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Sitting in a hotel that has been fitted out by her and her father's company isn't that strange to Noor Sweid, she's used to it. In fact most of the hotels she and thousands of other Dubai residents visit every day have been decked out by daddy's Depa. The ultimate irony, however, is that she has just spent one and half hours in her BMW trying to find her way to the Grand Hyatt. "I'm so sorry I'm late," the 27 year-old managing director of strategy at the Depa United Group says apologetically. "The barriers the Road Transport Authority has put down led me down the wrong road and I ended up lost in Sharjah, and in 13 years of living in the Emirates I've never been there before."

Sweid makes up for her lack of road sense by her short but incredibly successful business career. Aged only 27 she has managed to cram in a huge amount in a miniscule timescale. In short, she has a Bachelor of Science degree in finance and economics from Boston College; an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management; has worked in the Dubai International Financial Centre's strategy group; spent time as a strategy consultant at Accenture in Boston as well as Charles Schwab Institutional Management working with the industry's top investment managers, followed swiftly by a return to Dubai to manage Depa's strategy. Oh and did I mention that she is chairwoman of the Middle East chapter of 85 Broads, a female business network, and that she's just set up her own chain of yoga centres with two other female partners? Take a deep breath - all that in three and a half years.

Her greatest achievement, however, has been with the company her father started 11 years ago restructuring the world's fifth largest interior contractor that lists Dubai's iconic Burj Al Arab as well as the Burj Dubai - now the tallest building on earth - from 2500 employees and growing it to a US$130m business with 6500 staff. But growth with the hundreds of projects planned across the MENA region and in an industry like interior contracting doesn't stop. Depa has been working hard over the past two years in order to prepare for its next phase of expansion, says Sweid.

"We will float on the Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX) and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) at some time in the first four months of next year and on top of that make US$500m of acquisitions in the next two to three years."

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) has been in the planning for two years for a reason she adds. "We were waiting for the company to be really ready. We're very aware of how crucial getting everything right before going ahead with an IPO is. Corporate governance, policies and regulations are key and we've being implementing those for the last couple of years. "Transparency within and to the external world is something good for any business and we've been operating on that basis for the last two years."

Sweid is only too aware, however that the internal message can all too often slip out into the external world. This happened when a senior colleague leaked the news that Depa was undergoing preparations for an IPO in early 2008. "We've been discussing it internally for some time now, it's a small community, internal becomes external sometimes. We never said we're going to IPO now it was one of our bankers who said we were ready to IPO."

Nevertheless the prep work has been worth it Sweid adds. "We didn't want to be one of those companies that just said ‘what's the list of things we need to tick off?' Corporate governance check, this check and so on.

"The requirements for a public listed company is that they have to be beneficial for a business so we said let's try and implement these correctly and make sure they are adhered to internally and benefit from that until we can say ‘yes they work really well within the company, now let's go public'.

The unique aspect of this IPO, however, is that the twentysomething Sweid will become the first female managing director to have run a listing in the Emirates. I ask her whether this is true, she thinks about it but isn't sure at first, she then beams: "In Arabtec there aren't any but Shuaa Capital. I think there might be, but she didn't run the IPO for them. Yes I probably will be the first."

It takes a blend of hard work, studious planning and strategy and the willingness of everyone involved in a company to prepare for such a big step, explains Sweid.

"The obvious element of preparing for an IPO is corporate governance in terms of decision making and making sure the company isn't a one-man show. The company lies on the shoulders of many, many people."

To ensure this happens Sweid says that she "had to get the board structure right". With her commitment and insistence the eight-man Depa board has now had two independent members on its for almost two years. This includes Helal Al Marri, CEO of the World Trade Centre and Faisal Al Matrouk, executive chairman of Contech Engineering. "There is a code of ethics and conduct for everyone within the company", she explains.

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