A group in that position usually enters a new continent one of two ways. It appoints a distributor — fast, cheap, and it leaves the relationship with the customer in somebody else's hands. Or it opens a representative office, which puts a flag in the ground but cannot sign, cannot produce and cannot bid.
The brief we were given was the third and hardest option: a unit inside the continent, locally incorporated and locally staffed, holding its own approvals — a business that could win work in its own name rather than act as an outpost of Abu Dhabi. That single choice is what turned the assignment from a corporate exercise into a government one.
In the sectors e7 works in, a company does not simply register and begin trading. Secure printing and identity sit next to the state: government is the customer, the regulator, and the party ultimately answerable for the integrity of the documents involved. Entry at that level has to be understood and agreed, not merely filed.
Who may produce state documents
The right to produce or personalise credentials is a sovereign decision. It is granted to organisations a government has satisfied itself about, and it is rarely delegated down to a registrar.
The national-interest question
Every approval of this kind turns on one question a visitor cannot avoid: why should this exist here, and what does the country hold afterwards that it does not hold today? Jobs, transferred skills, import substitution and regional export are the currency of that answer.
Sequence, not paperwork
Approvals interlock. Some cannot be applied for until another is granted, and taking them out of order does not merely waste weeks — it can mean restarting a process in front of the same officials, with the credibility cost that carries.
Commitments that outlive the meeting
What an investor undertakes in a ministerial meeting becomes the yardstick they are measured against for years afterwards. Anything overstated to win the approval is a liability from the day the unit opens.
The second row is the part that cannot be bought in later. Most of the delay in ventures like this is not caused by refusal — it is caused by arriving in front of the right official with the wrong thing in hand.
Permission of this kind is not granted by a form. It is granted by people who have to be persuaded, in person and more than once, that a foreign group intends to build something durable in their country rather than extract from it.
The engagement ran to ministerial level across the relevant portfolios and, for the decisive conversations, to head of state. That takes months rather than weeks, and much of it is repetition — the same proposition put to different parts of government, each with its own mandate, its own timetable and its own reasons for caution. Consistency across those rooms matters more than eloquence in any one of them.
Our job there was to state the proposition in the country's terms rather than the investor's, and to keep what the client offered inside what the client could actually deliver. An adviser who lets a client oversell in a ministerial meeting has not won anything. They have moved the problem to the opening day, and handed it to the people who have to live there.
A government does not approve a company. It approves a proposition — then watches whether the company is the kind that keeps it.
The unit was incorporated locally and is wholly owned by e7 Group. Its approvals are held in its own name. Its management is its own. Nothing in the structure requires DNH to stay involved for it to keep operating.
That last point is the real test of an assignment like this one. An adviser still indispensable a year after opening has not built a business. They have built a dependency, and charged for it.
- Locally incorporated, with its own management.
- Licences and approvals held by the entity itself, not borrowed from a partner.
- Able to contract, hire and bid in its own name.
- Run by people in the country, not seconded indefinitely from headquarters.
- No continuing dependency on the adviser who built it.
This was one engagement, but very little of it was specific to one client. The same shape holds for any group trying to put a real operation into a market where the state is also the customer.
Choose the jurisdiction on its process, not its map.
A country that grants approvals predictably is worth more than a larger neighbour that grants them eventually. Market size is easy to research and tells you the least about whether you will ever open.
Establish the order of approvals before you spend anything.
The pathway is knowable in advance. Discovering it by trial costs more in credibility with officials than it does in fees.
Lead with the national-interest case.
The investment case belongs in the board paper. The case that opens doors is the one written from the country's side of the table.
Promise only what survives the opening.
Every commitment made to secure approval is measured later, usually by someone who was not in the original meeting.
Design the handover on day one.
If the exit is designed at the end, it is not an exit — it is a renegotiation, and the client is in the weaker position for it.