VOICES OF YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS IN THE MENA REGION
LEBANON: A Platform with Global Appeal to Help Restaurants Personalize Guests’ Dining Experience
S
arah is an entrepreneur from Beirut who cofounded a software company that provides a platform for restaurants to personalize their guests’ experience and maximize revenue per seat. Sarah graduated from the Lebanese American University with a bachelor’s degree in business and marketing and then completed her MBA. She started her career at a management consulting firm, where she worked for five years as a senior research consultant in the technology and telecommunications sector. Although she had no intention of starting a business, she gravitated toward entrepreneurship when she discovered a problem that no one was addressing and won a start-up competition based on the identified opportunity. The restaurant integrated reservation system tracks guest data with a centralized database and allows restaurants to understand their guests’ dining preferences and habits to make better decisions and create campaigns that increase guest returns, visits, and overall spending. The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt the hospitality sector considerably. Sarah and her team have been innovating their services to help restaurants open safely and give guests comfort about dining out. Her company developed a product, the contactless digital menu, that allows customers to view and order from a menu that can be accessed via QR code scanned by smartphones or before the reservation. In addition, they release payments where restaurants can charge a guest in advance to lower last-minute cancellations and no-shows. Since its launch in 2016, the company grew to employ 30+ staff between its office in Beirut and the regional and main office in Dubai, which was opened in 2017. The firm now serves thousands of clients in the MENA region (Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Malta, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), as well as in Europe (Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands) and Asia (India and Singapore). While Sarah hopes to expand further into the European market in the coming years, she notes that such expansion requires significant capital investment. Lebanon presents unique and unexpected challenges and obstacles for entrepreneurs. Lebanon’s commercial law is outdated, highly bureaucratic, and opaque. Navigating through these laws requires a lot of patience and time. Moreover, the crumbling infrastructure coupled with the economic and
106 | Jobs Undone: Reshaping the Role of Governments toward Markets and Workers in MENA
