An Unexpected Path Into Public Life

Nothing in my early career suggested that I would one day sit across the table from ministers, ambassadors, and royalty. I began as an entrepreneur in the north of England, building Furniture in Fashion from a modest operation in Bolton into one of the largest online furniture retailers in the United Kingdom. My education came from warehouses, supplier negotiations, and customers, not from diplomatic academies or policy institutes.

Yet in January 2022 I was appointed Senior Advisor to HRH Sheikh Ahmad Bin Faisal Al Qassimi of the UAE, and in the years since, my work has expanded into investment facilitation, trade corridors linking the UK, the UAE, and Pakistan, and advisory roles spanning tourism, sport, and the energy sector. That journey, from shop floor to statecraft, has taught me lessons that no classroom could. This post is an attempt to share the most important of them, honestly and without embellishment.

Governments Move Differently, and That Is by Design

The first lesson every business person learns when entering the world of government advisory is that the pace is different. In commerce, speed is a virtue. Decisions are made in days, sometimes hours, because delay costs money. In government, deliberation is a virtue. Decisions affect millions of people, bind future administrations, and set precedents that outlive everyone in the room.

Early in my advisory work, I found this frustrating. I wanted to apply the entrepreneurial instinct: identify the opportunity, move decisively, correct course later if needed. I gradually understood that governments cannot operate this way, and should not. A business that makes a poor decision loses money. A government that makes a poor decision can damage livelihoods, relationships between nations, and public trust that takes decades to rebuild.

The lesson for advisors is patience without passivity. You keep the work moving through preparation, relationship building, and careful documentation, so that when the moment for decision arrives, everything is ready. The best advisors I have observed treat the slow periods not as dead time but as construction time.

Trust Is the Only Currency That Matters

In business, contracts govern relationships. In government advisory, trust governs everything, and contracts merely record what trust has already established. When HRH Sheikh Ahmad Bin Faisal Al Qassimi appointed me as Senior Advisor, the appointment itself was the culmination of a long process of demonstrated reliability, not the beginning of one.

Trust at this level is built through small things repeated consistently. Arriving prepared. Keeping confidences absolutely. Delivering unwelcome news directly rather than softening it into uselessness. Never overstating what you can deliver. In diplomatic and governmental circles, word travels, and a single instance of exaggeration or indiscretion can end an advisory career quietly and permanently.

I have also learned that trust must flow in both directions. An advisor who does not trust the principal enough to speak honestly becomes an echo, and echoes add no value. The most productive advisory relationships I have experienced, including those described on my services page, are those where candour is expected and respected on both sides.

Listen for What Is Not Being Said

Business negotiations are usually explicit. Both sides state positions, exchange offers, and converge or walk away. Government and diplomatic discussions operate on a different frequency. What is left unsaid often matters more than what is spoken. A minister who praises a proposal warmly but does not commit to a timeline is communicating something. A delegation that sends a deputy rather than a principal is communicating something. An agenda that omits a topic everyone expected is communicating something.

Learning to read these signals took me years, and I am still learning. The skill is not cynicism. It is attentiveness. People in public life carry constraints they cannot always articulate: political pressures, internal disagreements, timing considerations tied to events an outsider cannot see. A good advisor learns to sense these constraints and to shape proposals so they can succeed within them, rather than demanding that the constraints disappear.

Bridges Are Built by People, Not Policies

Much of my advisory work concerns connections between the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan: trade corridors, investment facilitation, and partnerships in sectors from energy to tourism. On paper, these connections are matters of policy, treaties, and frameworks. In reality, they are matters of people.

Foreign direct investment does not flow because a policy document says it should. It flows because an investor in one country trusts a counterpart in another, and that trust usually traces back to individuals who took the time to understand both sides. I have sat in meetings where years of policy groundwork advanced further in a single honest conversation than in months of formal correspondence, because the right people finally sat in the same room with someone they both trusted to interpret between them.

This is where a background spanning cultures becomes an asset rather than a footnote. As a British Pakistani working extensively in the Gulf, I have lived inside the assumptions of each culture involved in the corridors I work on. I know where a British counterpart will expect directness and where an Emirati counterpart will expect relationship building before business. I know which silences signal reflection and which signal refusal. None of this appears in any policy manual, and all of it determines outcomes.

The Energy Sector Taught Me the Weight of Time Horizons

My involvement in oil and gas and broader energy infrastructure discussions introduced me to a lesson that reshaped how I think about all strategy: the discipline of long time horizons. Energy projects are measured in decades. An LNG facility or a pipeline corridor conceived today will still be operating when the officials who approved it have long retired. Every decision must therefore be tested not against current conditions but against a range of plausible futures.

This discipline transfers powerfully back into business and advisory work generally. When I evaluate any proposal now, I ask how it performs across decades, not quarters. Who maintains it? Who benefits in year fifteen? What happens if the political environment shifts? Entrepreneurs tend to optimise for the near term because survival demands it. Governments and energy planners cannot, and working alongside them has permanently lengthened my own strategic sight.

Small Causes, Fought Well, Open Large Doors

One of the experiences that taught me most about how institutions change was not a trade negotiation at all. It was the five year campaign to secure the first professional boxing licence in the United Kingdom for a boxer with Type 1 diabetes. On the surface, this was a narrow sporting matter. In practice, it was a lesson in everything advisory work requires: evidence gathering, persistence through repeated refusals, respectful pressure on a governing body, and the patience to let an institution change its mind without humiliation.

That campaign succeeded because we never made the regulator the enemy. We made the outdated assumption the enemy, and invited the institution to join us in correcting it. I have applied that framing in far larger contexts since. Governments, like governing bodies, rarely respond well to confrontation, but they respond remarkably well to being offered a dignified path toward a better position. More about this campaign and my sports advocacy work can be found in the news section of this site.

Philanthropy Keeps Advisory Work Honest

Advising at senior levels carries a subtle occupational hazard: distance from ordinary consequences. Decisions become abstractions, numbers on documents, lines in agreements. Founding Insaaf 4U, a philanthropic initiative focused on justice and access to legal aid, has been my corrective. Legal aid work deals with individuals at their most vulnerable, where the gap between what institutions promise and what people actually receive is visible in a single case file.

Every hour spent close to that reality sharpens the questions I bring back into advisory rooms. When a policy or investment framework is discussed, I find myself asking who, specifically, feels its effects, and whether they have any recourse if it fails them. Governments serve people, not abstractions, and advisors serve governments best when they refuse to let that truth fade into the background.

What I Would Tell an Entrepreneur Entering Public Life

If a business person asked me how to prepare for government advisory work, I would offer this. First, audit your motives. If you seek proximity to power for its own sake, the work will corrupt your judgement and the people around you will sense it. The only sustainable motive is genuine usefulness. Second, become comfortable with invisibility. The best advisory work is uncredited. Your proposals succeed under other people's names, and your satisfaction must come from outcomes, not recognition.

Third, protect your independence. An advisor who needs the role too much cannot give honest counsel, because honesty risks the role. Keep your own affairs strong enough that you can always afford to say what is true. Fourth, respect the institutions you serve, even when you are working to change them. Institutions carry accumulated wisdom alongside their accumulated flaws, and advisors who see only the flaws do damage.

The Continuing Education

I remain, in the truest sense, a student of this work. Every negotiation, every delegation, every quiet conversation on the margins of a formal meeting teaches something new about how nations, institutions, and leaders actually function. The journey from a furniture business in Bolton to advisory rooms in the Gulf, chronicled in part on my about page, has convinced me that the boundary between commerce and statecraft is thinner than either side believes. Both are ultimately about the same things: trust, judgement, patience, and the willingness to serve something larger than yourself.

Those lessons were expensive to learn. I share them in the hope that they cost the next person a little less.