The Story of People & Co

Twenty years, and a gap I kept seeing

For nearly twenty years my working life ran to the rhythm of global management consulting. MSE. Kearney. Strategy&, part of the PwC network. Booz Allen Hamilton. Boardroom after boardroom, advising cross border leadership teams on organizational mechanics at the scale where those mechanics are hardest.

It was rigorous work and I would not trade the training. But somewhere in those years I started noticing the same companies turning up at the edge of my calendar and never quite making it onto it.

The gap was never about quality. It was about economics.

Global firms are not failing mid-market companies. They are built for a different client.

A tier one engagement carries a team, a bench, a global overhead structure, and a fee floor that follows from all three. That model is entirely rational at the scale it was designed for. What it cannot do is serve a 250-person family business in Beirut, a scaling group in Riyadh, or a private equity portfolio company preparing for exit, at a price and a rhythm that make sense for them.

So those companies get one of two things. Either an engagement priced for someone else, which produces a 200 page deck and a team that has moved on within the week or so. Or a local generalist without the structural toolkit to do the work at all.

What they actually need is not complicated to describe: the same standard of diagnosis and design that the large multinational consulting firms bring, delivered by someone who stays, at a scale they can absorb.

In May 2026 I left to build exactly that. People & Co.

Corporate strain is rarely a failure of product or vision.

Most of the businesses I work with hit what I call the 20 to 200 trap. They begin with a strong idea, a committed founding team, and fast organic growth. Everything runs on proximity and goodwill. Then headcount triples, and the informal networks that carried the company quietly stop carrying it. Decisions slow. Handovers fail. Culture thins out.

At that point most leaders reach for an HR consultant to fix the people.

You cannot fix a structural problem with a cultural remedy. If two executives share accountability for the same number, no amount of team building resolves it. If pricing authority sits three functions away from the person held responsible for margin, no engagement survey will surface why the business feels slow. The people are usually fine. The architecture is not.

That is where our work starts. Not payroll, not compliance, not policy administration. Human architecture: how decisions flow, who is accountable for what, how roles are defined and levelled, and how work is organized so that a company can grow without buckling under its own weight.

What People & Co is built on

Tier one rigor, sized correctly. The same organizational diagnostics I ran for multinationals, scaled and adapted for founder led businesses, family enterprises and private equity portfolios. Every engagement runs through the CLEAR Method™: Clarify, Leadership Layers, Enable, Align, Reinforce. The method is what makes the work repeatable rather than dependent on inspiration.

Practice tied to teaching. I hold an Executive MBA from the Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut, and I teach and sit on the advisory board of AUB's Master of Human Resources Management programme. That connection is not decoration. Teaching HR analytics to people who will run these functions forces me to keep the frameworks current, and it keeps client work anchored to evidence rather than habit.

Diagnostics that are actually instrumented. Assess by People & Co is our own diagnostic environment: calibration engines, structured organizational assessments, and performance dashboards that give a leadership team a shared view of where the organization actually stands. Design arguments go better when everyone is looking at the same data.

Why we do not bill by the day

Anyone who has worked with a daily rate advisor knows the problem. Day rates pay for presence. They reward the consultant who stays longest, not the one who resolves the question fastest, and both sides know it.

People & Co does not bill daily rates.

Engagements are structured as milestone based project fees against defined deliverables, or as selective strategic retainers where a leadership team needs a standing partner. You know the scope, the sequence, and the total before we start. Whether the work is helping a GCC family group navigate a generational transition so that family culture and corporate governance complement each other rather than collide, or restructuring a portfolio company ahead of exit, the incentive is to finish it properly, not to extend it.

And we stay through reinforcement. Design is the easy half of organizational work. What determines whether a company actually changes is what happens in the few weeks or months after the deck is delivered, which is precisely the period most engagements are structured to skip.

The journey ahead

When People & Co launched, a feature in Entrepreneur Middle East opened a flood of conversations with founders, private equity partners and family business heads. What came through in almost all of them was appetite for a different kind of advisor: one who says the difficult thing plainly, skips the theatre, and stays long enough to see the structure hold.

That is the firm I am building.

If your business is at an inflection point, scaling faster than its structure, or preparing for a transition, let us talk about the architecture your vision deserves.

info@peopleandco.me | +961 3 411 034 | www.peopleandco.me