Operator first, coach second

The story

I grew up in Bahrain, trained as a designer at Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion, and graduated into the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2010 I moved to Singapore and started a branding business from a spare bedroom. Looking for somewhere better to work, I toured serviced office after serviced office and found nothing that felt right. So in 2012, at 26, I built one. Collective Works opened in Singapore's CBD that December, broke even within two months and grew around 1,300% in four years, to more than 2,000 members from 47 nationalities. In 2016 it formed a joint venture with CapitaLand, and in 2018 I sold it to The Work Project, one of the coworking industry's first institutional acquisitions.

I went on to help build IWG's partnership and franchise business across Asia-Pacific: improving how franchise centres ran, leading a sales team that signed some of IWG's first asset-light deals in China and Indonesia, and managing a pipeline of more than 180 partner locations.

In 2024 I took charge of Compass Offices in Hong Kong, a $75M workspace operator with 30 centres in seven countries, and led it back to cashflow positive within six months of my arrival.

Alongside the operating career I've spent years reading and practising in developmental psychology and attachment, because the same question kept coming up: why do capable founders get stuck in the same places? Founder Architecture is my answer. I'm a coach, not a therapist, by choice: free to be directive and to give a straight opinion, and clear about where the coaching line sits.