Through Her Family Business, This MBA Is Helping To Empower Women Refugees

Working with her mom, Hawa Sultani found a new passion for business. Eager to learn more, she began taking free accounting and finance classes at the California Capital Women Business Center. “They offer free workshops for anyone that wants to start a business,” she explains. “I was getting all of these business terms thrown at me, and I was absorbing them like a sponge.”

Inspired by the cafe’s momentum and her own growing business acumen, Hawa decided to apply to business school in 2019 to take Crest Cafe to the next level. She was accepted by the University of Rochester Simon Business School. She split her time between New York and California, where she would return every few weeks to support the business.

BUILDING A COMPASSIONATE COMMUNITY

Hawa says she her B-school experience was “special” — she was overwhelmed by the support she received from classmates and faculty. Everyone was understanding about her situation. Not only did they follow her business journey closely, they even helped Crest Cafe raise money to help feed healthcare workers in Sacramento during the pandemic.

She was also grateful for the ways in which her school’s resources helped her to grow the restaurant; Simon’s Ain Center for Entrepreneurship connected her with lawyers, financial advisers, and branding folks. “One of my professors even helped me improve the menu,” she says.

“I’ve never felt that homey, family, community atmosphere at other schools,” Hawa says. “To this day, I still have people from admissions or people from their career center message me and ask about how the restaurant is doing.”

‘WE NEED MORE LEADERS THAT HAVE EMPATHY’

Through her experience as Head of Brand for Crest Cafe, Hawa saw the inequities of not only being a woman, but of being an immigrant and person of color. “It was harder to be taken seriously when speaking with banks and landlords,” she explains.

Once at Simon Business School, she was introduced to more data that demonstrated the lack of funding for women and people of color. “I thought, I need to help change this and provide more opportunities and seats at the table for people like myself,” she says. “We need more leaders that have empathy and a high EQ, not just IQ.”

On top of growing Crest Cafe and her regular MBA studies, Hawa became president of the Simon School Venture Fund, a $2M student-run fund that invests in companies founded by women and BIPOC. She says that SSVF and her work at Crest Cafe is what gives her hope for Afghan women. “There’s at least a group of us getting educated and there will be more of us sitting at the right seats and at the right tables. Changes will come,” she explains.

EXPANDING THE FLAGSHIP STORE

After graduating in 2021, Hawa started a full-time job as a business program manager for Microsoft in the global cloud doing design, delivery, and strategy. She’s continuing to split her time between New York and Sacramento to expand Crest Cafe; on February 26, the team will be opening a second location in Sacramento, which will be the flagship store.

She says that Crest Cafe has been — and continues to be — an essential part of her professional growth; not only has it become a passion project, it’s also helped her gain experience growing a business from the ground up. “If you’ve never built something, you can’t give advice about it,” Hawa says. “I want Crest Cafe to continue to be a platform to hire, support, and inspire women.”

Her dream is to eventually be an investor that supports women-owned businesses, with the hopes of building generational wealth for the communities that tend to not have it. “A lot of the Crest women’s stories have provided inspiration for what I want to do next with my career and who I want to support,” she adds.

‘YOU HAVE TO FIND THE LIGHT INSIDE OF YOU’

Had Hawa Sultani gone against her instincts and accepted her medical school offer, her future may have looked very different. “I’m so grateful for my journey and most importantly, for trusting the process and going with my gut feeling,” she says.

“You have to find the light inside of you,” she continues. “A lot of people can’t find it because they don’t know their purpose, what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. I struggled for so long to find mine. I was so unhappy until I joined this small little hole in the wall on K street in Sacramento, California. I’ll never look back.”

DON’T MISS THIS MBA STUDENT-RUN FUND IS A TEMPLATE FOR IMPROVING VC DIVERSITY and MEET ROCHESTER SIMON’S MBA CLASS OF 2022