Rana El-Chemaitelly was so confident of her business’s potential she invested her children’s education fund. Rana El-Chemaitelly is most assuredly a businesswoman, but she’s also a mother. So it’s hardly surprising that these two roles both converged and clashed as she went about establishing The Little Engineer, a successful string of educational centers offering basic engineering skills to children and teens across Lebanon, and soon the whole region. It all began with a robot, as Chemaitelly tells it. When assigned to teach the robotics class in the faculty of engineering and architecture at the American University of Beirut, where she continues to instruct part-time, Chemaitelly brought the robots home to prepare her classes. The automatons quickly revealed their power: Her son’s fascination with them was sufficient to distract him from the video games he was, as Chemaitelly frankly puts it, “addicted to.” Inspiration struck, and the mother of three piloted The Little Engineer in the summer of 2009 with some 100 participants. Impressed by its reception, she promptly registered the name and brand with the Ministry of Commerce and began sending applications to business plan competitions. After taking the $50,000 first place prize in the 2010 edition of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition, Chemaitelly went on to win several other prestigious awards, including a MED Venture award. Writing business plans not only secured funds for Chemaitelly’s venture, it also got down on paper financial projections for five years and put in place plans for growth and expansion in the local and regional market. Here, Chemaitelly identifies what is the single biggest challenge facing businesswomen starting out: securing funding. In the early days, she sought out a bank loan. But Chemaitelly met a myriad of roadblocks. Foremost among them was that she had nothing to use as collateral. And she had only a part-time contract at AUB. The ambitious mother eventually ended up cashing out a savings fund set up for her children’s education. “I already had some other savings, and I’m the kind of woman who doesn’t like to save money, so I just invested.” After that, she says, as it was a “cash flowable” business, she managed to grow it from within. Was she worried about compromising her kids’ futures? “No, I was fully confident. I was feeling the cash flow, I was feeling the interest of people, I was seeing a promising future. I can tell that from now until they reach 18 instead of having $40,000 each, they will have $300,000 to $400,000 each,” she adds. Indeed, The Little Engineer is rapidly expanding. In addition to four branches in Lebanon, a franchise has recently opened in Benghazi, Libya. Chemaitelly expects the franchise to extend to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, Saudi Arabia and beyond in the near future.“In five years time I think there will be at least 50 branches of our initiative around the MENA region,” she says confidently.
