Internationalism Embodied

Drum Roll

by Charles Molineaux

May 2, 2008

Her company’s logo is a lighthouse. Its name comes from the French word for “lighthouse” or “ headlight.” Fatiha
Coulombe, founder and CEO of PHARE Associates, says that’s her role in a nutshell, guiding companies through the murky, treacherous shoals of foreign relations, regulations and markets.
Binational, tri-cultural, space station engineer, pilot and now consultant, Coulombe has specialized since 2000 in helping companies forge international partnerships. Only now, however, has she embarked on the bridge-building opus for which she may be uniquely qualified, bringing together businesses from the United States and her native Morocco.

“The timing is really perfect,” she says. “In the past five years, I would have never thought of undertaking anything in the region, but with the changes that are taking place, the fast-paced growth in the
area, really I see there are so many opportunities now.” Galvanized by the new U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement, Coulombe has been putting together a March business mission to Morocco, signing up U.S. companies for what she hopes will be the first of many trade forays there.

“I am received very well,” she says. “The people that I know in the country are very proud to see a Moroccan woman successful in America.” Proud and, in what she sees as a sign of progress, not particularly surprised.“It’s more common now. Twenty or 30 years ago that would be a surprise, but not today.”

Hers has become a natural, if serendipitous, career path. Although her formal education was in electrical engineering and aerospace, international transition and translation have been central to Coulombe’s life since childhood. Growing up in Morocco, she spoke both French and Arabic and was steeped in both cultures. She went to school in France, and in the mid-1980s traveled to California to work on the International Space Station at Rockwell subsidiary Rockadyne. But when she and her husband, Ray, relocated to Mystic, Conn., Coulombe found herself with no real local prospects in aerospace and discovered that she had an incurable case of the entrepreneurial bug. “I always wanted to be independent,” she recalls, “to be the entrepreneur. I was not interested in going back to work for a company, but starting my own business. That’s when I decided to create PHARE.”

With PHARE Associates, Coulombe drew on her American business experience and her French background to help French-Canadian aviation and aerospace companies, primarily smaller ones, wend their way through the complexities of the United States. “For some of them we’ve done technical or trade studies,” she explains, “feasibility studies. We help them with procurement. Really the core activities were in expanding and giving them access to the U.S. markets.” Then the opportunity came to turn the model inside out … and go home … with a new endeavor into a promising and emerging market outside the United States, a market that she knows well from having grown up in it.

The U.S.-Morocco FTA was signed in 2004 and went into effect in 2006, mandating sharply reduced or eliminated tariffs on a variety of products traveling in both directions. The U.S. International Trade Commission has anticipated the change would dramatically increase the competitiveness of U.S. companies in the Moroccan market. But Coulombe sees the treaty as a still largely unexploited ingress to her homeland, a market now largely dominated by the European Union in general and France and Spain in particular. “Every time I travel,” she says, “the Moroccan businesses and companies, they do ask, ‘Where are
the American companies that signed the free trade agreement?’”

Enter PHARE. Coulombe says she has five clients hoping for commerce with Casablanca. She declines to identify them but describes their fields as construction materials, fuel distribution, textile manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. Only one, an aircraft maintenance company, even resembles her previous clients. “Of course, Morocco is not going to be aerospace and aviation,” she says. “Part of the needs will be in the aviation sector, but there are many, many other sectors.” Progress notwithstanding, this new role as transatlantic envoy has brought her up against some challenges for a woman, an Islamic woman reared in North Africa, as well as against stereotypes on both sides of the pond. Although she does expect some residual resistance to progressive women in Morocco’s rural areas outside of major centers like Casablanca, Rabat andTangiers, Coulombe likes to tell of a startling double whammy of prejudice she encountered someplace else entirely – California. As a pilot, she was looking for opportunities to work as a flight instructor and contacted the operator of a flight school in Van Nuys. “He literally told me, ‘Well, I do not hire women pilots.’ I was shocked,” she recounts. But she says she was more baffled by what followed. “ Later on I shared the response with the lady engineer with me, and she told me ‘Well, you should not complain. In your country you cannot do much anyway.’

This was in the ’90s. Even then in Morocco, you had women pilots who were flying 727s. That illustrates, I think, two things. One, women, here and there, will encounter the same problems and, two, there is a perception that women there cannot achieve things that we can here. We can. As far as the formal business environment, Morocco, Tunisia, they are
more progressive.”

Today, Coulombe says she finds both progressiveness and livability in her current home base, not Atlanta or its immediate suburbs, but in LaGrange in Troup County. “I don’t think I could live again in a large city like L.A. or Atlanta,” she exclaims, grateful for the chance to do most of her business with Morocco, Canada, and clients around the United States, remotely. She also gets lots of practice right at home in bridging any cultural gaps between her homeland and the United States, thanks to her husband, Ray. She comes from an Islamic background; he does not. He also speaks not a word of either of her two first languages, French and Arabic. Ironically, her family ties and her adopted hometown have taken her to yet another international business frontier and across yet another cultural threshold, this time with East Asia.

Her husband’s work in economic development for LaGrange has meant face-to-face contact with the Korean developers of Kia Motors’ manufacturing plant under construction in
West Point. “It’s really a delight to me,” she marvels, “again talking about cultures, meeting Koreans and learning. We’ve received
Koreans in our home, and we meet them in town and it’s just wonderful. I didn’t know much about Asia. Now here it is again. I’m coming closer to other cultures.