Hani Mebar

I've spent 24 years in operations and supply chain leadership across Nokia, HMD Global, Nestlé, and Novartis, working out of Finland, the UAE, and South Africa. My modus operandi is I take a process that's reactive, undocumented, or running on someone's memory, and turn it into something structured, measured, and owned. I’ve been a founder as well. I ran Shawarminator, a food business in Cape Town, with direct P&L ownership: waste held under 3 percent, time to serve cut from 6 minutes to 2.5, and it sold at break even after averaging 30 percent net margins. I’m an MBA graduate in Leading Business Transformation at Haaga Helia afterward, with a thesis on building an ESG services portfolio against the UN SDGs and CSRD, which is where my interest in sustainability and responsible business got formal grounding rather than staying a vague instinct.

Since 2022 I've run an independent consultancy, Äctvli Responsible Consulting. The client work is transformation and PMO governance: I built a PMO from scratch at Alma Career that now governs 12 concurrent post merger integration projects across six countries, a EUR 2M portfolio, and I advise the sponsoring SVP directly on integration sequencing.

The part that's newer, and the part I actually spend my evenings on because I want to, is that I build software. Thirteen production applications since 2022, ten of them live. I have a suite of AI agents that handle real client work end to end, each with a defined scope and a defined point where it hands off to a human rather than guessing, and a retrieval augmented knowledge system for compliance work so answers are grounded in actual source documents instead of a model's memory. I did this because I wanted to understand AI capability by building with it, not by reading about it, and it's changed how I evaluate transformation work generally: I can tell the difference between where an AI system removes real friction and where it just adds a governance problem nobody asked for.

What I'm looking for is a role where those two things compound rather than compete: real operational or transformation ownership, somewhere the AI-building is executed and not just spoken about.

On outside interests specifically: I can’t sit still, and need to be active so I enjoy various physical activities and always make time for those whether it’s jogging, kayaking, paddle board, crossfit, fishing. and I am always coming up with business ideas or solutions to every problem out there.