This is the story of Tadiwos Belete, an Ethiopian entrepreneur that had taken his little and turned it into very much. He was a teenager when he’d fled Ethiopia in 1980, six years after the coup that ushered in the Derg communist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam.  In 1983, he was granted refugee asylum to the United States. He tried his hands at a restaurant and at promoting Ethiopian artists until 1989 when he enrolled in a school for hairdressers, working nights as a parking lot attendant. He then worked his way up from assistant stylist to salon manager before pooling resources with seven other entrepreneurs to open the salon on Newbury Street.

Belete has transplanted his success from Newbury Street to Bole Road in Ethiopia. He bought a piece of land along Bole and began construction on what is now the eight-story Boston Partners building in Addis Ababa. When the first few floors were completed, he opened Boston Day Spa for business while construction continued on the remaining floors. The average price of a haircut in Addis at the time was 10 Birr. The most expensive haircut in the city was at the Hilton for 22 Birr. Boston Day Spa started off charging 100 Birr, the equivalent of $10. A luxury spa in the heart of one of the poorest nations on earth sounded highly impractical. A new salon charging almost five times more than the competition seemed nutty. However, Belete’s strategy is telling of what it takes to create and maintain demand regardless of the situation.

“Everybody doubted my move – my wife, my friends,” he said. “The first two months I gave free haircuts. The minute you sit in a sink to get shampooed you have someone massaging your hand. The minute you’re in the dryer, you have someone massaging your feet. From that day on, this place has never slowed down.”

Belete’s business has grown significantly since he opened in 2003. Besides Boston Day Spa, he runs a guesthouse located in the Boston Partners building. He rents out the remaining space to a restaurant and corporate offices. It costs $70,000 per year to rent a floor in the building, and because people often pay in bulk sums one or two years in advance, he was able to use the income from the Boston Partners building to complete Kuriftu Resorts, an eco-lodge on Lake Kuriftu in Debre Zeit, half an hour’s drive outside Addis. He reinvested the profits from running Kuriftu into building a second eco-lodge on Lake Tana. Belete’s business employs about 700 people, most of them women who’d been construction workers on the Boston or Kuriftu buildings now trained as masseuses, hair stylists, and manicurists. In 2008, the combined business of the spa, guesthouse and resort logged a total of $1.7 million in revenues.

Belete could not have done any of this without the help of Tera Chung, his Taiwanese business partner. One evening in April 2002, she’d asked the concierge at the Belvedere hotel in Boston to call in a hairdresser. The haircut for Ms. Chung and her husband cost $500. She must have noticed that Belete was wearing an Armani suit, a nice tie and expensive-looking cufflinks and did not seem like someone the salon had sent out on an errand.

She asked if he was an employee or an owner. He told her he owned the salon. Why then did he work so hard if he owned the place, she asked. He explained that he was working to save up enough money to go home to start a business. She then wanted to know what kind of business, the cost and how profitable it would be. She asked him to drop off the feasibility with the concierge the next day.

Chung was interested in the business but had no basis on which to trust this stranger from Ethiopia who could take her money and disappear. All she knew was that he ran a profitable upscale business on Newbury Street, was a family man and that he sent his kids to one of Boston’s best schools. She eventually set up an appointment with the Ethiopian Ambassador in Washington D.C. who vouched that Belete had in fact been traveling frequently to Ethiopia with the intention of starting a business, but that nothing was finalized. She took the plunge and decided to trust him with $700,000. He sold his house and put in another $700,000. With over fifty percent of the $2.5 million it would take to complete the Boston Partners building, he took a loan from a bank in Ethiopia. In November 2002, he paid $130,000 for a villa on Bole Road, demolished it, and began construction.

It was almost easier to come up with millions in capital than it was to find skilled construction workers and managers. Once, he had to knock out a door because the masons had built it too tight. On a different occasion, he had them pull out all the tiles and start laying them again from scratch because they were crooked and the cement work was messy. He could have hired foreigners to do the work. I had seen several Chinese construction workers around the city. But Belete was adamant against hiring any foreign talent. He felt Africa had to be changed by Africans.

He was also quite particular about what Kuriftu would look like. He’d designed the hut-shaped bungalows with the fireplace on the verandah. From the inside of the room, it looked like the ceiling was made of thatch, adding to the sense of being in a real hut. But that was the only bucolic thing about the room. Beverages hung in bottles from leather straps on a rack by the door. There was a flat screen television in the room, the option to see a movie in the resort’s theater and access to a spa. Each morning, fresh rose petals were sprinkled on the beds and bougainvillea lined the entire brick walkway of the resort from the roundabout at the entrance to the stairs leading down to the lake. There was a swimming pool on the slope leading down to the garden.

When time came to hire a management team, Belete went looking for people with experience and the people he met quickly turned him off to the idea.

“The guy didn’t care about the business. His shirt was almost black, his bowtie was upside down and the jacket was 50 years old because nobody was changing it. The menu was dead, no new chef coming to train the staff. The whole industry was dead.”

He decided to hire fresh university graduates from a university in the countryside and double what most of them could expect as a starting salary. Training started at 5 am and lasted until 10 pm for six months at Kuriftu before the resort opened. There were classes in everything from English language and self-confidence to coloring and cutting. His hard work has paid off. Belete says the bulk of his clients come from the diplomatic agencies stationed in Addis and competitors are now trying to lure away his managers.

Granted, Belete is a businessman, not a humanitarian, but he is making a quantifiable and sustainable impact. While one may argue that salons, hotels and spas are not the essentials that a developing country needs, Belete’s impact goes beyond the obvious. For instance, most of his employees, since working for Belete, are economically empowered women. Studying the impact of women empowerment around the world, the United Nations Population Fund writes, “When women are empowered, whole families benefit, and these benefits often have ripple effects to future generations.” Compared to governments that hire outside workers to quickly build roads, Belete is employing and training Ethiopians even if that means extra costs in undoing and repairing poor quality work. Directly or indirectly, he is raising the bar for the construction sector.

He was like someone who’d seen a leak – an opportunity or need – and had decided to plug it. Governments regulate. They don’t create. I started feeling that bemoaning the lack of good governance, policies and frameworks without taking any action was akin to a town giving up entirely on fetching water simply because there were thousands of leaks in the only bucket it would ever own. What would happen if several other Beletes began plugging the small leaks they saw? Would things remain as bad? Clearly, there were some things I could begin fixing that did not depend on the government. Luxury spas have sprung up throughout the city since Belete opened his doors in 2003. Was it so farfetched to think that everything from great restaurants to great schools, great hospitals, and even great leaders would spring up if more of us decided to plug a leak?