Ash Ghahramani: How to Build a Business That Outlasts You

Nine months to learn a new language. Eighteen months of knocking on doors before anyone called back. Twenty years building a business with the same business partner, without ever needing to be seen doing it. Ash Ghahramani didn’t learn discipline from a book.

Ash Ghahramani is the co-founder and managing director of Naturally Gluten Free, one of Australia’s first purpose-built, HACCP-approved gluten-free manufacturing facilities. He arrived in Australia at eleven, having spent his early years in Iran, with almost no English. He is also my husband: 21 years married, 7 before that, which means recording this one meant asking questions I’ve never had to ask out loud in 28 years of knowing the answers. Finding the right partner in life is the most important decision you’ll ever make. I made mine at seventeen, and I’d make it again.

The Highlights

A new language in nine months.

Ash arrived in Australia having lived through war as a child, knowing little more than hello and thank you. Nine months in an intensive language centre later, he walked into mainstream high school able to read, write and hold his own. The curriculum he’d already survived in Iran had quietly prepared him to finish a year ahead.

The job that rerouted everything.

University was never a question in a family of academics, until a job at McDonald’s at fifteen answered one Ash hadn’t known he was asking. He didn’t fall for the job. He fell for the people, and for the particular satisfaction of running something well. Every business he’s built since is an extension of that first instinct.

One sentence. One decision. Twenty years.

Retailers laughed when Ash said his bread needed refrigeration. Looking for the science to back the decision, he found one sentence: the most common bakery preservative is also used to disinfect hospital equipment. He closed the browser. No preservatives, ever. He’s never reopened that question since.

Walking away from Coles.

Every small food brand wants the call from a major supermarket. Ash and his business partner got it, then walked away, refusing to absorb the rebates and shrinking margins the deal demanded. The retreat became the turn. Food service relationships with chefs that, in some cases, have now outlasted entire restaurant careers.

What success actually means.

Not the house. Not the car. Walking down the road for a coffee on his own time. A holiday that doesn’t have to be big to count. Being present for the people he loves, rather than just providing for them.

The legacy that isn’t the business.

Ask Ash what he’s most proud of after two decades of building a company from nothing, and the answer isn’t the factory, the contracts, or the twenty-year partnership. It’s two kids he calls his legacy.

~~~ In His Own Words

“We will never use preservatives. We’ll just have to work on the mindset that it’s okay to keep real bread in the fridge, because that’s how it was made a hundred years ago.”

“Finding the right partner in life and raising two beautiful kids that are going to be our legacy, that’s probably the biggest thing I’m proud of.”

~~~

I have had the front-row seat to all of this for over twenty years. The early mornings. The long days. The pressure he carried without needing to say it out loud. The business was never a means to an end for him. It’s the thing he and his team built with their own hands, to a standard he’d feed his own kids. That care is exactly why it lasts, and exactly why it was never separate from the rest of what we built together.

He’ll tell you the proudest thing he’s built is us.

I believe him.

Connect with Ash: LinkedIn

Connect with Naturally Glutenfree: LinkedIn | Website

This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree

Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website