Five capabilities that only matter together.
A strategy nobody can license is a document. A licence with nobody to run it is a cost. We deliver the whole sequence — and you can stop after any stage without being left with half a business.
Know before you commit.
Expansion failures rarely come from a bad market. They come from entering a good market with the wrong assumption about who buys, what the regulator requires, and how long the first sale actually takes.
We do the unglamorous part: primary conversations with operators already in the market, a regulatory read done against the current rulebook rather than last year's summary, and a cost model that includes the line items most plans forget — visa quotas, mandatory local audit, bank onboarding delays, Ramadan and summer seasonality.
Discuss this serviceWhat is included
- Market sizing, segmentation and demand validation
- Regulatory, licensing and ownership mapping
- Competitive landscape and white-space analysis
- Pricing architecture and go-to-market design
- Full feasibility study and investment case
- Typical duration
- 3–8 weeks
- Primary output
- Board-ready decision memo
- Commercial basis
- Fixed fee
What is included
- Jurisdiction comparison: mainland, free zone or offshore
- Trade licence application and activity selection
- Shareholding, governance and substance design
- Corporate bank account introductions and onboarding
- Visas, establishment card and PRO services
- Corporate tax registration, ESR and UBO filings
- Typical duration
- 4–8 weeks to licence
- Primary output
- Licensed, banked entity
- Commercial basis
- Fixed fee + pass-through
A legal home, properly built.
Jurisdiction is the most expensive decision to reverse. A free zone licence that cannot invoice a mainland client, or a structure that fails the substance test two years later, costs far more than it saved.
We design the structure around where your revenue is booked, where your people sit and where your tax exposure lands — then we file it, chase it, and hand you an operating entity rather than a folder of forms. Government fees are passed through at cost with receipts.
Discuss this serviceCapacity where it pays.
Gulf salaries make some functions structurally uneconomic to run locally. North and West Africa solve that without the time-zone penalty of Asia — and with French, English and Arabic in the same labour pool.
We benchmark locations on what actually determines success: depth of the relevant skill, employer contribution rates, attrition, connectivity, data-protection regime and the realistic cost of a senior manager who can hold the site together. Then we build it, run it, and transfer it to you on an agreed date.
Compare delivery locationsWhat is included
- Location benchmark across candidate countries and cities
- Fully loaded cost model and savings case
- Build-operate-transfer programme management
- Vendor selection, contracting and SLA design
- Data protection and cross-border transfer review
- Typical duration
- 6–18 months
- Primary output
- Running delivery centre
- Commercial basis
- Build-operate-transfer
What is included
- Employer of record and professional employer organisation
- Payroll, social contributions and end-of-service accruals
- Executive, commercial and technical search
- Local labour law, contracts and termination guidance
- Workforce planning and compensation benchmarking
- Typical duration
- From 2 weeks
- Primary output
- Compliant people on the ground
- Commercial basis
- Per employee, per month
Hire before you incorporate.
The best candidate is rarely available on the week your licence arrives. An employer of record lets you hire now, compliantly, and migrate the contract to your own entity later.
It also de-risks the market test: you can run a two-person commercial team for six months before committing to a full structure. If the market works, we transfer everyone across. If it does not, you exit cleanly, with the notice and end-of-service obligations handled correctly.
Discuss this serviceFrom beachhead to business unit.
A new market usually survives its first year on founder energy. It survives its third on operating discipline — and the handover between the two is where most expansions quietly stall.
We install the operating model, the reporting rhythm and the controls that let headquarters see problems while they are still small, then step back. Where growth is better bought than built, we support partnership, joint venture and acquisition work in the same markets.
Discuss this serviceWhat is included
- Operating model and process architecture
- Systems selection and implementation oversight
- Performance governance and management reporting
- Cost optimisation and margin recovery programmes
- Partnership, joint venture and acquisition support
- Typical duration
- Ongoing or project-based
- Primary output
- A self-sufficient unit
- Commercial basis
- Retainer or fixed scope
Before you ask.
The questions that come up in almost every first conversation, answered the way we would answer them on the call.
No. Most relationships start with a three to four week diagnostic on a single market. It is fixed fee, it stands on its own, and roughly a third of the time it ends with us recommending you do not proceed — or proceed somewhere else.
A formation agent executes the jurisdiction you already chose. We are accountable for whether that was the right choice, and for what happens in the eighteen months after the licence arrives. Where a formation agent is the efficient tool for a step, we use one and manage them.
Routinely. Most clients arrive with group tax counsel and an audit relationship already in place. We work to their constraints rather than around them, and we are happy for them to review our structuring recommendations before anything is filed.
For most service and engineering functions, a North African hub lands between forty and sixty-five per cent below a Gulf or Western European cost base once social contributions, facilities and management overhead are included. We model your specific roles rather than quoting an industry average — the spread between functions is wide.
English, French and Arabic — in meetings, in filings and in the documents we hand over. On this corridor that is not a convenience; a Maghreb labour contract and a Gulf regulator rarely speak the same language.
Tell us the market.
We will tell you what it takes.
A thirty-minute call, no deck. You describe where you want to be in eighteen months; we tell you honestly what stands between you and it — and whether we are the right people to help.