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Activity 06
Target operating model, organisational design, process and working capital improvement, freight procurement and commercial due diligence, under a UAE management consultancy licence.
What this activity does
We take on the questions we have already lived with. The activities in this house ran into the same problems first, including where decision rights sit, why the cash conversion cycle will not shorten and which part of an operating model is actually holding the weight, and we worked them out on our own profit and loss account before anyone was invoiced for the answer. That is the whole basis of the practice, and it is also why we turn down work outside it.
An engagement runs in three stages, and we will end it at any of them. Scoping fixes the question, the part of the business in play and the test the work has to pass, written down before a fee is agreed. Diagnosis is done by the people who will sign the advice, using your own numbers and conversations with the team who run the work, including the constraints nobody mentioned in the first meeting. Delivery is the change itself, handed to the people who will operate it, with us still on the file while it beds in.
When we say we stand behind the outcome in writing, we mean that the engagement letter names the result we are accountable for instead of the hours we will bill. We do not take an engagement we cannot describe that way. The improvements we look for come from how a business is arranged, such as who decides what, how cash moves through the operation, how freight is bought and which customers and products actually earn their place. Those changes hold because the operating team owns them, and we will tell a prospective client when the gain is not there to be had.
Some engagements we decline immediately. Work outside the sectors where we have real operating depth, meaning logistics and freight, real estate, family offices, consumer goods and manufacturing and trade. Anything whose purpose is to obscure who owns a business or where it is resident. Briefs that ask us to confirm a decision already made instead of testing it. We advise where we have run the same kind of business ourselves, in the markets we know, and we say no to the rest.
Where a question is really about artificial intelligence, meaning whether a workflow should use it, how to evaluate it and what it costs to run, that work sits inside the consultancy as applied AI advisory. It is advice on adoption and evaluation, and not software we sell.
We are also clear about the boundaries of our licence. Tax, audit, legal drafting and investment advice sit outside it. Those questions come up often in this work, and when they do we say so plainly and work alongside the advisers who are qualified to answer them, instead of offering an opinion we are not entitled to give.
How engagements usually run
A first engagement starts with a short diagnostic that sets out what the work has to answer and how we will know whether it worked. If that diagnostic shows the problem is not one we should be paid to solve, we say so and stop there.
How an engagement works
We establish the question the work has to answer and write it down, with the test it must pass, before anything is bought or built.
The change and the way it is measured go live together, reviewed on an agreed timetable, with the working alongside your own team rather than behind a wall.
Responsibility moves to the people who run the business day to day, so what we build keeps working after the engagement ends.
Where we take engagements
Common questions
No. Discretion is a deliberate choice. We do not publish a client list and we do not name the businesses we advise, because that is the same discipline our clients rely on us to keep.
Owner-led businesses and family companies that want operating work, such as the operating model, organisational design, working capital and procurement, instead of tax, legal or investment advice, none of which we provide.
The United Arab Emirates, where we are based, and the wider Gulf, with work in South Asia where a client's supply chain reaches there. We do not advise on markets we have not operated in.
With a short, confidential conversation to agree the question before anything is committed. It is free of charge, and we reply to every enquiry within two working days.
A fixed fee for each stage, agreed in writing before the stage begins. We do not bill by the hour, and any element linked to results is capped and tied to something we can genuinely influence.
The senior people you meet in the first conversation. We do not win an engagement with principals and then staff it with juniors, which is one of the reasons we take on few engagements at a time.
We tell you. A short diagnostic that ends with a clear recommendation you can carry out yourself is a good outcome, and it is how several of our longer relationships started.
Begin
If it sits outside our licence, we will say so in the first reply.
