By Mohsen Allam San Diegan entrepreneurs inspired Dina Abdel Hadi to think more creatively about work.

MANY LOCAL BUSINESS leaders feel bogged down when struggling with local bureaucracy, rising competition and cautious consumers — but some realize their own day-in, day-out perspective traps them, too.

A few lucky managers and entrepreneurs have sought out Middle East Entrepreneur Training in the US (MEET US), a program sponsored by American cultural exchange and training center AMIDEAST and the US State Department that has given them the opportunity to learn how businesses think and act on the other side of the world — the West Coast of the United States.

MEET US brought 95 participants from a range of industries to San Diego, California for the first time last year for an intensive series of seminars with academics and meetings with American professionals. The State Department chose the city for its diverse economic environment, which features both IT companies as well as business services.

Dina Abdel Hadi, general manager of operations and partner in Proact World, a marketing solutions company that deals primarily with direct marketing (a growing field in Egypt that targets individuals or businesses) found the experience useful and eye opening.

“[MEET US] was a comprehensive program, we got a bit of everything: marketing, finance, international business,” says Abdel Hadi. “It didn’t go in depth into any of the subjects, but I don’t think that that was the objective. It touched base on a lot of subjects. The good thing is that the people speaking were people who knew what they were talking about. For myself, it exceeded my expectations. Not in terms of learning [she has 15 years of work experience], and I don’t think people with that experience should expect to learn new things. I think I was really inspired by the program — by the people teaching, but more by the companies we visited, businesspeople we met, and the group itself.”

The MEET US program is funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative created at the end of 2002 and benefits from the resources of several partners: the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Management, University of California San Diego; America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST); the Entrepreneurial Management Center at San Diego State University; and the US Departments of State and Commerce.

Participants attended training seminars to develop the skills necessary to succeed in today’s global business environment. Topics included business ethics, strategic partnerships, leadership, finance and entrepreneurial marketing. Perhaps more importantly, they spent time with Californian entrepreneurs in their fields, swapping tales and ideas. The sessions were divided into two programs — 35 people were chosen for an executive seminar that ran for two weeks, and 20 each attended three industry-specific seminars that ran for three weeks each. Fluent English was not necessary since the activities of the program were simultaneously translated into Arabic and French.

Ahmed Hafez, general manager and co-founder of Almona CIS, a communications and information services company that specializes in supply chain automation solutions, appreciated the exchange of ideas, which he says helped develop his relatively new company.

“There were different types of programs. There was the business service, which targets marketing and business administration, and there was the IT [one],” says Hafez. “The last week, we had an internship with an American company that had similar activities to our own companies. We spent two weeks attending sessions, talking about business, about the American experience. During these two weeks, we visited other companies, some of them just starting up, others well established. It was a very good experience.”

Shereen Allam, co-owner and vice president of Eco-Tek, is building a unique company in Egypt: a venture focusing on the recycling of print cartridges, both laser and ink. While recycling may not be on the minds of most Egyptians, Allam is doing her utmost to make people aware of both the benefits and necessity of recycling. She was particularly interested in the peer-to-peer exchange that the initiative offered her with other representatives from Arab countries.

“We didn’t get to see a lot of San Diego,” says Allam. “We were always inside the hall. We went to a lot lectures, and met a lot of interesting people. The most interesting part was meeting a lot of people from the Arab world. The impression that we have here is totally different from what we saw — they are very intellectual people, they are very advanced, they know what they are doing. We found things about ourselves that we didn’t know existed. It was interesting to find that we were all in the same boat, but with different styles in running our companies.”

In addition to the difficulties of registering a new company in most of MENA, securing capital presents a serious obstacle. Venture capitalists are abundant in the US; while they exist in Egypt, most hopeful entrepreneurs have difficulty enticing them.

“[The US business environment] is highly competitive, and there is no excuse such as ‘there is not an opportunity’ — you can do anything,” says Allam. “Here you have to struggle for everything, starting from setting up your company, to getting it to work, to getting the right people, to getting a product that you want. But there, they get the idea, they have the institutes, they go to venture capitalists for the money. They present the idea [to them] — if they like it, they have 100% financial backing, plus support for studies, information, everything they need to succeed. Which is completely different from here. We heard that there are some venture capitalists in Egypt, but the amazing thing is as business people we don’t know about them.”

Sharing experiences with other entrepreneurs provides much needed encouragement to other businesspeople looking beyond their immediate surroundings.“In our culture, we are against entrepreneurs,” says Hafez. “We think [these days] that you should graduate and join a well-known company, but before it was government, military. Now it is big corporations. No one would think of their children starting their [own] business — it’s not what we were raised on. I personally didn’t have the chance to sit and speak with entrepreneurs, and to talk about our problems, our clients, our experiences.

“Entrepreneurship is very well organized in the United States, they have communities, societies, they have networks where they just meet and talk and exchange information. We don’t have this here in Egypt.”

The cultural exchange worked for both sides of the partnership.

“Some of the lecturers and some of the translators were inspired by us. They didn’t know that in our part of the world there are people like us, they didn’t know that there are women like us,” says Abdel Hadi, a mother of two boys. “One of the people there approached us and said that she got so inspired that she wants to start her own business now.”

At press time, the Middle East Partnership Institute was funding alumni programs to follow up on progress among this year’s attendees, the next of which will be held in Tunis in September. It was still studying turning MEET US into an annual program.  bt