How to Start a Marketing Management Business in Dubai

How to Start a Marketing Management Business in Dubai

Marketing management is a licence to run somebody else's marketing function, and the first thing to understand about it is that the responsibility transfers while the authority does not. The budget stays his. The suppliers expect to be paid by him. The people who have to carry out the plan report to one of his managers, and they have a day job that was not written by you. So the practice is accountable every month for a number that half a dozen other people can move, and almost none of the standing needed to earn that fee arrives with the engagement. It has to be negotiated into it, in writing, before the first month closes.

That gap between responsibility and authority is the whole craft of the line. Practices that treat it as an administrative detail spend their second year explaining why a target was missed by people who overruled them on the decisions that caused it. Practices that treat it as the first thing to settle write it into the engagement: who approves what, at what value, within how many working days, and what happens to the plan when an approval does not arrive. That paragraph is worth more to both sides than anything else in the contract.

The client who buys this has a function and nobody to run it

Four situations produce this engagement, and each one changes what the client will actually let you do.

The commonest is the company that has outgrown doing it itself and cannot yet justify a marketing director. It needs marketing continuously rather than in projects, the owner has been handling it between other duties, and he has run out of hours rather than ideas. The second is the local arm of a foreign group, where the strategy is decided at head office and somebody has to translate it into a market that behaves nothing like the one the strategy was written for. The third is a business between managers, where a departure has left a calendar, four live supplier relationships and nobody holding them. The fourth is an owner who has concluded that his last two hires were the wrong answer and would rather buy the capability than employ it again.

In every one of those the buyer is a managing director or an owner, not a marketing manager, and what he is buying is relief from decisions he does not enjoy making. That is why the engagement is bought on trust rather than on a portfolio, and why a reference from a comparable business is the most valuable asset a new practice can acquire.

The fee shape follows from the continuity. A monthly retainer is the honest form, because the work is continuous and the value is in being there when something breaks. A fractional arrangement, priced in days a month, suits a client who wants seniority rather than coverage. What is worth avoiding is a fee calculated as a share of the budget being spent: it reads as alignment at the start and as a conflict by the third quarter, when the client works out that the adviser recommending a larger spend is paid more for recommending it.

Whatever the shape, the engagement begins with a handover, and it is worth being explicit about which parts of the function actually transfer and which only appear to.

A licence to run the function is not a licence to perform everything in it

This is the distinction that matters most on this page, and it is the one most often got wrong by practices that are otherwise competent.

What the line comfortably carries is the management: setting the plan, agreeing the measures, building the calendar, writing the brief, selecting and appointing suppliers, supervising what they produce, controlling the budget against it, and reporting to whoever commissioned the work. That is a substantial service and it is what the client is paying for.

What it does not automatically carry is the performance of the specialist activities it coordinates. Booking media space in your own name, producing the advertising itself, organising an exhibition or an event, recruiting the client's own employees, giving advice on a financial product or making a claim about a health service, or acting for a principal in the sale of his goods — each of those is a line of work in its own right, held by whoever is licensed for it. A manager who quietly absorbs one of them because the supplier was slow has moved outside what he is permitted to do, and the fact that the client asked him to makes no difference at all. The correct answer is to appoint somebody who holds that line, which is also the better commercial answer, because the margin on coordinating a specialist is safer than the margin on becoming one badly.

Two further limits belong here. The first is contractual rather than regulatory: you cannot bind the client unless he has given you written authority to, and a supplier who has only ever met you will pursue you rather than him when an invoice goes unpaid. Settle, for each category of spend, whether contracts are signed by the client or by the practice, and keep it consistent. The second is a tax question that catches new practices at the first year end. Whether media and production costs recharged to a client form part of your own supply or pass through as a disbursement changes the turnover you report and the treatment that follows from it. It is a question to put to the tax authority at the start of the engagement, not after twelve months of invoices have already answered it one way.

The practical conditions are about access, not floor space

A management practice has no stock, no workshop and no customers walking in, so the premises question is smaller than it is for most lines. What is not small is access, and that is where the real conditions sit.

The work needs access to things the client owns: his sales data, his customer records, his advertising accounts, his brand files and his supplier history. A practice that is given a target and refused the data behind it has accepted an unwinnable engagement, and the time to say so is during scoping. Access also means people — the client's sales team, his branch managers, whoever answers the phone — and in most engagements it means a desk on his premises for part of the week, because a function cannot be run entirely by electronic mail.

That last point raises the one structural question on this page. The people doing the work are employed by somebody, and they hold work permits under that employer's licence. An arrangement where your staff sit at a client's office, under the day-to-day direction of his managers, is a real arrangement with real labour consequences and it should be designed rather than allowed to happen. The same is true in reverse where a client wants the practice to manage people he employs: direction is not employment, and the dotted line has to be written down or the first performance dispute lands on nobody.

The mainland and free zone choice follows from these two facts rather than from cost. Invoicing UAE businesses directly for services delivered on their own premises points one way; a practice whose clients sit outside the UAE points the other, and the combination of a free zone licence with staff working regularly at a mainland client's office is exactly the arrangement to take advice on before it is built. Which emirate, which authority, what the permitted activity wording should say and what conditions attach are specific to the case, and ConsultZone confirms them against the intended client base before a structure is committed.

References

1. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation — work permits and labour contracts, including arrangements where staff work at a client's premises. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation
2. Federal Tax Authority — tax enrolment and the treatment of costs recharged to a client. Federal Tax Authority
3. Ministry of Economy — commercial agency matters, which is where acting for a principal in selling his goods sits. Ministry of Economy
4. UAE Government portal — federal law and general government information behind the licensing of professional activities. UAE Government portal