Run from Cairo

The mistake looks the same every time. A Saudi promotion goes quiet for a day in July, and when somebody asks why, the answer is that the twenty-third was a holiday. It was. In Cairo.

A great many Gulf accounts are run from Cairo. The talent is there, the cost works, and the platform does not care where the login is. I have sat on both sides of that arrangement, and the governance problem is never skill. The Cairo teams I have watched are as good as any in the region.

The problem is that everything the team does not think about is Egyptian. Its holidays. Its Arabic. Its sense of what eighty riyals feels like, which from a Cairo desk is a serious sum and from a Riyadh desk is lunch. So the offer is set a little too low, the Eid greeting arrives with an accent, and the campaign calendar quietly follows the wrong country.

From the Cairo desk none of this looks like a mistake. The team did what the calendar on the wall said. The calendar was the problem, and nobody in Riyadh had ever asked to see it.

The usual response is to move the team, or to hire someone in Riyadh to sit on top of it. Both are slow and expensive, and both treat a calendar problem as a people problem.

The fix is to move the calendar. The team serving Riyadh keeps Riyadh's holidays, Riyadh's licence dates and Riyadh's prices on the wall, in riyals, and is measured against them. The Cairo weekend, the Cairo idea of a good discount, the Cairo Eid: none of it gets a say in a Saudi account.

When the wall is right, the work is right, because the work was never the problem.

The team does not need to be in Riyadh. Riyadh needs to be on the wall.