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.

She reminded the group that you should always work for yourself. She explained the times in her life when she follow her instinct, whether it be to obtain a Master’s degree abroad or change careers, and explained that to truly be successful you must set your own rules.

In 1988, Randa started her career in advertising at Americana Advertising Agency, moving to market research with Procter & Gamble, where she was promoted to Market Research Planning Manager. Abdou did not feel fulfilled, however, by her work in market research. She worked diligently, however, keeping her dissatisfaction to herself, explaining that it is important to never let people know you when you are unhappy at your job. When she decided to leave P&G to work for a local snack company that was just being acquired by PepsiCo Foods, many people doubted the move. It appeared risky at the time to leave an established multinational for a local company that was just starting out. Abdou laughed as she explained that today, many of the people working in upper management at PepsiCo Foods (FritoLay) are the same people who told her she was making a mistake all those years ago.

Abdou left Pepsico Foods (FritoLay) as Marketing Manager to start her own venture. Thinking like a true entrepreneur, she identified a gap in the market and, in 1996, founded Marketing Mix, Egypt’s first marketing consultancy firm by practitioners with FMCG background. In 2001, she co-founded Creative Lab Advertising, and in 2009, co-founded ICE Branding. Abdou’s personal success stories as a marketing entrepreneur served as inspiration for all in attendance.

MEEP sessions are limited to 30 members and priority is reserved for marketers in the beginning stages of their careers. The small but dynamic group that attended Abdou’s session gained valuable advice and life lessons.

“If people have some stereotype about what I can do or can’t do because I’m a woman, I can talk to them for five minutes and eliminate that stereotype,” said Randa Abdou, managing director of Marketing Mix in Egypt.

Speaking at the opening session of the summit, Abdou said it was a matter of having confidence in her abilities. She admitted that she was somewhat apprehensive when she left a secure job with a multinational company in 1996 to start her own business, but she knew that it was the right thing to do. She had been successful as a marketing manager in other companies, and she was confident that she could do it on her own.

“I believe it’s not the system, it’s the people who make things happen,” she told the participants, explaining that she did not credit her former employer for her success. “If you have the skills and the character for it, you can easily do it.”

Abdou’s company, Marketing Mix, was responsible for developing the highly successful marketing campaign for Chipsy, Egypt’s local potato chips, which nearly forced the multinational Lay’s potato chips out of the Egyptian market. Indeed, the campaign was so successful that Pepsico, Lay’s parent company, had to buy out the competitor well above its market value in order to continue doing business in Egypt.

Lina Hindeleh, founder of Jordan’s Philadelphia Chocolates, expressed a similar sense of self-confidence. She decided to open a chocolate-manufacturing company simply out of her love for chocolate, even though she had no previous knowledge of the industry. Despite her lack of background, however, she managed to turn her company into the country’s largest manufacturer of quality chocolates.

“I believed in the project. I saw only success as my ultimate goal,” she told the summit participants. “I had a plan. I had a product. I wanted to succeed, and I succeeded.”

Imen Bakhouche, general manager of Tunisia’s Net Concept, believes that being a woman in business can actually be an advantage.

“I can be enriching,” she said. “I bring different ideas, a different approach. Perhaps it’s the mothering instinct. I can be more empathetic.”

All three of the women view their management styles in terms of team-building rather than directing.

“I don’t supervise,” said Abdou. “I advise. I work as an internal consultant for the company.” She said she cultivates a relaxed atmosphere in the office, telling her employees to sing songs or play football at work as an antidote to the high levels of stress related to marketing. She said the neighboring companies with more traditional work environments find her office “a bit of a zoo.”

Bakhouche expressed a similar attitude toward management. “I’m not a micromanager,” she said. “I’m more of a team worker, a supporter, a motivator than a director.”

The women agreed that the key to management is assembling a good team of employees, and they all said their primary concern in hiring people is character. Even before considering a prospective employee’s skills, they look for people who are pleasant, courteous, honest and direct.

Abdou said that she made a mistake early in her business by not investing more in people. She now realizes that it is worth hiring experienced, senior talent. In particular, she has found it useful to recruit employees from multinational companies. She said these people, who have already had successful careers in large companies, are more likely to be dedicated to making a local company succeed.

Bakhouche agreed. “These are people looking for a dream to believe in, a project to take part of,” she said.

Hindeleh spoke of the importance of being proactive in business.

“You should be the leader of the market, not the follower,” she said. “If you are the leader, you have a vision, a plan, targets.” Without a proactive and adaptive spirit, she said, a company is in crisis.

She said her proactive strategy has been the key to her success when she has faced changes in the competitive field. She said that business is a matter of survival of the fittest and that a businessperson must always be prepared to change, adapt, find new niche markets, expand product lines and seek export opportunities.

Hindeleh said this was this was the case when the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement went into effect and she faced stiffer international competition.

“The free-trade agreement can be seen as an opportunity or a threat,” she said. “If you look at it positively and recognize the need to compete, to improve your product, then it can be an opportunity. If you just stand still and say you will be crushed by the international competition, you’re in trouble.”

The participants at the three-day summit come from 15 countries across the Middle East and North Africa, and not all of them have enjoyed the same ease of entry into the business world as the opening speakers.

Hindeleh told the group that she is not afraid to meet male colleagues anywhere at any time to discuss business, but a participant from Bahrain said that the cultural taboos in her country would not allow her to enter certain male domains. Nevertheless, the Bahraini woman said that she has joined traditionally male professional organizations and goes to all of the receptions and conferences she is allowed to attend in order to advance her business.

“Sometimes I get harsh comments,” she said, “but I don’t care because I believe in what I’m doing.”

The Middle East North Africa Business Women’s Summit is sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, the California-based Beyster Institute and Women Entrepreneurs, Inc. Over three days, the participants will receive training in leadership, management, marketing and finance, and they will be encouraged to establish stronger networks with their colleagues across the region.

Randa Ibrahim Abdou, Founder and CEO of Marketing Mix and the co-founder of Creative Lab, grew up in Cairo, the daughter of a university professor and writer, and a stay-at-home mom who was active in Egyptian politics.
They taught her that, “nothing in life comes easy,” and that she would have to work for the things she wanted.
Her entrepreneurial flair became evident at a very early age. “When I was a child, I used to read two books a day. In the morning, I would buy a book for 15 piasters, then by midday, sell the book for 11 piasters, save up my proceeds, and go buy another one,” Randa laughs.
With a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication from the American University in Cairo and a Master of Science in International Marketing from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, she was quickly scooped up by the multinationals after graduation. She gained experience as an Account Executive at Americana Advertising, a Market Research Planning Manager at Proctor & Gamble Egypt, and the Marketing Manager at PepsiCo Foods Egypt.
Her decision to start a business was prompted in 1996 when PepsiCo Foods offered her a move from the marketing department into business development. Wanting to stay in the marketing end of the business, which she loved, she started thinking there might be an opportunity to carve out a niche for a new kind of marketing support company in Egypt, one that would serve the unmet needs of local companies that could not afford to have their own in-house marketing departments despite being in great need of marketing and brand-building support.
As the potential to have her own company became more real in her mind, she decided to take the plunge, quit her job and started Marketing Mix, “Egypt’s first private marketing consultancy business created by a practitioner with multinational marketing experience,” as she describes it.
Her friends thought she was crazy! She was trading a safe job with a steady pay cheque for an uncertain future with no guarantee of ultimate success! Randa admits that the decision was not without risks. “Although I believed in myself and I was confident I could do it,” she confides, “I did keep asking myself, ‘what if I fail – then what?’ But soon she was approached by her first client and from that point on stayed focused on serving the client well and building the business.
“I started from home”, she says. “I had my computer, my phone, my fax – I didn’t need much start-up investment.” For the first six months she worked alone. “It was tough having to do everything all by myself,” she admits, “but I couldn’t afford to hire anyone, and I knew that I was building something for me.”
Early in 1997, when she really needed to bring in someone with marketing expertise to help her, she convinced, Mohamed Khalifa, a man she had met while working at PepsiCo to join her as a partner. And in 1999, the growing company took in a third partner, Ahmed Abdoun.
Businesses: Marketing Mix; Creative Lab
Marketing consultancy firm and advertising agency Years started: 1996, 2001 Location: 28 Tiba, 5th Floor, Mohandessin Employees: 28 Volume of business: Total client marketing
budgets approaching LE 75 million Ph: (20) 012 1042 189 Email: info@creativelab-adv.com Website: www.creativelab-adv.com

Randa could clearly see that there was an opportunity for someone with the right mix of marketing expertise to get noticed in the Egyptian market—the market for independent marketing consultants was wide open. So, instead of taking the business development position offered by PepsiCo—and instead of accepting any of the tempting offers from McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, and others that began to arrive as word of her imminent departure leaked out—Randa decided to leave the company and start a new business, a marketing consultancy named Marketing Mix.

Of course, Randa knew from the start that building her own business from scratch would not be an easy task, but she felt strongly that this was not only something she could do, it was something she should do. As a university professor, writer, publisher, and historian, Randa Abdou’s father provided his daughter with a very strong role model, and she always felt that she would like to do something intellectual like him. But Randa also possessed a business edge, and the pull of its gravity constantly tugged at her. Both her father and her mother—a housewife who was active in Egyptian politics—taught Randa that nothing in life comes easy; you have to work for it. This belief stoked Randa’s young entrepreneurial spirit, and she was soon involved in several business enterprises.

Says Randa, “When I was a child, I used to read two books a day—Egyptian short stories about a gang and the police chasing them for one thing or another. In the morning, I would buy a book for 15 pence, then by midday, sell the book for 11 pence, save up my proceeds, and go buy another one.” And then there was her donkey rental business. One summer she asked her parents for a motorcycle to drive around the resort where they were staying. The next day, Randa’s parents surprised her by buying her a donkey—not exactly what she had in mind when she was thinking about tooling around the resort. Regardless, Randa made the best of the situation, renting out the donkey and making a modest but steady income as a result.

Today, Randa Abdou—with her business partners Mohamed Khalifa (who joined the company in 1997) and Ahmed Abdoun (who joined in 1999)—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. Abdou’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. Today the company has 23 employees and maintains a roster of approximately 15 clients at any given time.

Randa Abdou started her company on a shoestring, and it has been internally financed—no bank loans or outside investors—ever since. While the company might have experienced considerably faster growth with an infusion of outside cash, Abdou’s approach removed much of the pressure to show immediate results while giving her maximum control to steer her business forward. Says Abdou, “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.”

While there is much satisfaction in being her own boss and in calling the shots, Randa Abdou is particularly proud of the very tangible results that her firm has been able to provide its clients. Says Abdou, “It’s not really about being my own boss so much as feeling the achievement of making positive changes in our client’s companies. Our first client has been with us for nine years now. This company started out with a 13 percent market share—it now has a 60 percent market share. Much of this jump is a direct result of the work we’ve done for them over the past decade. You get a much different feeling when you own your own business. When you work for someone else, you get appreciated, you get promoted, you get bonuses—you get all these things and more—but it does not begin to approach the pride you feel when you do it your way and you own it.”

Randa Abdou and her business partners have discovered and successfully mined a very profitable niche for the many Egyptian companies that don’t have their own in-house marketing departments. And, as these companies grow—and establish their own marketing departments—Marketing Mix is able to grow with them. According to Abdou, “Our company helps strengthen their presence in the market and it helps them grow. Most of the companies we started with did not have their own marketing departments. Now some do have big marketing and sales departments, and we are able to work with them directly. It personally gives me a lot of satisfaction to see the transformation that has come about in the time that we have worked with them.”

What is particularly noteworthy about Randa Abdou’s success story is that she was able to build her business despite stiff competition from much larger and long-established multinationals, ad agencies such as BBDO, Promoseven, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, and management consulting firms with departments specializing in marketing. Says Abdou, “Beating the multinationals has a different feeling altogether because it proves again that we can work against all odds. It’s not about multinationals. They have their expertise, they have their resources, they have lots of advantages. But we should not underestimate our capabilities—we have local knowledge and expertise that they don’t have. Being multinational doesn’t mean that they are any better than us—we can be better and more competitive. We showed that we could do it when we won the Chipsy account, and we’ve done it again and again.”

The decision to bring in partners was a crucial one for Abdou—one that set the tone for her business’s future growth. Her partners served two key benefits: they took some of the load of growing the business off of her shoulders while bringing their own unique skills and expertise to the firm and giving Marketing Mix a definite edge over the competition, whether local or from the large multinationals. Says Abdou, “I think bringing in partners was the smartest thing I did in building my business. Bringing these two men into the business as partners guaranteed that they would be with me—that they would not leave and take clients away with them. When you’re just an employee, you feel like you can leave any time. When you’re an owner, you feel that you should do everything you can to make your business a success. When times get tough, you don’t run away—you fight harder.”

But Randa would be the first to admit that starting your own business is not without risks. When she left PepsiCo behind, she traded a safe job with a steady paycheck for an uncertain future with no guarantee of ultimate success. To succeed, Randa first had to conquer her greatest enemy—fear of failure. Says Abdou, “As much as I believed in myself, I always had this fear inside myself that I might fail. I would ask myself, ‘What if I fail—then what?’ But, rather than submitting to these fears, she ignored them by focusing on growing her business and serving her clients. Says Abdou, “I focused on the business rather than on myself.”

As history shows us time and time again, even the most successful company has its dark days. And on one day in 2002, Marketing Mix had one of its darkest when the company lost the Chipsy account—a client that provided the majority of the company’s annual income—after the company was bought by the Frito Lay unit of PepsiCo. While this event was a blow to her company, Randa Abdou learned valuable lessons that have had a positive impact on the business ever since. Says Abdou, “They wanted to work with someone else, I don’t know the reason why. The account meant a lot to us, both psychologically and financially—Chipsy was our biggest client, accounting for maybe 60 percent of our income. We worked on the account for four years and literally turned its main product—the potato chip—into a national icon. It was a dark day for us, but we didn’t sulk. The next day I said to everyone, ‘This is life. We cannot attach ourselves emotionally to any account. Let’s go and get new business and learn a lesson from this.”

Continues Abdou, “The lesson we learned was not to rely on only one or two large accounts—its better to have 10 or 20 smaller accounts. We have also diversified our client base into a variety of different sectors so that the ups and downs of one sector won’t have such an impact on our own business. We have telecommunications, we have banking. We have insurance, Internet, and industrial lubricants. Now, if we lose a client, no problem—we have plenty of others, and the impact is not as significant. There should be no emotions involved when it comes to keeping, maintaining, or leaving an account—it’s a business decision.”

One of the keys to developing her business was building a strong reputation for providing clients with creative, affordable, effective—and honest—marketing solutions. But doing so requires the active involvement of Randa Abdou and her business partners. And sometimes it means firing a client that does not subscribe to the same business philosophies as do the owners of Marketing Mix. Says Abdou, “We strive to maintain a good reputation in the market, and sometimes we fire clients who do not comply with our professional philosophy, or with our ethical values. This does two very important things: it helps us maintain a strong professional reputation as a company that delivers, and it demonstrates that we are a company that’s highly ethical. These values are important not only in Egypt, but I think anywhere.”

Randa Abdou has learned many lessons while building her business from nothing to a force to be reckoned with in the Egyptian business scene. According to Abdou, the most important lessons have more to do with values and people than with financing or information technology or the other nuts and bolts of building a business. Says Abdou, “Build your business on values, no matter what it takes. You may encounter short-term financial losses along the way when you stick to your values, and you may be tempted to compromise them, but in the long term it will pay off. And don’t be afraid to invest in people and to do whatever it takes to get the right partners on board—and not just senior employees, but people at the junior level. When you have the right people and partners, the financial investment you make in them will be more than offset by dramatically increased company growth.”

Continues Abdou, “It’s people, people, people. Both the upsides and the downsides our company has gone through have been people related. We’ve learned our lesson to hire mature, talented employees and to pay them well. When we started out, my partners and I did most of the work ourselves. We relied on juniors to learn our business, but their dreams were not really with us in the long term—they wanted to go to work for the multinationals. So we began hiring seniors from the multinationals. They had already discovered the downside of working for a large company and were excited about the prospect of helping to build a fast-growing, local business. We have a very friendly culture in our company—our employees cooperate and enjoy working together—and it’s a real attraction for new hires and veteran employees alike. One of our employees left for another agency a few months ago and she asked to come back. She could not live with the other company’s culture, which was very competitive and unfriendly.”

The future of Randa Abdou’s companies—Marketing Mix and Creative Lab—looks very bright indeed. Adbou 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 Abdou, “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.”

Abdou 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.”