FROM A HOME DISASTER TO A FIX FOR EVERYONE

What began as personal frustration is now transforming how the region remodels

- BY NIVETHA DAYANAND

Every entrepreneur has a driving force, but for Marc Michel, Co-Founder and CEO of Reno Home, that inspiration was rooted in a personal, profoundly chaotic home renovation. That nightmarish experience, shared with his co-founder, became the foundational blueprint for a tech platform now revolutionising the region's massive property refurbishment sector.

Before he was advising on corporate strategy at McKinsey and later scaling financial services at AstraTech, Michel was simply a homeowner struggling with a contractor's lack of transparency.

"It all started from a personal pain," Michel recalled. "A few years ago, both my co-founder and I were renovating our own homes, he was in Dubai, and I was in Egypt, and it was a total nightmare. We both went way over schedule, way over budget, and just ran out of money halfway through."

Frustration to action

The anecdote he shared encapsulates the industry's broken model: his co-founder promised his wife the renovation would be done before their son was born, but "their son celebrated his first birthday by the time the renovation was finally finished."

This shared frustration led to the realisation that the entire renovation process was fundamentally flawed. There was no clear structure, no accountability, and critically, no way to track spending or progress.

A fix for the flaw