Tareq Thalji: Why MENA Businesses Hit a Growth Ceiling on Talent

Early-stage growth tends to run on the founder's own expertise, determination and willingness to solve problems personally. That works while the company is small. As it expands, the financial, operational, legal, technological and strategic demands multiply, and the original team can run out of capacity to meet them.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, that squeeze is playing out in a costlier operating environment. The UAE makes the pattern visible: small and medium-sized enterprises account for 94 percent of businesses there, according to the Ministry of Economy, which puts their ability to scale at the center of the wider economy. As these firms grow, their needs typically extend into financial leadership, project management, legal guidance, technology and specialized operational knowledge. Building all of it through permanent hires can weigh heavily on companies still converting growth into durable scale.

Where growth stalls

Tareq Thalji, founder and CEO of Hakeema and a serial entrepreneur whose career began in finance, describes the result as a plateau. A company can grow for years on the strength of its own expertise, he says, and growth eventually exposes the gaps around that expertise. The question becomes whether the business can reach the right knowledge, people and systems at the precise moment they are needed.

Firms in the region are already bringing in independent professionals for specialized work. Thalji points to the range of needs that arrive with a defined timeline: a CFO to build financial controls, prepare for investment or improve cash flow management; a project manager to oversee a major implementation for six months; legal, technology, marketing or operational expertise for a set period.

Hiring a permanent employee for each of those needs can produce an organizational structure larger than the company actually requires. A fractional arrangement places an experienced professional in a specific function and lets the level of expertise match the real requirement. In Thalji's framing, a business should be able to add a senior specialist when a problem demands senior expertise, without treating every requirement as a permanent position.

Widening the search

Fractional work also redraws the map recruiters use. In high-cost markets, companies often search only within commuting distance of their offices, which narrows the talent pool and pushes compensation expectations upward. Hakeema connects businesses with expertise in markets such as Jordan, where a strong pool of skilled professionals can deliver capabilities at more competitive costs. Jordan has built a growing technology and outsourcing ecosystem, and its geographic and cultural proximity to Gulf markets makes cross-border collaboration increasingly practical.

Cost, precision and purpose

Thalji treats the financial case and the strategic one as inseparable. Lower-cost access to talent has little value if the expertise does not solve a genuine business problem. The aim is to identify capable professionals, place them where their experience has impact, and keep arrangements flexible as requirements shift.

The most expensive person in a business is not necessarily the one drawing the highest salary, he says. It can be someone hired too early, too broadly, or without a clearly defined purpose. Growth, on this reading, requires precision: knowing exactly which capability is being bought, and why.

As margins tighten and functions grow more specialized, the assumption that every critical capability must sit inside a permanent organizational chart is losing ground. Businesses can assemble what they need around a specific objective, stage or challenge rather than building a large internal workforce first.

Thalji reads a growth plateau as a signal that the current structure has reached its limits, not as a verdict on the business. Expand that structure deliberately, matching expertise to timing and cost, and the ceiling becomes a point of transition rather than a stopping point.