Who is behind UAE Exits

I built a construction company in New York from nothing, ran it for years, and sold it. Then I moved to Dubai and started again.

That sentence covers a decade of hiring, firing, chasing payment, carrying payroll through slow quarters, and eventually going through the thing this entire site is about: valuing my own business, meeting buyers, and signing the paperwork that ended it. What I walked away with, the business and the property behind it together, was enough to reset in a new market on my own terms.

What I remember most clearly is how little useful information there was, and how much of the advice available was really advertising. I did not know what a normal multiple looked like. I did not know which of the things I was worried about actually mattered to a buyer and which were noise. I made at least three of the mistakes on this list myself.

Now I do sell-side work for owner-operated UAE businesses, generally in the AED 2 to 10 million range, and occasionally acquire one for my own holding company when it is the right fit. Dubai based, dealing with UAE owners face to face, in a market where the negotiation happens on WhatsApp and confidentiality is the thing everybody claims and few actually run.

Search for how to sell a business in the UAE and you mostly find two things: portals that want your listing, and setup agents writing about company formation. Almost nothing tells an owner what their business is actually worth, what a real buyer looks like, or how a properly run confidential sale works from the inside.

Meanwhile the market is enormous and quietly aging. Our own extract of Dubai DET open licence data, a snapshot dated December 2025 through July 2026, counts roughly 533,000 active trade licences in Dubai. Inside two segments we studied closely, around 15,900 of about 76,000 facilities management and MEP licences are ten years or older, and for auto services and garages it is roughly 3,700 of about 12,800, more than half of which are past twenty years. Every one of those older licences represents a founder who will eventually stop, and most of them have never been told what a sale actually involves.

So this site is the long version of the conversation I have with every owner who calls. It is deliberately complete, it names the numbers this market pays, and it costs nothing to read. If it convinces you that you are two years away rather than two months, it has done its job.

If you are on the other side of the table and looking to acquire a UAE business rather than sell one, that runs separately at uaedealroom.com, and buyers there go through the same gates described on this site. The advisory firm itself is Coello Advisory, and my personal site is josephcoello.com.