Thirty-eight years ago, Gideon Elkayam held weekly meetings with himself.
Gideon had started Obelis alone from an office in a city house in Brussels. Across the street stood a maternity hospital. Spotting an opportunity, he even opened a small snack business from the office for a while.
It was a modest beginning for a company that would eventually grow far beyond that Brussels office. Today, Obelis has a global presence and supports companies navigating regulatory requirements across markets. Nearly four decades later, the regulatory world around it has changed considerably, and so has the company itself.
Growth has also changed the way Obelis works. What once depended on Gideon making every decision now relies on a much wider group of people, each bringing their own knowledge, judgement and responsibility. Much has changed along the way, but the question of how to keep a business moving forward has remained remarkably consistent.
It started with a question
Gideon Elkayam was 39 when he started Obelis, but his career had already taken a few turns. At one point, he found himself selling jewellery. Eventually, he came to a fairly simple conclusion: jewellery was not going to be his future.
European regulation, perhaps surprisingly, was.
At the time, Europe was developing its New Approach Directives, and Gideon started looking closely at how the system worked. One question kept coming up: could an Authorised Representative represent more than one manufacturer and more than one product? So, he did the obvious thing. He asked the European institutions directly.
There was nothing in the rules saying he couldn’t.
That answer left room for an idea and eventually a business. More importantly, it established a way of thinking that Gideon still talks about today: get close to change and understand what is happening. Ask questions before the answers become obvious.
“You always need to be a pioneer,” he says.
For Gideon, that has meant being curious enough to look at what is changing rather than working with what is already widely known. The question facing Obelis today are widely different from the one he asked almost four decades ago, but that instinct behind them has stayed the same.
The human side of growing a business
Ask Gideon what 38 years in business have taught him, and the answer quickly moves away from regulation and strategy. It comes back to people.
It is a deliberately human way of looking at a company at a time when businesses are increasingly talking about automation, artificial intelligence and efficiency. Gideon is interested in all of those things.
But he draws a line between using machines and trying to turn people into them. You cannot, he argues, transform a company into machinery and expect technology to replace the human qualities that allow it to work.
When it comes to the people he works with, Gideon knows what he values: curiosity, determination, trust, respect, a willingness to learn and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to listen. These are the qualities he has looked for throughout Obelis’ growth and ones he believes a company has to hold onto as it gets bigger.
Learning to move through uncertainty
Thirty-eight years inevitably brings a few crises. For Gideon, the point is not that every disruption should be treated as an opportunity. It is instead, waiting for certainty can become a risk of its own. Sometimes, a business has to make a decision while the picture is still changing. And yet, at times that decision can be wrong.
”You can fail. You can make mistakes. So what? Move on.” Though it may sound casual, the thinking behind it is more complex. Gideon talks about the mechanism around a decision: people, processes and flexibility that allows a company to recognise when something has gone wrong, correct it and keep going.
Obelis has lived through regulatory upheavals, Brexit and a global pandemic. Gideon does not romanticise uncertainty, but he is unusually comfortable with it. In fact, he says he sleeps better when there are challenges in front of him.
No crises arrived with a ready-made playbook on how-to. Each forced the company to respond to circumstances that were changing around it.
COVID-19 tested that adaptability. As cosmetics slowed with shop closures, medical devices flourished, allowing Obelis to respond to a rapidly changing market.
Brexit was another example. Gideon saw the direction of travel early, and in 2018 Obelis established its presence in the UK; three years before Brexit took full effect.
Was it instinct? Gideon prefers another word: pioneering.
For him, being a pioneer means staying alert, recognising that tomorrow may require something different from today and being willing to act before the answer becomes obvious.
An institution built to continue
Gideon does not expect the next chapter to look like the last. After 38 years, experience does not necessarily make the next change any easier to predict. What it does provide is the instinct to ask questions early, and the flexibility to adjust when the answers change.
Whatever the next chapter brings, there will be questions Obelis cannot anticipate today, alongside new opportunities to grow and move into new areas. Thirty-eight years have not provided a way to predict exactly what comes next. However, they have provided something more useful: the experience to recognise where the opportunities are and the confidence to move towards them.
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