Twenty Years in Top Tier Multinational Firms. Now She’s Building Her Own: Introducing People & Co.

Most businesses in the region don’t fail because the vision was wrong. They fail because no one built the structure to hold it.

For Hala Achkar Slaiby, that gap became impossible to ignore after nearly twenty years inside the inner workings of some of the world’s most formidable consulting institutions: Booz Allen Hamilton, Booz & Company, Strategy&, MSE, and Kearney, among them. Years spent advising consultants, many of whom are today’s most influential partners in the industry, alongside cross-border leadership teams, on the complex machinery of human organizations. Brilliant work. Consequential work. But work that kept orbiting the same tier of corporate giants, while the founders, the family businesses, and the fast-scaling companies quietly went without.

This May 2026, Achkar Slaiby launched People & Co., an independent organizational advisory firm headquartered in Beirut, serving businesses across the Levant and the GCC. For her, it is a deliberate return to what drew her to this field in the first place: the human side of building something that lasts.

The re-occurring problem Achkar Slaiby kept seeing and couldn’t stop thinking about

The founding team that once communicated through instinct and proximity now numbers two hundred people. Decisions that used to take an afternoon now take weeks. The founders, who built everything on vision and drive, finds themselves managing chaos they never anticipated, not because the business failed, but because it succeeded.

Achkar Slaiby calls it the Scale-Up Collapse.

“Corporate strain is rarely a failure of product or vision,” she says. “It is almost always a failure of human architecture. When a company scales from twenty people to two hundred, the informal channels that once made it work begin to fracture. Decisions slow. Execution drags. The CEO, once the architect of the vision, becomes the company’s highest-paid secretary, approving expenses, chasing updates, and routing questions that should never have reached their desk. And founders become prisoners of their own operational chaos.”

It is a phenomenon playing out with particular intensity across the GCC’s hyper-growth corridor, in the venture-backed startups of Riyadh, the family conglomerates of Dubai, and the resilient enterprises of Beirut. The capital and ambition are there, but what is often missing is the structural backbone to hold it all together. This is the gap People & Co. intends to close.

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An advisory firm built differently

Operating across three core pillars: organizational diagnostics, structural design and alignment, and transition implementation, People & Co. offers the kind of deep, customized counsel that large global firms rarely have the appetite to provide to mid-market clients. Its proprietary diagnostic frameworks are already being deployed with regional enterprises, mapping where decision rights are unclear, where executive alignment has broken down, and where growth has outpaced the structures meant to sustain it.

For established companies, those where HR has long meant payroll, contracts, and the quiet machinery of compliance, People & Co. offers a reframe most leaders never hear: the people function is not a cost to be administered, it is a business to be run. Achkar Slaiby is a hands-on partner who shapes, designs, and implements an operating model that lets the department earn its seat at the table, with an employee experience built with intent from first interview to final goodbye.

For venture capital funds and private equity firms, People & Co. positions organizational architecture not as a soft add-on, but as a hard risk-management tool, one that can cost firms up to 30% in execution velocity when neglected during rapid expansion.

For family businesses navigating generational transition, it offers something rare: a partner who understands that governance and culture are not opposing forces, but the same conversation.  Sunday lunches won’t turn to an Executive Committee.

The person behind the firm

Achkar Slaiby’s authority extends beyond strategy rooms. Recognized by the American University of Beirut as one of its most impactful alumni, she serves as both a faculty member and an Advisory Board member in the Master of Human Resources Management program at Olayan School of Business, AUB. That role keeps her thinking anchored in both rigorous theory and lived organizational reality.

She holds an Executive MBA from AUB and brings close to two decades of tier-one management consulting experience to a firm that is, by design, built at a very different scale.

“I spent years helping large institutions become more efficient,” she reflects. “Now I want to help ambitious founders become more resilient. The complexity is just as high. The stakes, honestly, feel higher.”

People & Co. is now open and actively working with clients across the Levant and GCC, as an independent organizational advisory firm.

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