From selling walkmans in Pakistan to building a heart-led business in Dubai: How an entrepreneur defied odds

She smiles over her toast and says, “There’s nothing ground-breaking here. It’s just my life story.”

But from selling Walkmans as a child in Karachi to building a purposefully small business in Dubai, one that doesn’t overtake her life, Naheed Maalik's life story does stand for something.

After all, we do live in a world where entrepreneurship is seen as courageous but also precarious, and the stories of exhilaration and exhaustion persist. But that’s where Maalik and her friend, co-partner Rachel Lloyd, wanted to be different: They wanted to run a business, but also their lives alongside. And so, they run a comfortable, small business—with its ups and downs, of course. Maalik doesn’t romanticise the effort it takes, but she’s clear about one thing: Her life remains her own.

Maalik has always had a resilient entrepreneurial spirit, she says with a slight laugh. The seeds were there back in the ’80s. “I used to sell Walkmans. I also made brownies and sold those. I’ve done it all.”

Yet before she became an entrepreneur, Maalik had already built a strong foundation of professional experience, skills that would later shape her business journey.For instance, working with a magazine sharpened her writing and taught her how to meet deadlines, speak to different audiences, and navigate the business side of publishing. Moreover, it helped her discover stories and develop her skills as a storyteller.

So, when she moved to Dubai from Karachi, she brought with her a background in non-profit communications and magazine journalism. “I worked first with the Red Cross for three years, and then the British Council for another four years,” she says.

Dubai offered opportunity, but it also required a pivot. With limited non-profit roles available in 2006 and 2007, she moved into communications roles in higher education, including at Wollongong and Canadian University Dubai. “It was a very different environment then,” she reflects. “I had three jobs at one point, including in the airline industry. For every job now, there are 5 million applicants.”

Education felt like the right fit, both professionally and personally. “I had young children. I wanted to work close to home. Education made sense.” Every role added a new layer, branding, strategy, media relations. Each skill helped her build a network of meaningful relationships she would later call on.

Maalik reflects on the current ideas around entrepreneurship. “I think it scares a lot of people, especially if you’re getting a proper salary, and the whole data tells us businesses close within two years.”

But Maalik had never been a stranger to risk.

She and Lloyd often found themselves juggling multiple vendors, outsourcing PR, content, media buying, and design to different third parties. The choices weren’t ideal: expensive agencies or solo freelancers who couldn’t always deliver.

That pain point became their purpose.

In 2018, Maalik and Lloyd launched The Loop—a one-stop agency designed to close the gap they kept running into. The goal was simple: offer reliable, cohesive services in branding, marketing, communications, design, and PR. Everything under one roof. Deliver it on time, on budget, and with an understanding of the client’s voice.

But “closing the loop” didn’t happen overnight.

The journey wasn’t linear. At one point, Maalik took a sabbatical and briefly considered emigrating.

“Back then, the UAE was very different,” she says. “Being on your own visa made things complicated, quitting a job meant worrying about residency. I took time off and went to Canada for a while, just to explore. But I quickly realised: I couldn’t do it. It was too quiet, too spread out. And starting all over again in my forties? I just didn’t want to.”

The decision to return to Dubai brought a quiet kind of clarity. After long conversations with Lloyd, Maalik quit her job—and took the leap into starting a business. One of her first steps was reaching out to the Canadian University and the British Council, places where she had built trust and credibility over the years.

There’s a quiet but powerful lesson in that: every experience matters, even if you never go back to that job or title again. When you’ve built a reputation rooted in consistency and trust, people remember. The relationships you nurture, the way you carry your name, that becomes the foundation you return to when it’s time to build something of your own.

Today, Maalik’s work spans strategy, content, and brand consulting, especially in the education sector. “Marketing communications, branding, PR, that’s the space I work in,” she says. “But within that, it’s really about content and strategy. For instance, if a university has 12 programs and five aren’t doing well, we’re brought in to review what’s going wrong, whether it’s the pricing, positioning, or career relevance,”  

The team is small at The Loop, and they don’t wish to scale their business. As Maalik explains, they work with both long-term and contract-based clients.

And more than anything else, Maalik wanted to reclaim her life. Travel more. That was the theme she intended to follow.  “We didn’t want to take too many clients, and keep it a small business. But the more you grow, the more staff you get — we do have staff — but the more clients, the more people you hire, and it takes away life. That wasn’t the idea. The idea was to have your life and business running smoothly,” she says.

Even now, growth is intentional and aligned with values. There are difficulties of course: While 2019 was a good start, COVID did impact the business. But they found a way to bounce back, despite the worry of a ‘tricky revenue pipeline’.

Maalik is also conscious of the choices she makes: It has to be interesting to her. She doesn’t want to choose just anything, just because it exists. She gives the example of fashion: That’s not her experience. “Our expertise was content,” she emphasises.

“I mean, of course you still have to work. Of course, the revenue pipeline is tricky too—we were very sure that we didn’t want to work in retail sector—it has to be interesting to us. So if you work with fashion, but that’s not our expertise. Our expertise was content, and that was service sector.

There are quiet, radical lessons in the way Maalik works. That you can build something of value without chasing constant growth. That staying small doesn’t mean thinking small. That you can run a business—and still run your life.

Her story does stand out in a world built on the pressure to scale,it’s deeply refreshing.

And that, in itself, is a story worth telling.