Entrepreneur Profile: Randa Abdou of Egypt, Founder of Marketing Mix Consultancy
Executive Director Ray Smilor introduces an excerpt from a new Beyster Institute book

The Beyster Institute is proud to announce the publication of “Entrepreneurs at the Crossroads: Success Stories from the Middle East and North Africa.” This inspiring book profiles 11 successful and innovative entrepreneurs from the MENA region, sharing their personal stories and tips for success on the entrepreneurial journey.  The book features men and women who have built thriving companies of all kinds, strengthening their countries’ economies and providing jobs for many. 

In the excerpt below, you’ll meet Randa Abdou, a young entrepreneur from Egypt who left behind a lucrative position with a multinational giant to found her own marketing consultancy in Cairo.

When Randa Abdou’s Employer – Pepsico Foods in Cairo, Egypt – offered her a new position in the mid-1990s that would take her out of her beloved marketing department and into business development, she was forced to make a difficult decision. She could accept the assignment – and say goodbye to the marketing work she so much enjoyed – or she could leave the company and start her own marketing consultancy. At that time, few Egyptian companies were very savvy when it came to marketing, and they had a real need for the kind of services that Randa could offer them. Says Randa, “These local companies have the technical know-how, they have distributional sales force. What they are really missing is marketing, which is building their brands.”

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. 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’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 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 – 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. 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. Today the company has 23 employees and maintains 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.”

While there is much satisfaction in being her own boss and in calling the shots, Randa is particularly proud of the very tangible results that her firm has been able to provide its clients. Says Randa, “It’s not really about being my own boss so much as feeling the achievement of making positive changes in our clients’ 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 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 Randa, “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’s success story is that she was able to build her business despite stiff competition from much larger and more established multinationals, ad agencies such as BBDO, Promoseven, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, and management consulting firms with departments specializing in marketing. Says Randa, “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 Randa – 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 Randa, “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 anytime. 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 Randa, “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. SaysRanda, “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 one day in 2002, Marketing Mix had one of its darkest when the company lost the Chipsy accoun – 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 learned valuable lessons that have had a positive impact on the business ever since. Says Randa, “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 Randa, “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, banking, 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 hones – marketing solutions. But doing so requires the active involvement of Randa 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 Randa, “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 has learned many lessons while building her business from nothing to a force to be reckoned with in the Egyptian business scene. According to Randa, 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 Randa, “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 Randa, “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’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.”

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