I read Kathy's last post -- An American entrepreneur in the Middle East -- with great interest. About five years ago, I was hired by the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego to write a book titled Entrepreneurs at the Crossroads: Success Stories from the Middle East and North Africa. After the book was published, it was widely distributed to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be in the Middle East and North Africa. The project was funded by the US State Department, which believes (probably correctly) that it's a good idea for our country to help support entrepreneurship in these volatile areas of the world because the more people who become successful businesspeople, the fewer people who will find terrorism a viable way of life.
During the course of my work on the book, I interviewed (often in the middle of the night, Pacific Time) 11 successful and innovative entrepreneurs from the Middle East and North Africa. These men and women -- which included the founder and owner of a chocolate manufacturer in Jordan, an advertising agency in Egypt, a pharmaceutical and medical supply company in Lebanon, a computer retailer in Bahrain, and others -- shared with me their personal stories and tips for success on the entrepreneurial journey. In addition to building thriving companies of all kinds, these entrepreneurs strengthened their countries’ economies, provided jobs for many, and brought stability to some very unstable places.
Consider the example of Randa Abdou, a young entrepreneur from Egypt (in the photo above, and the YouTube clip below) who left behind a lucrative position with PepsiCo to found her own marketing consultancy in Cairo. Today, Randa – with her business partners Mohamed Khalifa and Ahmed Abdoun – runs Cairo-based Marketing Mix, along with the Creative Lab advertising agency that the trio founded in 2001 after a number of clients (particularly Chipsy, Egypt’s largest manufacturer of fried potato snacks, and up to that time the company’s most important client) lobbied for this additional service. Randa’s company has shown steady growth since its humble beginnings, attracting top-rank clients such as Exxon Mobil, Allianz Egypt, Barclays Bank Egypt, Savola, Halwani Brothers, and many others. When I interviewed Randa, the company had 23 employees and maintained a roster of approximately 15 clients at any given time.
Randa started her company on a shoestring, and it has been internally financed ever since – no bank loans or outside investors. While the company might have experienced considerably faster growth with an infusion of outside cash, Randa’s approach removed much of the pressure to show immediate results while giving her maximum control to steer her business forward. Says Randa, “I started from home. I had my computer, my phone, my fax – I didn’t need much start-up investment. It was risky, but I believed in myself and I was confident I could do it.”
The future of Randa’s companies – Marketing Mix and Creative Lab – looks very bright indeed. Randa and her partners have plans to expand regionally and be the first Egyptian marketing consultancy and first Egyptian advertising agency to go regional. According to Randa, “This is the one thing that keeps me awake all the time – how to grow regionally, how to become the first Egyptian marketing consultancy to become established in Dubai or Kuwait or other key markets while maintaining the high level of quality that we have here in Cairo.”
Randa has great hopes for the future of entrepreneurship in Egypt, and she intends to play a role in turning this hope into a reality. “I would like to have entrepreneurship become a vital part of Egyptian culture – I would like the normal thing to be for people to be entrepreneurs and to own and run their own businesses. On the other hand, a lot of people make the mistake of going directly into their own business without preparing for it – that’s why a lot of businesses fail. Part of building a culture of entrepreneurship is helping people learn the basic skills they need to start their own businesses. The idea of entrepreneurship is becoming more accepted in our country, and investment laws are becoming much, much better. We are rapidly reaching a point of convergence where the country, the culture, and the people are coming together to make entrepreneurship a vital element of the Egyptian economy. I will be contributing one way or another to this convergence.”
And as Egypt and other Middle Eastern and North African countries emerge from the Arab Spring, and move down the path to freedom, I have no doubt that Randa Abdou -- and many thousands of other successful entrepreneurs throughout the region -- will be leading the way.
