Specialty coffee in the Gulf has no second generation. Every business of any size in this market was started by the person who still runs it, most of them within the last fifteen years, most of them by someone who was in their thirties when they started and is not any more.
That is an unremarkable sentence until you sit with what it implies. An entire industry is approaching the same question at roughly the same time, and there is nobody ahead of them who has answered it.
What a mature industry has that this one does not
In older industries, and in older markets, an owner thinking about stepping back has infrastructure to lean on. Advisers who have done a dozen deals in that specific sector. Buyers who are known quantities. A rough sense, circulating among operators, of what these businesses trade at and what terms are normal. Peers who have been through it and will tell you over dinner what they wish they had known.
None of that exists here yet. An owner in Dubai or Riyadh who starts thinking seriously about what happens next finds very little to work with. The advisers are generalists. The buyers are unknown or hypothetical. There is no peer group who has done this, because almost nobody has.
The consequence is not that people make bad decisions. It is that they make no decision at all, for years longer than they intended, because the alternative to a known path is an unknown one and the business is still, more or less, fine.
The three doors, and why two of them are shut
An owner who wants to step back has, in principle, three options.
Hand it to family. This is the default in much of the region and it works when the next generation wants it. Frequently they do not. The children of the people who built these businesses have watched the hours involved and have professional options their parents did not have at the same age. Assuming the answer is yes, and not asking early, is one of the more common and more painful mistakes.
Hand it to management. This requires management to exist, and to be able to fund a purchase. In a business where the founder is still the buyer, the head of sales and the final word on every roast profile, there is often nobody to hand it to. And a team that could run it usually cannot afford to buy it, because the same thing that makes the business valuable — its cash generation — makes it expensive relative to what employees have saved.
Sell it. Which returns you to the absence of a market, and to the discovery that the buyers who do exist are frequently not what the owner had in mind.
What tends to happen instead
The business is not sold, not handed over, and not stopped. It continues, at the size it reached, run by a founder who is now doing it out of obligation more than appetite.
There are worse outcomes, but it has a cost that compounds quietly. A business run by someone who has mentally left stops spending on itself. Equipment is repaired rather than replaced. The good salesperson who wanted a path upward goes somewhere that has one. Accounts are held rather than grown. Two or three years of this and the business is materially weaker — which narrows the options further, at exactly the moment the owner finally decides to act.
The thing worth understanding is that waiting is not neutral. It is a decision with a price, and the price is paid in the value of the thing you are eventually going to do something with.
What this actually asks of an owner
Not to sell. Most people reading this should not sell, and certainly not now.
What it asks is the thing that is genuinely hard: to decide, deliberately and early, which of the three doors you are walking through, and then to spend two or three years making that door wider. If it is family, ask them now, properly, and believe the answer. If it is management, start building people who could actually do it and give them scope before you need them to. If it is a sale, start reducing the degree to which the business is you — which is worth doing regardless, and which takes longer than anyone expects.
All three preparations look identical from the outside for the first year. They all consist of making the business less dependent on one person. That is the useful thing about them: you can start before you have decided, and none of the work is wasted whichever door you take.
Why this is worth saying out loud
I have had versions of this conversation with a lot of operators in this region over the past few years, almost always privately, almost always with someone who believed they were the only one thinking about it.
They are not. It is happening across the whole industry simultaneously, and it will keep happening for the next decade as a generation of founders reaches the same point. The market that does not exist yet — of advisers, of buyers, of received wisdom about how these things are done here — will exist, because it has to.
In the meantime, the owners who do best will be the ones who treated it as a decision to be made early rather than an event that happens to them. That is true whoever ends up on the other side of the table.