Nobody in the Gulf needs to be told to think big. Cities have been built along coastlines, giga-projects are moving from renders to reality and founders here are building companies faster than would have seemed realistic fifteen years ago. Ambition is the default.
I’ve worked on major regeneration projects in London on both sides of the capital structure, and in operating businesses across the Gulf, and along the way I’ve come to believe that most problems can be solved if people stay creative, clear and collaborative for long enough.
I haven’t worked anywhere that believes this more than here.
What gets much less attention is a more basic question, and in my experience it decides whether the ambition pays off: where is the business right now?
Start from where you are
You can only aim well if you know where you’re standing. If you set a target without an accurate starting position, what you have is a goal and a date than a strategy.
I’ve seen this in large asset-heavy institutions all the way to small family businesses. Capable people work extremely hard without a clear view of which products are carrying the company, which customers are profitable, or how much runway is left once committed spend and slow collections are taken into account. They aren’t short of effort. They’re short of information.
To me, that is the main job of the finance function. Control, compliance and the monthly pack all matter, but the real point is to give the people taking the risk an honest, shared view of the business, early enough that changing course is still cheap.
Why the picture gets distorted
That sounds obvious, so it’s worth asking why it goes wrong so often. I see three reasons.
The first exists in every organisation, and it’s just human nature. Information is naturally filtered as it moves up the layers – such that the raw reality of what’s happening on the ground is somewhat lost when it reaches the top. The second is also true of most enterprises, and where the unglamorous work needs to happen for AI to actually add value – and that is the data architecture of an organisation. Consistent definitions and a single source of truth that is available and distributed company wide.
When sales teams are quoting numbers finance don’t recognise, or vice versa – a company wastes valuable resources in simple data reconciliation.
In my opinion, these are both essentially speed problems – hiring plans, leases and supplier contracts take months to unwind, so how much room a business has to react depends on how soon it learns what’s really happening. I’ve seen more than one company make the right call six months too late.
The information was in the building. It just hadn’t reached the people making the decision. The third reason is one my own profession has to own. In a lot of companies, finance has made itself irrelevant. We ask colleagues for inputs without explaining why we need them, push those inputs through systems nobody likes using, and produce backward-looking reports that take enormous effort and rarely change a decision.
Finance should give the clearest view of the business. Too often it ends up simply recording what has already happened.
What leaders can do
Better software helps, but it won’t fix this on its own. Leaders have to decide they would rather hear an accurate picture early than a comfortable one late. In practice, I’d focus on three things.
First, make it safe, and good for someone’s career, to walk in unprompted and say: “This is off track, here’s why, and here’s what I’d do.”
Second, keep management reporting and statutory reporting consistent, and make someone responsible for reconciling the two. If they tell very different stories, one of them is wrong.
Third, cut reporting back to the few drivers that actually determine results, so everyone in the room can keep the real position in their head. The companies I’ve seen handle difficult periods best didn’t usually have the most sophisticated models.
They were the ones where bad news reached the top quickly.
Ambition in the right order
None of this is an argument against the region’s ambition.
The belief that nothing is impossible is a real advantage for the GCC. The founders and operators I meet here are well educated, have worked internationally and are building in markets they know well, and I expect the region to produce more category-defining companies over the next decade than many outside observers predict.
But big things usually get done in a certain order: an honest assessment of where you stand, then the creative thinking, then the execution. The ambition and talent are already here, and so is the capital, though finding the right capital takes work.
The companies that do best will be the ones that add a less exciting habit: knowing, accurately and early, where they actually are.
This article was written by NAMAA CFO Qazim Sumar.
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