About
A desk, not a portal.
Business setup in the UAE is a solved problem that is sold badly. We are trying to sell it well: one person who knows your file, a fee you can see the components of, and advice that occasionally costs us the work.
What we are
Corporate services, narrowly defined.
We form companies, obtain licences, arrange residence visas, prepare bank files and keep the resulting compliance obligations filed on time. Across every emirate, in free zones, on the mainland and offshore.
We are not a law firm and we do not pretend to be one. When something needs a licensed advocate, a registered tax agent or a chartered auditor, we say so and we introduce you to one. A good deal of what goes wrong in this industry starts with somebody answering a question they were not qualified to answer.
What we will talk you out of
An offshore company when you actually need residence. A three-entity holding structure for a business turning over half a million dirhams. The cheapest package in the northern emirates when your clients are institutional and your bank will be reading the address. A Golden Visa application that will not succeed and will sit on your record when it fails.
How it works
One file, one person, start to finish.
The dominant model in this industry is a sales desk in front of a processing floor. Somebody persuasive sells you a package, the file moves to whoever is free that week, and by the third handover nobody can tell you why a particular activity was chosen or what the bank asked for in the second round. It is efficient for the firm and it is why so many clients cannot answer basic questions about their own company.
We run it the other way round. The person who scopes your file keeps it through incorporation, banking and the first year of compliance. They know that your revenue is invoiced in euros, that one shareholder is resident in a country whose documents take eleven weeks to attest, and that your licence says consultancy while your second contract is for resale. Those are the details that decide outcomes, and they do not survive a handover.
What that costs us is scale. A desk model does not multiply the way a processing floor does, and there are weeks when we cannot take work on. When that happens we say so rather than accepting the file and putting it in a queue.
What we do not take
We take no commission from any free zone, any bank, any landlord and any insurer. That is worth stating plainly because commission is the industry's normal arrangement, and it is invisible to the client. A firm paid a referral fee by three authorities will recommend one of those three, and the recommendation will sound exactly like advice.
Our fee comes from you and it is itemised: every government charge shown at cost, beside our own, before you commit to anything. If a cheaper authority is the right answer, it costs us nothing to say so.
Values
Four words, and what each one costs us.
Afterwards
The year after the licence.
Setting a company up is the easy part and it is where most firms stop. What follows is a calendar that nobody hands you: corporate tax registration within its window, the return nine months after your year end, VAT once you cross the threshold, an economic substance notification if you hold shares in anything, a UBO register that updates within days of a change rather than at renewal, the establishment card that expires on a different date from the licence, and an audit that is now a condition of the free zone rate rather than a formality.
Almost none of that is difficult. All of it is dated, and the penalties attach to missed dates rather than to bad judgement. The most common expensive mistake we see is not a wrong structure — it is a correct structure that nobody maintained, discovered at renewal when the licence will not reissue, the visas are frozen and the bank has restricted the account.
Honestly
Who we are a bad fit for.
Anyone whose only question is price. There are firms in Dubai that will licence a company for less than we will, and for a straightforward single-shareholder consultancy with no visas and no banking they are a reasonable choice. We are worth paying for when the file has something in it — an unusual nationality, a corporate shareholder, a regulated activity, a bank that has already said no once.
Anyone who wants a structure built to conceal an owner. The beneficial ownership register looks through nominee arrangements by design, banks are trained to find exactly that, and we would rather lose the work than file it.
Anyone who needs the answer to be yes. Some Golden Visa applications will not succeed. Some activities will not be licensed at the authority you have set your mind on. Some businesses should not be here at all, and occasionally the right advice is that the UAE is the wrong jurisdiction for what you are describing.
This site
Why it is written like this.
Most of this site is not marketing. It is four hundred pages covering the forty licensing authorities, the activities they license, the districts you would take an office in, the residence routes, the banking reality and the compliance calendar — written out in the detail we would use on a call, including the parts that are unflattering to the industry and occasionally to us.
It exists for a straightforward reason: this is a market where the published information is mostly written to generate enquiries rather than to be correct, and where a great deal of it is simply out of date. The employment law was rewritten in 2021 and half the advice still describes the old position. The Golden Visa property rules changed in 2026 and guidance written the year before is now actively misleading. Small Business Relief ends for tax periods after December 2026 and very few companies relying on it know that.
Where we publish a figure, it comes from the authority that sets it, and where a number varies by emirate or is not published at all, the page says so rather than inventing a national average. Where we have no view worth having, we have not written a page.