Star-CaT by Corina Goetz

Star-CaT by Corina Goetz Better relationships lead to better pipelines, more revenue and more business.

Our goal, our passion, is to help companies and professionals take away their anxiety when they first start doing business in the Middle East and clear up stereotypes.

21/07/2026

Three companies told me this month they’re delaying their Gulf expansion.

“It’s too unstable.”

I think they’re asking the wrong question.

While many Western companies wait, the Gulf keeps moving.

Billions are still being invested. Meetings are still happening. Contracts are still being signed.

In the Gulf, relationships compound.

One project leads to another.
One introduction becomes trust.
Trust creates opportunities your competitors never even hear about.

By the time the headlines feel “safe” again, someone else has already built the relationship.

That’s why I use AI—not to replace relationships, but to build them faster, prepare better and spot opportunities earlier.

On 7 September, I’ll show you the exact workflow I use to identify opportunities, find decision-makers and prepare for Gulf meetings in a fraction of the time.
Comment ‚unlock‘ to join.

The companies that win in the Gulf won’t be the ones waiting. They’ll be the ones preparing.

21/07/2026

I often get asked how I seem to spot Gulf opportunities before everyone else.

The answer is surprisingly simple.

I don’t just read the headlines.

I watch the relationships behind them.

After more than 25 years working with Gulf governments, royal families, investment funds and some of the world’s most ambitious organisations, I’ve learned that the biggest opportunities rarely arrive with a press release.

By the time everyone is talking about them, the most valuable conversations have often already started.

That’s why I don’t write news.

I write about what the news actually means.

Who should be paying attention.
What questions you should be asking.
What conversations you should already be having.
And where I believe the next commercial opportunities will emerge.

This week is a perfect example.

Most people saw a gaming headline.

I saw a 60-day relationship window.

That difference in perspective is exactly why I started The Gulf Desk.

Because the Gulf doesn’t reward the fastest people to react.

It rewards the people who understand how decisions are really made.

If your company is serious about Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar or the wider GCC, I’d love to have you join us.

Comment ‚Gulf Desk‘ to subscribe.

18/07/2026

Today, the UAE celebrates something most Western companies have never heard of.

Union Pledge Day.

It marks the day in 1971 when Sheikh Zayed and the rulers of the Emirates signed the declaration of union and the country’s first constitution.

President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed made it an official national occasion only in 2024.

If you are travelling through the UAE right now, you could easily miss it.

But your clients will not.

Because this is not just another date on the calendar.

It is a reminder of the values the country was built on.
Unity.
Long-term thinking.
Stewardship.
Building something that lasts.

Those values still influence how business is done today.

Many Western companies quietly fall behind.

They spend weeks perfecting their trip.
Their proposal.

Almost no time understanding the country they are pitching.
Knowing what a nation is proud of is not trivia.

It is commercial intelligence.
Context changes conversations.
Conversations build trust.

And in the Gulf, trust almost always comes before business.

History. Leadership. National priorities.
These are not background reading.
They are part of the pitch.

The commercial advantage is not just knowing who you are meeting.

It is understanding the country that shaped how they think.

17/07/2026

I grew up in a country I was not allowed to leave.
I now spend my life helping people cross between worlds.

East Germany.

Travel restricted, Western music arriving in fragments, an orange or a banana a small glimpse of somewhere else.

My first passports were not documents — they were books, television, and my father’s stories about the world beyond the wall.

At 22, I landed in London with two suitcases and a job at The Dorchester.

No plan.
Just a strong feeling that there was more to see, and that I was not going to spend my life wondering about it.

Hospitality is where the world finally came to me.

Guests from across the Gulf — first a curiosity, then a genuine fascination.

The curiosity became understanding.
The understanding became trust.
The trust, eventually, became my life’s work.

The child who could not cross a border now helps Western Executives and the Gulf understand each other — two worlds that misread one another far more often than they need to.

I sat down with the Two Worlds, One Me podcast to talk about all of it.

East Germany and London.
Identity and belonging.
Stereotypes, hospitality, trust, motherhood, and what it really takes to become a bridge between cultures.

It is the most personal conversation I have shared in a long time.

If you have ever felt the limits of the world you were born into — and wanted to push past them — this one is for you.

16/07/2026

People keep telling me AI has made Gulf research easy.

Feed it a name, get a briefing, walk into the meeting prepared.

It doesn’t work like that. Not in the Gulf.

I am refining a pitch for a Gulf client this week, and the interesting part is not the project on the table.
It is what sits behind it.

One project, done well, leads to the next.
That one leads to a recommendation.

And in the Gulf, recommendations are the whole economy — reputations travel faster than any proposal ever will.

None of that happens if the pitch is generic.

To land, it has to be genuinely about the person across the table.
Often a senior official.
What matters to them.
What they are trying to build.
PLUS
how that connects to what their country is working towards — because here, people and national ambition are rarely separate things.

This is not surface-level work.

It means knowing who to call.
Where to look.
What actually matters to this person, in this country, right now.

It means the kind of localisation you can only do if you have been there, seen it, talked to locals and understood the place — not read three articles about it.

AI is part of how I do this.

B U T
It is not the holy grail.

Feed it shallow prompts and shallow information and it hands you a confident, useless answer a Gulf client will see through in minutes.

If you want to get this right, I am teaching exactly how on 7 September. Comment ‚unlock‘ for the link.

15/07/2026

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani could be remembered for the gas, the skyline, the World Cup.

What moved me this week was smaller.

And it will stay with me longer.
Qatar buried its Father Emir.

Four days of national mourning.
The UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain stopped too.

Flags at half-mast across the Gulf.

People and Heads of State flew into Doha to pay their respects — a whole region, and a whole family, standing together.

But the moment I keep returning to is a clip of him speaking about his wife, Sheikha Moza.

Not a line of protocol.
Real credit.
The kind a man gives when he knows exactly how much of what he built, she built with him.

In a part of the world the West is so quick to lecture about women, here was one of its most powerful men giving his wife the credit.

In public. Without hesitation.

This is not a small thing.
It is one of the most beautiful compliments you can pay anyone.

There was a second thing I noticed this week.

You could see which relationships were real — by who made it a priority to be there.

Presence, when nothing is being sold and nothing is owed, tells you the truth.

It is exactly the same in business.
The relationships that matter are the ones that show up when there is nothing to gain.

This week the Middle East Sunday Pages bring you a special Edition dedicated to his legacy.
—
what this kind of leadership actually is, and why the West keeps underestimating it.
Comment ‘Sunday’ to read it

Some leaders are remembered for what they built.

He should be remembered for who he lifted.

14/07/2026

I turn down most partnership requests.
I said yes to this one in a single conversation.

I am careful with my name.
In this region trust is built quietly, and you do not lend your credibility to a logo just because someone asks.

But I have known Emily Foreman إميلي who heads up Alliance of Independent Agencies Middle East for a long time.

I love how she works.
How open she is.
How she genuinely wants to make a difference — because she has been on the ground, seen the problems up close, and refuses to look away from them.

A while ago I sat in on one of their calls.

I listened to the problems these teams were describing.

And I could see it straight away — there is an angle here that is completely misunderstood.

Not a small gap.
A fundamental one.

🤝 Western teams walk into Saudi wanting to do good work.
🤝 Saudis want to be understood, not sold to.
And the two keep missing each other in the space between.

This gap is fixable. This is the whole point.

So I have joined Alliance of Independent Agencies Middle East as a Partner and Expert on their Saudi Market Focus sessions.

It is the region’s first curated network of independent, founder-led businesses and senior decision-makers — people who build things themselves and want to compete and grow at scale across the UAE, Saudi and the wider MENA region.

This is exactly the room I want to be in.

To bridge the gap properly.
To help Western businesses see they can make a real difference in Saudi — and be part of the story Vision 2030 is actually building.

Because when the Saudi side feels understood, and the Western side stops guessing, you do not just win the work.

💚 You build something that lasts.

In the Gulf, the relationship is the strategy.
The product is the byproduct.
This is the real work.
I am glad to be doing more of it.

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