togethers with friends, he is also a great lover of the guitar and singing, which he practises regularly. ”I am lucky enough to be able to do duets with my son Karim, aged 19, a medical student in Morocco”, he confides.
Success on every front
Inspired early on by Christian Ricard, a teacher at the Institut de Tourisme de Toulouse who instilled in him a love of hospitality, he has big plans for the future of his school, with the aim of training future leaders of the sector. “100% of our graduates are recruited and they earn above-average salaries as soon as they leave the school. Some alumni are now hotel general managers. That makes us very proud”, says the man whose establishment was awarded the Ministry of Tourism’s label of Excellence in 2016.
A passion that travels
And his desire to share the spirit of hospitality does not stop at Morocco’s borders. Together with partners, he has also launched the EHB school in Abidjan, which brings this Swiss know-how to meet the needs of the Ivorian market. Looking ahead, he says he is also preparing “a project for a tourism school attached to a hotel, in Marrakech”. Close to the Swiss embassy, Nabil Kouhen believes that the Swiss Confederation would benefit from “gradually positioning itself in third place in economic relations with Morocco, behind France and Spain, its historic partners”.
Driven by his father’s memory
Morocco is also today the economic bridge par excellence for Switzerland to forge links across the whole African continent. A member of the CCSM’s Board of Directors for a few weeks now, he hopes to help achieve this goal. In the meantime, this tenacious and highly optimistic man takes on the daily challenges, driven by the memory of his father, to whom he wishes to pay tribute. “A true mentor, charismatic, whose advice resonates within me at the most crucial moments”, he concludes.