When Tayma Khalil tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) for the second time, she knew immediately what had happened. There was the familiar sound, the familiar pain, and then the familiar thought: not again.
But something else came with that second injury that had not been there the first time – a strange, hard-won reassurance. Tayma already knew the road ahead. She knew what the surgery would demand and what the months of physical therapy would feel like. Crucially, she knew that the reward at the end was real. "It takes four weeks to lose all conditioning in the muscles," she says, "and it takes seven months to put it back." The first recovery had taught her that the effort, however invisible in the moment, was always worth it.
That lesson – that progress is earned slowly and often unseen, then arrives all at once – sits at the centre of how Tayma thinks about the next chapter of her career. Having joined All Interests Aligned (AIA) as an Operating Partner, she is preparing to acquire and run a Swiss or French small or medium-sized enterprise through a management buy-in (MBI). It is a path that rewards precisely the qualities her injuries taught her: patience, milestone-by-milestone discipline, and the willingness to keep showing up when nothing visible is happening.
Tayma did not set out to be an operator. She began in the sciences, studying biology and genetics, before discovering that a life spent working with cells at a lab bench was not for her. "I needed more human interaction," she recalls. The pull toward people carried her into pharmaceutical consulting, then to an MBA at INSEAD, and then to McKinsey, where she spent roughly six years – two in London and four and a half in Geneva. Her time at the firm served as a deep immersion into diverse industries and functions, equipping her with the multifaceted perspective required for the challenges ahead.
What came next was Expedia, an intentional move into a sector Tayma judged to be years ahead of pharma and consumer goods on technology and e-commerce. She intended to stay a few years and bring the lessons back. She stayed seven, moving through the company's major divisions, mostly under the banner of strategy and transformation – and, when circumstances demanded, leading the company's COVID war room. But a nine-hour time difference with Seattle eventually caught up with her. Working from Geneva with teams on the West Coast meant nights that ran to one or two in the morning. It was not sustainable.
The turning point came through a former McKinsey colleague at Labatec Pharma, a family-owned business in Geneva. The company was going through leadership changes and Tayma was offered the COO seat with a mandate to transform and set the company on a path for growth. She stepped down from Labatec a couple of years later to hand the reins back to the son of the owners.
It was, she says, the first real test of a question that had long nagged at her. Having spent her career in large corporations, she wondered whether a smaller company would excite her, whether it would feel too small, not challenging enough. Labatec was, in effect, a great opportunity to find out. If she loved it, she would pursue this path further. If she did not, she could always return to corporate life.
She loved it. Every fear was, in her words, thrown out of the window. What she found instead was the pleasure of knowing every person in the company, making quick decisions, and seeing the impact of those decisions directly, not after "hours and hours in meetings to create meetings, to decide on the meeting, to decide on a decision." The numbers were smaller, the initiatives more modest, but things moved. And she could watch them move.
Ask Tayma which parts of her corporate experience will transfer most directly to running a succession-stage SME, and she does not hesitate: the ability to hold the big picture in mind while diving into the operating detail as needed. Labatec taught her to change hats "35 times a day," she jokes, moving from people-related topics to sales and marketing to operations within the space of an hour.
What she will have to unlearn is subtler, and she names it precisely: the "governance tax". In large companies she grew used to polished decks, rich analytics, and every number available at her fingertips. In a small company, she notes, that reporting comes at the expense of execution, because it is the same handful of people who must produce it. "Everything you ask for comes at the expense of something else," she says. Finding the balance between the reporting she wants and the work that actually needs doing is, she believes, the real adjustment ahead.
Her instinct for where value hides is equally clear-eyed. She is wary of generalising – every company is different – but if pressed, she points to growth. Many European SMEs are run successfully by families and reach a comfortable plateau. It is not a lack of skill or a failure of will, she notes; it is that a profitable, self-sustaining business removes the pressure to double or triple in size. "In some cases, there's no need per se for them to think about how I can double, triple the size of that company today." That, she argues, is where an incoming operator can build on what already works and unlock growth.
If resilience is the theme running through Tayma's story, it is not a trait she claims as innate. She frames it, tellingly, as a choice one keeps making. The second knee recovery taught her patience – "probably not my strongest virtue," she admits – and, more practically, taught her to break an overwhelming journey into small, achievable steps. First, walking without limping. Then jumping. Then running. Each milestone, however far from the ultimate goal, delivered the sense of progress needed to keep going.
The higher you rise in a company, the lonelier it gets, especially at the top.
She expects the MBI search to demand the same discipline. The hardest stretch of invisible progress, she predicts, will come early: in the search phase and its inevitable failed acquisition attempts. "There's going to be a lot of mini failures along the way," she says, deals that advance to the final stages and then collapse into a no. Her answer is to set interim milestones that have nothing to do with closing: how many people she reached, how many serious conversations she had, how many led to a non-binding offer, how many to a letter of intent. The acquisition may be distant, but the small victories keep the momentum going.
On the loneliness that operators often describe – the thinning of the support scaffolding as one climbs – Tayma is sanguine. Here, her choice of AIA is part of the answer. "The higher you rise in a company, the lonelier it gets, especially at the top," she acknowledges. But the platform, she notes, offers a structure alongside the solitude: investors and fellow operating partners going through the same passage who form a shadow structure to lean on. The absence of internal scaffolding, she argues, does not mean the absence of scaffolding elsewhere. In time, the acquired company's own management team becomes part of it.
Tayma approaches the question of gender with characteristic directness. Asked whether resilience is something women have to draw on differently than the men around them, she declines the premise gently. "I honestly never think about things like that, men versus women," she says. Every person's journey is unique; she prefers to reflect on her own challenges and how to get through them, rather than measuring them against anyone else's.
She is candid, though, about the imbalance in entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA). The more she looked into the field, the clearer it became that men vastly outnumber women – but the numbers did not shock her, and they certainly did not deter her. If anything, they were a motivator, proof to herself that the path was feasible. She also reads the imbalance as a reflection of the broader corporate world: since AIA's operators tend to come from senior positions in companies where men still predominate, the demographics of ETA end up mirroring the demographics of the rooms from which these operators are drawn.
Don't auto-select yourself out of the process without giving it a shot first.
Tayma’s advice to capable women weighing the path is refreshingly free of abstraction. "Don't auto-select yourself out of the process without giving it a shot first," she says. Her real fear is that talented candidates discount themselves before they even try. She reaches, as she often does with her own teams and her children, for a favourite line: you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And to the woman who does not yet see many people like herself doing this work, she offers a simple reframe: be the one who shows it can be done.
An MBI typically means stepping into a business with a long history, an established team, and an outgoing owner whose knowledge lives largely in their head. Tayma is clear that trust in such a setting is earned. Her plan for the early months is unhurried: get to know everyone, understand their challenges and their story, and see the business through their eyes. Due diligence produces ideas, she notes, but ideas are only ideas. She intends to go in with an open mind, validating her hypotheses before acting on them, refining them, and then working with the team so that any vision becomes shared from day one.
The same instinct tempers her competitive drive. Sports gave Tayma a team-first mindset and a habit of competing against her own past performance rather than against others. But she has learned, sometimes through direct feedback, that running too fast can leave half the team behind. Taking a step back to check that people are on board, she says, is something she has had to consciously practice.
Asked what success looks like five years after a first acquisition, Tayma says numbers are not the only consideration. Success, for her, is a business that thrives despite its founder's departure. And, ultimately, one that can grow without her, too. "You want to build something that can operate independently," she says. A business that continues to flourish, in her telling, means more jobs in the community, more services, and a healthier local economy. It is a definition of success that looks well beyond the balance sheet. That may be why, when the talk turned to a follow-up interview five years out, as a repeat operator, she was happy to put it in her diary.
Mukul Pandya is the founding editor of Knowledge@Wharton and a former Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He writes regularly about entrepreneurship through acquisition for All Interests Aligned.
