Amany Youssef: From refugee to rare female contractor

For years after starting her company in Northeast Florida, contractor Amany Youssef pretended that she wasn’t the owner.

“I was so afraid that people would find out a girl owned it,” she says.

It wasn’t until she did an on-camera segment with a local TV station where she identified herself as the owner of AY Luxury Design in Jacksonville that she realized people identified with her being a woman in a male-dominated field.

From then on, she decided it was time to be true to herself. 

“I thought about it to myself, like, ‘why am I so stupid?’” Youssef says. “I never hid the fact that I was a girl when I played soccer. I never hid the fact that I was Muslim. I never hid anything. Why am I now, all of a sudden, being such a coward?”

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Being one of just a small number of women in her field, a member of a religious minority in Florida, or even just a younger-than-average business owner, Youssef has plenty of experience defying expectations.

Never tell her the odds

• At 28 years old, Youssef is among just 6% of business owners in America who are under the age of 34, according to U.S. Census data. Upon earning her contracting license, Youssef was the youngest general contractor in Florida. These days she is still the youngest in Northeast Florida.

• Youssef is among less than 1% of Americans who identify as Muslims, according to data from the U.S. Religions Census conducted every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.

Youssef and her parents came to Jacksonville as refugees in 2000. She grew up in Lebanon during a time when conflict with Israel was heating up.

“We were gonna stay,” Youssef says, “and then the house next door got shelled, and our house split down the middle.”

That was when her dad decided they had to leave their home, family and life in their home country behind. 

“His sister had just moved to Jacksonville a year before or something, so she’s like, ‘You have to come here. This is the only safe place,’” Youssef recalls.

But things weren’t easy when they got to Florida.

“I didn’t have a bed when we first got here. We slept on the floor for months,” Youssef says. “We didn’t have food, we didn’t have clean water, we didn’t have anything. We were literally staying in government housing with my cousins because they had just got here.”

Even once their living arrangement improved, adjusting to life in America wasn’t always easy, she says. 

As a Muslim kid in the early 2000s, she was often bullied for her appearance and identity — wearing a hijab head covering often meant sideways glances and being called a “terrorist,” Youssef says.

Even after all these years, she admits that she’s still adjusting to some aspects of American life. When Jacksonville Today sat with Youssef, she showed off a handful of post-it notes with sayings like, “like lipstick on a pig,” so she can remind herself of their meaning. 

Youssef doesn’t wear her hijab anymore — a change that has been a big adjustment, she says. She takes pride in her identity and takes pride in knowing that she wore her hijab through college, at parties with friends and as the owner of the hot dog company she started at the University of Florida.

“I was unapologetically myself,” Youssef says. “I did my thing. I did all the things. Once I graduated college, it got harder and harder and harder to do what I was doing in the professional world.”

“And I thought to myself,” she continues, “what do I still have to prove?”

Pivot to contracting

Youssef’s original career plans were a far cry from where she ended up.

Her grandfather died when she was a kid, and that’s when Youssef decided to pursue medicine. 

She stayed on that track, graduating from Wolfson High School, earning a degree from the University of Florida, taking her MCAT exam and applying to medical schools. It was only after all of that work that it became clear to her just how much debt she would have to take on to become a doctor. 

So, she took a management job at a friend’s contracting company to raise some money. But instead of taking the cash and putting it toward medical school, Youssef found an entirely new passion.

“There I was playing in sticks and mud, and then I was like, ‘You know what? This is just like being a doctor,’” she says.

Youssef found similarities between the chaos of working in an emergency department and the calm it requires to navigate the world of construction and contracting.

The true test of working in contracting, much like health care, she says, is not that you can prevent every metaphorical fire from starting, but that you can put out the fires that do arise without losing your cool.

Working in the field

At 23, Youssef started her own company, AY Luxury Designs. These days, she has more than 20 employees.

While she may own her company, Youssef still goes out in the field, talking to property owners and working on jobs. When she sat down with Jacksonville Today, she joked that she was still covered in dust from having been on the roof of a house earlier that day.

But as a 5-foot-2 woman, she says she isn’t exactly what people expect when they call a contractor. 

And that’s not exactly surprising, Elyse Adams tells Jacksonville Today. 

Adams is the chair of the Northeast Florida Builders Association’s Professional Women in Building Council. She says women make up less than 15% of the workforce in the construction industry and less than 5% of skilled tradespeople. 

“We’re very underrepresented in the industry, considering women are the market drivers for homebuying,” Adams says.

She hopes more young women will see Youssef and realize that the building industry is an option for them, too.

“The more women who do it,” Adams says, “the more women will see they can do it.”

But it’s those statistics that Youssef says made her hesitant to let people know she was the owner of her company. She was afraid people would look down on her or not take her seriously.

But Youssef is proud of who she is, and she knows she doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone. 

After all, she says, “I am Bob the freaking Builder.”