Situations rarely break where the damage shows. They break where nobody was looking.
Private, selective work with founders, business owners and principals. I work at the level of commercial reality, structure and human decision logic — to restore clarity, control and movement.
Business Recovery & Crisis Intervention
When the situation is stuck.
For owner-led businesses with a costly live problem: a stalled project, delivery failure, cash-flow pressure, partner or stakeholder conflict, a key client or supplier relationship at risk, operational disorder, or a business that is permanently firefighting.
The visible symptoms are rarely the whole problem. The job is to identify what is actually breaking, what must be protected first, and what sequence of decisions restores control.
This includes business-critical projects that are delayed, fragmented, misaligned or producing activity without progress.
Send a short written description of the situation. If it fits my work, the first step is a focused Situation Analysis, with a fixed fee agreed in writing from the scope before work begins.
Hands-on recovery involvement is primarily UAE-based. Strategic analysis can be remote. This is business and project recovery — not engineering design, construction supervision or technical project management.
Decision Logic
When the decision is stuck.
Intelligent people repeat expensive mistakes because the circumstances change while the underlying logic does not. They also misread each other because they can be reasoning from different logics while looking at the same facts.
Decision Logic makes that underlying logic visible before it costs more.
Decision Session
One live decision. One focused piece of work.
Use it for a major decision, partnership, deal, commitment, recurring problem or situation that needs clarity now.
- 90-minute session with Anna, online or in person
- Facts separated from assumptions
- Blind spots and contradictions named
- Options, dependencies and risks laid out
- A concise written Decision Logic Snapshot afterwards
If the issue is not one decision but a repeated pattern or multi-party dynamic, deeper analysis can be scoped after the first session. This may include a structured Decision Map and additional sessions. By scope.
Private Strategic Advisory
For selected clients who want me involved at key decision points over time — situation reframing, decision reviews, negotiation preparation, early identification of structural risk and support around business direction.
Usually available after an initial Decision Session or Recovery engagement. By scope.
Selected situations
Different industries. The same work: finding the real problem before more time, money or energy is spent solving the wrong one.
Project Recovery · Major UAE construction projectRestoring control when a live construction project started to derailRestoring control by finding where commercial reality, project-management logic and execution had stopped speaking the same language.
Ongoing engagement
Situation
A specialist subcontractor on a major UAE construction project was in an escalating conflict with the main contractor’s project management team. Work was still moving, but the project was entering a phase of a great deal of activity and decreasing visibility and control.
What was really happening
The two sides were operating through different decision logics. The project manager needed programme visibility, manpower allocation, sequence of works, clear commitments and reporting. The owner was focused on procurement, production, site constraints and what could realistically be delivered, and when. Each believed the other was missing something obvious. The core problem was the absence of a shared operating language.
What I did
- Separated valid project requirements from the emotional conflict around them
- Restructured the programme into a clearer recovery schedule
- Reviewed manpower allocation, delivery constraints and execution sequence
- Supported communication around the recovery plan and strengthened the site structure, including a dedicated site engineer
Current status
The communication breakdown has eased. Project requirements are being translated into a clearer operating structure, and site execution has improved with stronger technical coordination in place.
Business Architecture · Owner-led healthcare businessFrom a successful clinic to a business that can scaleTurning an intuitively successful business into one its owners can understand, manage and scale deliberately.
Situation
Two doctors had built a profitable, highly rated dental clinic from scratch — one that could run without them present every day. They had built it through professional judgement and instinct rather than formal management systems. When growth came up, so did a harder question: what exactly are we scaling?
What was really happening
The problem was not management ability — the clinic proved the opposite. The owners could not yet describe their own operating model clearly enough to scale it deliberately.
What I did
- Built a structured business review that moved them from clinical thinking into the role of owners
- Defined what the clinic must deliver to patients and to its owners, and the owners’ own benchmark for an ideal clinic
- Reviewed clinical quality, patient experience and commercial performance from the perspective of owners, patients, employees and the numbers
- Ran a gap analysis, separated goals from KPIs, and reduced everything to a limited set of priorities
Result
The owners moved from “we do not fully understand how this business should develop” to a structured view of what they had built, why it worked, where the real gaps were, what to protect, and what had to happen before scaling.
Expansion Decision · Interiors and hospitality supplierShould we build our own production capability?Preventing growth ambition from automatically becoming capital expenditure.
Situation
An established interiors business ran an asset-light model: it won projects and managed delivery, while production was outsourced to a long-standing subcontractor. Moving toward larger hospitality contracts, the owners began discussing their own production facility. The logic looked simple — larger contracts, own production, higher margin, growth. It had not been tested.
What was really happening
A growth decision was in fact an operating-model decision. Owning production does not simply remove a subcontractor’s margin; it adds fixed cost, coordination and execution risk. The real question: does it create enough value to justify becoming a materially more complex business?
What I did
- Compared current subcontracting cost with the true in-house cost: rent, equipment, labour, supervision and idle capacity
- Assessed working-capital impact, quality and rework risk, and management burden
- Established the level of contracted demand needed to justify fixed capacity
- Tested whether the owners actually wanted to run a production business
Result
The question changed from “should we open a factory?” to “under what commercial and operating conditions would owning production improve this business?” The sequence became: validate margin, demand and operating appetite first; commit capital second.
Venture Premortem · Jewellery technology startupFinding the flaw before scaling the ideaSeparating a real problem from a commercially viable solution — and stress-testing adoption logic before more capital, time and identity are committed.
Situation
An early-stage venture set out to create jewellery authentication and traceability on a blockchain-based platform. The founder had identified a real market problem. What did not yet exist was the business behind it. We worked from the ground up to build an operating model rather than a presentation plan.
What was really happening
We broke the venture into the questions that decide whether a business can exist: who the real customer is, what they pay for, which parts of the jewellery ecosystem must participate and why, and where the model conflicts with the industry’s status quo. The technical platform was not the hardest part. Adoption was — and I became increasingly sceptical it could be achieved.
What happened next
The founder continued the project with others and a product was built. The central problem surfaced exactly where expected: users were not willing enough to adopt it, and the venture did not become the scalable platform originally imagined.
How to start
Start with a Decision Session — 90 minutes of focused work on one live decision, with a concise written Decision Logic Snapshot afterwards.
Request a Decision Session →Describe it in a few lines. If it fits my work, I will propose a focused Situation Analysis as the first step.
Describe your situation →Deeper work is scoped only after the first step, if it is actually needed.
not a service label.
A few lines are enough. I read every inquiry personally.
Describe your situationStrategic and analytical advisory. Not therapy, coaching, legal, financial or investment advice. I do not raise capital, broker deals or provide regulated real-estate services.