Shadab Ansari

Learning the system from the inside

I moved to Dubai in July 2016 and joined a newly opened company that handled government services end to end. Tasheel transactions, GDRFA transactions, which used to be known as EDNRD back then, medical typing, Emirates ID, and more. That's the job that actually taught me how UAE visa and labour processing works. Not from a course or a manual, from doing it every day for other people's companies.

I used to handle the full process for a few big companies, start to finish. Offer letters, work permits, labour fee payments, entry permits, change of status when it was needed, Emirates ID typing, medical typing, residence stamping. New visas, renewals, cancellations, all of it went through me. If a company needed a visa case done properly, that was my desk.

Two years as a Visa Officer

After that I worked as a Visa Officer for around two years. Most of my day was tourist visas. Somewhere around fifty applications a day was normal for me. I also handled some staff visa processing alongside that, but tourist visas were the main work.

Doing that many applications a day teaches you things a slower job never could. You start to see exactly where an application goes wrong before it's submitted, and exactly what a clean one looks like. That's not something you can learn from a checklist, you learn it from volume.

2020, and starting again

In 2020, when the Corona situation started, I lost my job in tourism. I went back to India, stayed there until the end of January 2021, and came back to Dubai on 31 January.

On 16 March 2021, I founded Almotmaken.

The first few months were quiet. Genuinely quiet, almost no work came in, and there were plenty of days I wondered if the decision was right. Then it picked up a little. In October 2021 Expo 2020 opened in Dubai, and business setup activity picked up across the city with it. That period was good for us.

Where things stand now

Today I run Almotmaken personally. When you speak to us, you're speaking to me, not a call centre passing you between departments.

I've been in this field for ten years now, since July 2016. I've typed thousands of applications by hand, processed tourist visas by the dozen every single day, and built a company back up from a few quiet months with almost no clients. I want to use that experience for one thing, helping entrepreneurs set their business up properly and get their visas done right, without the overcharging and confusion I used to watch happen to other people's applications, back when I was the one typing them through the system.