Member Interview with Rasha Rteil

We are delighted to bring you a Member Interview with Rasha Rteil, Independent Marketing Growth Advisor.

What’s your golden rule? 

Say the true thing, especially when it costs you something. The rule has four parts. Say it early. Say it plainly. Say it to the person's face. Then stay in the room and help fix it. The staying is the part most people skip, and it is the only part that makes the honesty worth anything. Honesty and grit belong in the same sentence rather than in separate columns. Transparency with no stamina behind it lasts about one uncomfortable meeting. I have lost work for it. I have left an organisation because of it. I have also kept relationships for a decade because of it. 

Who has been your biggest influence and why? 

My father. He started his first business at sixteen and has not really stopped since. He built it in Lebanon, lost it, left, rebuilt from nothing in a country that was not his, then returned to Beirut and built again. Two businesses, four children, and no soft landing at any point. What I took from him has very little to do with business plans. He taught me that grit is deeply unglamorous. It is getting up the morning after everything has gone, doing the maths again, and opening the doors. That is also why leaving a holding company to build something of my own felt less like a leap and more like inheritance. Whenever I walk into a difficult situation, his standard is somewhere in my head: are you solving this, or are you narrating it?

What is your most hated business expression? 

"Skin in the game.” It once meant something specific and slightly uncomfortable: your money, your reputation and your downside were genuinely exposed. Now it is meeting-room garnish. Everyone claims to have skin in the game. Very few name the number, the deadline, or what happens to them if it does not work. There is a nice irony too. The phrase is commonly associated with Warren Buffett, although it predates him. Business’s favourite expression about ownership cannot establish who owns it.

My real problem is that it is presented as a differentiator when it should be the baseline. Of course you are invested in the outcome. That is the job. Do not tell me you have skin in the game. Show me the clause, the fee at risk, or the decision you are prepared to own." 

What’s the smartest business idea you’ve ever had? 

Putting my father’s bakery on Google, back when it was still called Google My Business. I slapped a sticker on his food display window. That is it. No digital transformation programme, no steering committee and, tragically, no 70-page deck. His food had been exceptional for decades, but his discoverability was essentially a sign above the door. We added the opening hours, photographs, reviews and a map pin. Delivery calls increased, and people who had lived ten minutes away for years found him for the first time. His new customer base grew by around 30%. It remains the cleanest marketing lesson I own: the smartest idea is often the smallest one that removes the friction between a good product and the person who already wants it. 

Which leader do you admire most and why? 

I am not naturally built for hero worship. I prefer principles to personalities, and I am mildly suspicious of anyone with an unquestioned list of favourite CEOs. The person I admire most is Dr. Maria Montessori. She died in 1952, so this is admiration at a reasonably safe distance.

She was a physician who applied observation, rather than authority, to the way children learn. Two of her ideas have shaped how I lead. The first is that the goal of leadership is to become progressively less necessary. Her measure of a teacher’s success was that the children could eventually work as though the teacher did not exist. That is the standard I hold myself to with teams and now with clients. If a system only works while I am in the room, I have created dependency, not capability.

The second is that help can become an obstacle once someone can act independently. Every over-managing leader and every over-servicing agency should have that written somewhere visible. As a mother, it changed how I raise my children. As an advisor, it shapes the entire business model: build the system, transfer the capability, and let the client own it. I am still learning the restraint that requires. Being useful can be addictive. 

What is on your mind the most right now as a marketing leader? 

How much talent we are wasting, very politely. The generation entering marketing now is the most technically fluent I have seen. They build, test, automate and prototype faster than many of the people managing them. Then we hand them a narrow lane, a reporting deck, and a manager who is too busy to explain how any of it connects to money. We say they lack commercial thinking. In many cases, they lack exposure to commercial conversations. Those are very different problems, and only one of them belongs to them. The leadership question is whether we let them anywhere near the P&L, the client’s real business problem, or the room where the trade-off is made. Or whether we quietly protect our own relevance by keeping the interesting work to ourselves. I do not think marketing has a talent-pipeline problem. I think it has an exposure and generosity problem.  

Why is being part of The Marketing Society important for your career? 

Three reasons. First, the room. I have just left a holding company to build an independent advisory, and independence carries one genuine occupational hazard: you can start believing your own arguments because nobody in your working day is paid to test them. The Society brings together senior people who have no commercial reason to agree with me. That is extremely valuable right now.

Second, the standard. Being measured against other strong marketers, rather than against your own increasingly convenient benchmark, is healthy. I want to be around people who are still interrogating their thinking, not simply displaying their experience.

Third, the perspective. My work sits at the intersection of marketing and the P&L: investment return, operating models, partner economics, data, technology and organisational capability.

Those questions look different in Dubai than they do in Riyadh, London or Singapore. Being exposed to leaders solving them under different conditions stops me from mistaking a regional habit for a universal truth. I am joining The Marketing Society for useful friction."    

Why does marketing matter to you? 

Because after more than twenty years I am still not bored by it, and because I get to do this work in a part of the world built on ambition. The economics here move faster than almost anywhere else, and they keep moving through disruption, volatility and the occasional crisis. That combination is rare, and can be obsessive.

I will be honest about the other half of it, though. The industry has become fragmented and complicated enough that it is losing some of its nerve. Channels multiply, platforms multiply, the stack multiplies, and somewhere inside all that machinery the fun went quiet. Creativity now has to survive ‘can we use AI conversation’, and a longer approval chain than it used to on cost. There is more fear in the room as well. Fear of the number, mostly. Clients are afraid of being asked what the investment actually returned. Agencies are afraid of being asked to stand behind it. So both sides do what frightened people do, they add complexity, because complexity is somewhere to hide. Which is why it still matters to me. I would like this industry to be brave again, and bravery gets easier when you can prove what the work is worth.

Tell us something that’s not on your CV

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