Tamar Gakharia on Nation-Building Finance and Georgian Resilience

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/26

Tamar Gakharia, CFO of CBS Group, has overseen $500 million in mergers and acquisitions spanning telecom, energy, and entertainment while shaping Georgian finance as a nation-building tool. Drawing on the resilience forged in post-Soviet collapse, she emphasizes balancing stability and growth through regulated industries and emerging sectors like telecom and fintech. Her story—recognized by Forbes and chronicled in a memoir—intertwines professional discipline, survival as a single mother, and dedication to empowering women in finance. She frames Georgia’s fragility amid great-power rivalries as a lesson in resilience, stressing cultural identity, financial stability, and strategic capital flows as foundations for national survival.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Gakharia on Georgia’s post-Soviet realities and the use of finance as a nation-building instrument. Gakharia explains small-state fragility amid great-power rivalry and the importance of cultural identity, regulated stability, and strategic capital flows. She details leading $500 million in mergers and acquisitions to retain domestic ownership, restructuring balance sheets, divesting weak assets, and investing in telecom and fintech while leveraging banks to channel foreign capital. As a single mother, she turned survival into disciplined practice. Recognized by Forbes, her memoir underlines a “strategy house” of KPIs—market share, EBITDA, ARPU, churn, and NPS—to transform Georgian telecom.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today we are here with Tamar Gakharia. She is the Chief Financial Officer of CBS Group, a major Georgian holding company with investments across energy, transport, real estate, consumer platforms, and telecommunications. She has led roughly $500 million in mergers and acquisitions across telecom, energy, and entertainment. As a Georgian with a post-Soviet background, what should people in North America understand about Georgia—both in the Soviet period and in the current war context?

Tamar Gakharia: The fragility of small countries like Georgia in great-power rivalries forces us to work under constant pressure. Georgia shows how small nations positioned between competing blocs become testing grounds for larger geopolitical struggles. Despite instability and recent wars in the region, our survival depends on cultural identity, faith, and traditional values. These provide resilience, which is essential for small nations.

Our history and identity give us the strength to resist hard power and sustain statehood against larger forces. After the Cold War, promises of security guarantees began to break down. Small states must survive without overreliance on patrons, which makes conditions even more difficult for businesses. Large powers should recognize that neglecting crises in smaller nations accelerates the erosion of the global order. Georgia survived the 1990s by relying on its identity and resilience.

In the 1990s, Georgia faced collapse, hyperinflation, and currency instability. Survival became both an art and a way of life—and a tool in business. International finance kept the state afloat, while leaders like me worked to empower domestic finance, because domestic finance enables nation-building. That was the foundation for my approach to building businesses and ensuring they remained national. The mergers and acquisitions I led were aimed at keeping capital inside the country. I bought out shares from…

Overseas owners were involved, and that is how I contributed to building domestic finance. The resilience and lessons learned from the post–Cold War order still affect Georgia and the region today.

Jacobsen: In business, especially with extremely large capital flows—say, from half a billion dollars in assets up to several tens of billions when operating at a national scale—how does this work in a smaller state? Especially in a context where alliances are shifting, not bilaterally, but with everyone pulling inward and focusing on their own issues, creating a kind of multilateral retraction of interests that shakes up the region.

Gakharia: Even in business, as in politics, there are always bilateral interests from different parties. I believe finance is a nation-building tool. Finance is not just about numbers; it is a vehicle for creating stability, opportunity, and transformation, and for recovering from conflict and collapse. In business, I tried to introduce as many tools as possible and to attract diverse sources of capital.

This was to create stability for future development, because money generates money, and the only stable financial institutions here have been banks. Banks became the vehicles for attracting foreign capital and transforming the financial markets. Working in banks gave me firsthand knowledge of how to secure financing and obtain lower rates for businesses.

I began restructuring the capital structure of the companies I managed. That helped reduce their burdens and secure funds for future growth. Brick by brick, I built stronger and healthier financial positions for these companies. I also divested from businesses that drained resources and invested in those with strong futures. As a result, our balance sheet speaks for itself.

This is the microeconomic level, but the same principles apply at the macroeconomic level. It is of paramount importance for our country.

Success depends on access to international finance, reducing burdens, and investing in sectors with a future. That is what happens in business as well. The right capital ratio keeps companies moving forward, and that is always on my mind.

That is my decision point when considering divestments, investments, mergers, or synergies. It always matters with whom I enter a merger or create synergies, because shareholders also matter. In small economies like Georgia, the influence of business on national development is significant.

Jacobsen: There is another aspect of your story—the balance between professional and personal life. At twenty-three, you were already a monk-like figure of discipline, rising as a financial star in Georgia’s capital-intensive industries. Years ago, Sheryl Sandberg, deeply involved with Facebook (now Meta) under Mark Zuckerberg, launched the Lean In movement in North America. Her book was pitched mainly to highly educated professional women, but the general message was resilience.

For you, in a post-Soviet context with more traditional values and a stronger emphasis on family compared to the West, how do you navigate parenting as a high-performing professional in the finance and business sector?

Gakharia: For me, survival had to become strategy. At that time, as a single mother with a demanding job and a turbulent personal life, the only way forward was to turn survival into a plan. Work became my anchor, my alibi. It kept my mind focused on providing for myself and my daughter.

In parenting, my goal was to be fully present wherever I was. If I was at work, I was 100 percent at work. If I was with my daughter, I gave her 100 percent of my attention. It was not the quantity of time but the quality that mattered. That quality was enough for her to understand that we were both in survival mode together.

Sometimes I had no choice but to keep her with me. She spent days and nights in the bank while I worked—crawling under tables, sleeping on desks, or resting in her car seat nearby. She was always with me, and that became part of our shared survival.

Survival mode defined our future. My daughter and I both felt, even at an emotional level, that my work had to speak for both of us. People noticed that resilience—the strength of two Georgian daughters—and they supported me when it mattered most.

Jacobsen: What inspired you to write your memoir and collect your story in one place?

Gakharia: In fact, the story began the other way around. Forbes proposed it. They found my story interesting—not just for Georgia but for the wider region. They also found the story of women in finance inspiring. That is how it began. What influenced my decision was a clear mission: to empower women, inspire emerging leaders, and contribute to building stronger, more resilient societies through finance, education, and storytelling. I believe sharing is powerful.

Jacobsen: What are the important vulnerabilities in the Georgian system today—areas that require protection, mitigation, or contingency planning? For example: grids, gas, or mobile core infrastructure.

Gakharia: While building portfolios for shareholders, I carry a double responsibility: to the companies and to the shareholders themselves. That responsibility guides my decisions. When I construct a portfolio, I always think about the ceiling and the floor.

For me, the “floor” is defined by regulated businesses. They may not offer much growth, but they provide stability during crises. Regulated businesses ensure predictable cash flows, a kind of financial pillow you can rely on. The tradeoff is capped profitability, since regulated sectors don’t allow for aggressive price increases.

On the other hand, I must also think about growth potential. This is where creativity matters—where I seek investments that offer higher growth opportunities. Telecommunications is one example, as is the financial sector, particularly fintech. Entertainment and other industries with emerging potential also fit this category. This mix allows me to balance the portfolio—stability on one side, growth on the other.

I am not afraid to improvise with new growth opportunities. That is how I navigate crises and overcome difficulties when they emerge. I always keep my hand on the pulse of the market. If I see that a portfolio company can be divested at its highest capitalization, I propose it. This is how I balance adverse market changes—by maintaining both stable, regulated businesses and higher-risk, higher-margin businesses in the portfolio.

Jacobsen: What about KPIs around companies like Nokia or Vodafone? What key performance indicators would show that, for instance, a Vodafone model outperforms going it alone or running a fully branded GV in terms of success rates and indicators of performance?

Gakharia: We define this through what I call our “strategy house.” Our main targets are revenue market share, EBITDA margin, active subscriber market share, and NPS (Net Promoter Score). These translate into the company’s vision—for example, in telecommunications, the vision is to lead Georgia’s telco future with digital-first, data-powered, personalized experiences.

This vision translates into the mission: giving people the opportunity to be closer to each other. From there, we define strategic pillars—such as market share growth, ARPU (average revenue per user) uplift, churn reduction, diversification of revenue streams into digital services, increased app engagement, and improved digital NPS.

We also focus on transforming the company itself—making decision-making more data-driven, increasing employee use of BI (business intelligence) tools, and embedding data-driven decision-making into the company’s DNA. That is how our strategy house is built, how our KPIs are structured, and how we leverage Vodafone’s global experience.

Our goal is to transform the Georgian telecom market for the future. Vodafone chose us as partners because of our core pillars: being data-driven, flexible, and working in ways that differ from other telecom companies. They saw an opportunity to share their knowledge, and with that knowledge, to transform customer experience and improve the lives of the Georgian people.

Jacobsen: Do you have any final pieces of Georgian wisdom, drawn from tradition, that you can share with readers today?

Gakharia: My book begins with the words: “One cannot build the Queen’s palace from the ruins of a henhouse.” These words were chosen deliberately. They capture the essence of the struggles Georgians—and Georgian women in particular—have faced to survive, to gain education, to move forward, and to secure the financial means to stand independently.

In this challenge, I see the parallel between my life and the life of my country: how step by step, stone by stone, and brick by heavy brick, we rise from ruins and claim a future worthy of dignity.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Tamar, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.

Gakharia: Thank you so much. I hope I covered all the topics you wanted. It was wonderful speaking with you, and I appreciate your time.

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