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Sand Birds
Ghaf trees on dunes in the Dubai desert, with morning mist on the horizon

How we work

Scope and fee are fixed in writing before the work starts

How the commercial arrangement is made is rarely written down in this market. Opacity about terms is a common complaint buyers here have, and it is cheap to fix.

The sequence

Five steps, in this order

Nothing here is unusual. It is written down because writing it down is what makes it checkable — you will know at the first conversation whether this is what actually happens.

  1. 01

    A scoping conversation

    Under an hour, no fee

    We establish what the decision actually is, who inside your organisation owns it, and by when it has to be made. Then whether any of our three licensed activities covers it. Where it does not, we say so and name the kind of firm that does — that answer is free and it is sometimes the whole conversation.

  2. 02

    A written scope

    Two to five working days

    The list of work, what you are left holding, the duration, and how completion is confirmed — by your sign-off, not ours. It also states what is excluded and who performs that work instead, because the boundary of a licence is part of the offer rather than a footnote to it.

  3. 03

    A fixed fee against that scope

    Agreed before anything starts

    One figure for the work described. No hourly meter and no variation for work that took longer than we estimated: if we scoped it wrong, that is our error to absorb. A change of scope is a written change, priced before it happens.

  4. 04

    The work, with the artefacts visible as they form

    The agreed duration

    Registers, models and drafts are shared while they are being built rather than presented at the end. A deliverable first seen at the closing meeting is a deliverable nobody could correct.

  5. 05

    Completion, confirmed by you

    At the end, and sometimes after

    You sign the certificate of services delivered against the criteria set out in the written scope — a board resolution, a walkthrough, a model producing the expected output, depending on the service. We do not certify our own work as finished.

The arrangement

Six rules we can be held to

Each of these costs us something real — a service we cannot take, a commission we cannot accept, a renewal we cannot hold. They are on the website rather than in a proposal because that is what makes them worth anything.

No hourly billing

The obstacle for most buyers in this market is not the rate but the model: an open meter makes the size of the commitment unknowable at the moment of deciding. Fixed scope, fixed fee, every time.

No open-ended retainer

Only one service runs on a standing cycle, and it says so: the retained market watch, delivered as a standing cycle or a short run of periodic trend sessions, as agreed in the scope. Everything else has an end date.

No work outside the licence

Licence 79497 covers three activities. Where your question needs an auditor, a lawyer, a tax agent or a corporate service provider, we say so rather than stretching a scope to reach it.

No commission from anyone we assess

We take no fee, rebate or referral payment from a distributor, partner or supplier we screen or review. A shortlist written by someone who could be paid by its winner is not a shortlist.

We do not negotiate on your behalf

We produce the commercial position — what to ask for, what can be conceded. The negotiation and the agreement stay with you and your legal advisers.

Your data goes back to you

What you receive follows the scope: reports and presentations as standard, and, where the scope includes a model or a register, that model is delivered working and that register in a format you can open and keep.

On fees

Why there is no price list here

The standard offer in this market is a free consultation with nothing written behind it. We would rather say plainly why a number is absent than print one that means nothing.

A fee follows a scope. The same title — a market entry feasibility study, say — covers three weeks of desk work in one case and ten weeks across three jurisdictions in another. A figure printed without the scope attached is either a floor that misleads or an average that applies to nobody.

What is published instead is the procedure by which the figure is arrived at, and the commitment that it is fixed before work starts and does not move because the work took us longer than we estimated.

What you can ask for immediately

  • A written scope with a fixed fee, after one scoping conversation.
  • A statement of what is excluded and who performs it instead.
  • An honest answer about whether the work sits inside our licence at all.

Start with the question, not the service

It is usually faster to describe the decision you are facing than to pick a service from the list. If one of them fits, we will name it; if none does, we will say that too.

Describe the decisionSee the services