You probably have not heard of Yaniv Natan and there is very little about the company he chairs, Tek Experts, on its website. This is perhaps all the more strange because his success story is the type that should be held up as an inspiration to others.

Just over four years ago, he was in Sofia as a project manager, with a team of around 20. The project grew and from Europe spread to the US – so he opened a second hub there and then in Costa Rica. Tek Experts had been launched.

When business opportunities in Asia cropped up, he wanted to be able to offer services in the main languages there – and from the same time zone – so hubs in Vietnam and China followed.

The media-shy Israeli is happy to share the praise: “I was very lucky. We had the right people and the right clients to make it happen.”

His clients are a select group of multinationals, who are more than happy to entrust their IT infrastructure and administration to someone else.

“They want to focus on their core business, so we look after IT support, education, professional services and sales,” he said.

“We follow the sun across all the time zones, supporting our clients’ customers in 25 different languages. The important thing is for the service to be seamless between us and the client. The customers should not even realise that they are not in touch with our client directly.”

To do this, for example, when developing software, Tek Experts sets up a clone of the client’s set-up, so its technical staff can check everything before putting it live.

“For these clients, there is no such thing as being offline. So everything has to work. First time. All the time,” he said.

To achieve that, Tek Experts now employs 1,500 in five different hubs – around 400 of them in Sofia. And the Malta one, opened in September 2014 with 20 people, has already quadrupled its workforce and is anticipating increasing that number of 160 by the end of this year.

He shrugs happily.

We follow the sun across all the time zones, supporting our clients’ customers in 25 different languages

“We only have enough space here at the Marina Business Centre for 110. I guess we are looking for bigger premises,” he said.

Mr Natan said that the decision to come to Malta was aimed at getting a foothold in the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa.

“We wanted a hub that was physically close to these markets and considered a lot of countries. But we felt that the DNA in Malta was very similar to ours: keen, ambitious, dynamic... From the very first candidate interviews, we were impressed by people’s talent, outlook and work ethic,” he said.

The company has been able to get help from various local entities, ranging from Malta Enterprise to the Employment and Training Corporation, for whom Mr Natan had nothing but the highest praise.

CEO Reuben Muscat (left) and chairman Yaniv Natan.

“People were doing all they could to find solutions – and to do so as fast as possible, much faster than our experiences elsewhere,” he said.

Most of the workforce are young graduates – a quarter of them Maltese – who are put through a comprehensive induction ‘boot camp’, and are then shadowed by mentors for a few months to ensure they have not only the hard skills but also the soft ones.

The local operation is being run by Reuben Muscat, a former Go employee with over 19 years of experience in the ICT industry in Malta.

He is already scouting various potential locations for premises, looking for large open working spaces – which the company prefers to buy, rather than rent.“All our offices around the world have the same look and feel,” Mr Muscat said.

“The offices are there to make our employees feel good as our clients do not visit. We believe in investing to take care of them. We understand the importance of retention.”

Recruitment of the best and brightest is the main reason that Mr Natan finally agreed to take the spotlight as clients tend to come to them through referral.

“People want to know who they are going to work for and I guess since we are so new, it is only fair to tell them,” he smiled.

“I guess we should put more onto our website, too. We have reached the point in our history when we should say that we are there and what we stand for...”