It’s what every business owners wants to happen – more customer inquiries than expected.

As part of our setup, we decided to develop a web and social media presence before we had our full business license. This was due to our previous business website experience. It can take a number of months to be indexed on Google and thus be found by those conducting a web search. This was the same for a social media profile which can also take many months to gain traction.

So once our business category was approved we established our website, instagram and Facebook profiles. It took only a few days to be indexed with Google and we had our first customer inquiry through the website! This was unbelievable traction and not expected. But it didn’t stop. Over the next three weeks we continued to get email and phone inquiries about our Screens. Then someone found our Facebook page and mentioned it on a local Dubai community group. We had to explain to each potential customer that we didn’t yet have our business license fully approved and didn’t expect to be able to service customers until the new year.

Now it was time to accelerate our business plan.

This meant delaying our first shipment of screens and filling the container with as many raw materials as it could fit. This wasn’t our initial plan as we were intending to ship a second container load of custom made screens for our next batch of customers before eventually manufacturing the screens ourselves in Dubai.

We now needed to develop our UAE based manufacturing facilities quicker than we anticipated which brings a whole new host of challenges which we’ll write about soon.