Julie Wilburn

A long-held marketing axiom is entrepreneurs first discover a customer need and then create a business to fill that need. Entrepreneur expat Julie Wilburn, like so many entrepreneurs abroad, discovered her customer need in far away Agadir, Morocco just over two years ago.

Her road to Morocco started in the small town of Grantsville, Maryland, two and a half hours west of Washington D.C. in the Appalachian Mountains. Born and raised there, the 43-year-old Wilburn married her high school sweetheart as soon as she graduated from high school.

“He was a pastor so we started a new Baptist church in Grantsville soon after we were married 25 years ago,” Wilburn said. “We also started a Christian school in our church, which helped prepare me for my new life in Morocco.”

In addition to teaching at the church’s school, Wilburn also was a volunteer for the Head Start program in town and worked at a local orphanage, which added to her experience working with children. Divorced in 2009, she attended a community college in Cumberland, Maryland and became an accredited phlebotomist. She also took an online veterinary technology course, which helped her find work with a local veterinarian.

But her life changed when she met her future husband, Abdelham Lam, online and moved to Baltimore, where he was working as a drug rehab counselor.

“We got married in 2011 while I was attending Baltimore City Community College,” she said, “and a year later he asked me if I would move to Morocco with him so he could be close to his family.”

They moved to Casa Blanca, a cacophonous city of over 3 million people situated on Morocco’s Atlantic coast to live with her husband’s family. But the transition was just too much for Willburn.

“I could not stay in Casablanca,” she said, “because it was too much of a change for me. I did not know anyone and the noise, crime and other big city problems had me looking online for a job somewhere else after just a few months.”

That somewhere else became Agadir, a city of just over 400,000 nearly 300 miles south of Casa Blanca on Morocco’s southern Atlantic coast. It is a resort area known for its golf courses, wide crescent beach and seaside promenade lined with cafes, restaurants and bars.

“I went online and found a job at an English instruction school in Agadir through the expat network in Morocco,” she said. “After four months in Casablanca, I had had enough and took a job as an assistant administrator and teacher at the school.”