Management Consulting Services in Saudi: Mohammed Nashar Al-Rashidi Presents Kafaa

Interview with Mohammed Nashar Al-Rashidi, CEO of Kafaa

What is your overview of your sector and what role does Kafaa play?

We are part of the management consulting sector which basically handles many services including financial consulting, technical operation consulting and advisory, companies’ restructuring strategies, strategies enhancement, developing operating models, and HR related consulting topics. All of that and many subtopics are classified as management consulting. The sector itself in Saudi Arabia has been developing over the years in many aspects such as from economical sides, evolving in terms of the types of services and management consulting services, in terms of how much it is supporting the private sector, and in terms of the wide range of businesses and government entities it covers. Today, the management consulting sector is worth about $1.6 billion in Saudi Arabia and that value has been growing over the past five years. It slowed down in certain years for various reasons, but it recovered quickly and continues to evolve. Much like many other sectors and businesses, our sector reacts to oil prices and overall regional and country economics. For example, in 2017 when oil prices decreased, the management consulting sector quickly recovered, averaging nicely even for that year. The same thing happened with the impact of COVID. Of course, globally and locally, all businesses were impacted in one way or another; yet, while other sectors suffered, the management consulting sector managed to maintain the great progress that it made between 2017 and 2019. Perhaps the growth and the slope of the growth is not as steep as it was in previous years, but there has been growth. We had an excellent year in 2019 which helped us carry over to 2020 and the start of 2021. Nevertheless, the speed of the recovery and how fast we are moving has been very good. Vision 2030 had a tremendous impact on the growth of this sector, much like many other sectors. Specifically, it helped this sector to grow not only from a business perspective but it also helped the sector to develop to cover wider parts of both the private sector and the public sector, covering all sizes of businesses and not being limited to the big spenders or big government entities, but also serving many sub entities and smaller companies as well. The Vision unleashed tremendous energy toward transformation and boosted our progress in performance which really sparked the need for that special expertise to fuel this fast transformation and growth that we aspire to achieve. All of this has made the management consulting sector very healthy. The big players have been present all along, but their presence has been strengthened and specified even more and the quality of their involvement has improved, which helped the overall industry. Many new small and medium companies have started. Either they existed outside the country and they launched their practices in Saudi or were like ourselves in Kafaa where we started from scratch almost six years ago. There is a lot of work that still needs to take place in order to fulfil the aspirations of Vision 2030, both in the private sector and the public sector. At all levels and services, we will continue to focus on ensuring that we have the right strategies, but more now, the focus is going into the implementation of strategies that were developed earlier and how to carry out the actual transformation at the right speed and at the right quality according to the business plans and strategies that were designed. The sector is huge and the practices and the services it provides are vast. At Kafaa, our focus is in operational optimization, such as how we improve operations and operating models, how we transform strategies into practice, how we ensure that transformation is done with the right operating model, how we ensure that the organization is set to deliver, and ensuring that it is actually delivering on the ground based on what it designed itself to deliver. We use the science of operational excellence to do that in many ways that help those operating models operate at their best.

What services do you offer at Kafaa? What makes you different from your competition?

Kafaa is a company that provides a wide range of management consultancy and business transformation services that aim to add value to our clients, utilizing our local, regional and global expertise.

Kafaa’s history relates to my personal history a lot, what I did in my career, as well as my partner and co-founder of Kafaa, and all the people who joined us in Kafaa as well. It is the career expertise, the passion, the subject matter expertise that most of us spent our careers doing. I have worked more than 30 years in operations and operational optimization, internal consulting, in large companies such as Procter & Gamble internationally and locally in operational excellence and manufacturing. The history of operation optimization and using the skills of operational excellence and total quality management has been with me and around me for decades where I practice it and I have the joy of doing it. Helping others was the underline of how I can help entities, companies, teams, and even individuals using proven world class well-known tools to perform better and cut waste so that they can reach their business goals in a faster and more efficient way. I came to a point in my career where I wanted to create a platform that does that with the use of operational excellence. There are many management consultancies that try to provide such a service, but many of them use the standard theoretical tools that exist and are used over and over. We come from more of a hands-on experience. We come from operations. We do not originally come from consulting. So, we speak the language of actual operations as we have worked operations with our own hands. We know what it takes to implement something successfully. We know how to differentiate and customize the solutions for our clients in a way that makes sense not only to their top management, but also to the people who are working with them on the ground. We have been there, we have done it ourselves, and we have that hands-on experience using and practicing those tools that we learned from the operational excellence frameworks that are available across the world. These include lean thinking, Kaizen methodologies, total productive maintenance in manufacturing, and many others. We got to the point where we had the expertise to develop our own tools and customize them further for whatever clients we work with. That has been recognized not only by the many big clients that we work with but also by many of the Big Four consulting companies that we affiliate with or we work with as a niche or specific expertise that complements their work in terms of developing operating models or strategies that need to go into implementation.

In terms of our services, first, we provide strategy implementation. We take strategies that have been developed by many of the key players in that field, many large consultancies, and we take it a step further to design that the right operating model is customised to the client needs. The key factor that helped us succeed is our international exposure in many of the resources that are available in Kafaa. Local Saudis like myself have had the chance to work in different regions of the world, understand the different knowhow that exists globally, and then are able to bring it back locally and customize it to the local needs. Transferring that global knowhow and that global knowledge into a customized knowhow has been a very specific success that we have been able to demonstrate over the past six years. That balance between having those international experiences through the team, through the leadership, and then the ability to mix those experiences with our local understanding and expertise is what made our solutions very popular and easy to implement and integrate for all of the clients that we are working with. Another service we offer is operation optimization. We kill three birds with one stone. First, we optimize operations so that it provides the right quality, whether that operation’s output is a service or a product, or whether that operation is in the private sector or the public sector. We think about how we can improve the internal operation of that company or that entity so their output services are also improved. Second is how we improve the agility of that organization. We work on not only helping them work fast but helping them in terms of responding to their clients, to the market, or to whomever benefiting from their services faster. We provide that ability to have them work better and with improved agility. Third, and one of the most important points, is improving their cost effectiveness. We work with them not only in helping them cut costs, because that can be done by financial services, but we do more than that. It is really helping the clients do more with less, which is the true meaning of cost effectiveness. We also have a large focus on manufacturing as a standalone sector because that is where we originally came from. We have the expertise to create manufacturing strategies, product supply strategies, operating models, improving current operations, taking them from losses to profitability, improving their technical operations in how to run the production lines in a world class standards, how to improve the factory’s production processes, and employee capabilities.

In the past two years, we have expanded to other services such as giving project management office services not only in a supportive way but in more of a directive way to insure things are done and according to the desired plans. This means helping on the ground managing initiatives and projects and up to delivering them to the last point. We are also expanding some of our services into the HR sector in terms of improving HR services within an organization including organizational development, optimizing the organizational structures, providing the right internal setup, work processes, and working conditions. We look at the future to expand all of these services plus many others that we are developing. Many of these basic services we are developing and have launched already as digital solutions. Digitizing is a big thing that we are working on and we have already launched, but we are not stopping there and we are moving into automating many of these services in the coming years.

What is your business philosophy? What are your business ethics?

We base all of our dealing internally and externally on our base values which are available on our website. From day one, as we were designing our overall internal strategy, even before Kafaa was established as a legal entity back in 2016, we wanted to make sure that we have a solid base that helps us manage this business and grow with it. We knew that we were, at that time, starting in an area that might be difficult to start any business. To start a small and medium business was not ideal at that time. So, we wanted to make sure that we did it right. One of the key things that we said we needed to do right was having the right values that we truly believe in. I remember locking ourselves in for a few days, just brainstorming and writing out charts of our real values that we truly believe that come from our hearts, how we are going to operate in a way that describes our personalities, how we think, how we want to conduct the business, and how we could create that. My business partner and I both recognized how important this is because we are going into management consultancy, which is something that requires tremendous leadership in terms of taking the necessary steps to really understand someone else’s challenges and then taking further steps to really provide the best solutions that client deserves. In management consulting, it is quite variable and it changes from week to week and from month to month and from client to client. Sometimes, when you are on your own or with a smaller team, those leadership values help you navigate and help you help others to navigate to the right solutions that add value and impact. Leadership is important to all businesses everywhere, but for us in Kafaa, it is a key thing that we needed to ensure.

The second thing was ownership. If we want to provide expertise, when we go as consultants, the client does not look at us as normal individuals, but as experts. Therefore, we have to have the right ownership in really becoming experts in the areas where we are providing solutions. At all of our levels across the company, we have the right ownership of our solutions so that they are more customized and personalized. That drives a lot of innovation in our thinking in how we, as the Kafaa family, provide solutions that carry our personal touches. Therefore, we own every detail of those solutions. When it comes to trust and respect, we are an operations management consultancy which means that we do not only come and look at the high-level strategies, meet with companies or government entity leaders, and give them presentations, etc. We do all those things, but then we dig deeper. We see everything they see, we open all the books, and we work with everything that might not be visible to everyone else. In order for us to do that, we need to gain the trust and respect of the client which we cannot do if we do not have that internally. This means we as a team trust and respect each other’s capabilities and value-added thinking and interactions. That was very important to establish as a value and as a culture inside Kafaa. We are after optimization and improvement, so continuous improvement was a natural thing to happen. We continuously improve our methodologies internally, our framework, our tools, our capability, the way we do things, and how we manage things. We are never satisfied with what we do and when we go to the clients we are also there to help them find better ways of how they conduct their business to gain better results. If every day of a job is to solve problems and to be faced with problems, it could be a very negative and stressful environment. It is a stressful job, but we need to provide positivity to balance that out.

Being positively oriented was the next value that we thought of and how to be positively oriented through all of the stress we are met with. We are looked upon as experts or problem solvers and everybody expects magic to come out of each individual. That is a tremendous responsibility and if we do not have that positivity as a value and as an attitude, it could be much more difficult.

Finally, one of the hardest things that we put on ourselves, but one of the most important things as well, is doing the right thing. Pushing, convincing, and doing our best effort to really bring out the best solutions for our clients, helping them see what we see if we believe it is the right thing for them to do. Many times, you get tempted to just do what the client thinks is the right thing to do and get his or her approval and move on, but we always pledge that we will not do that as long as it is not the right thing for the client and for what he or she trusted us with. Sometimes that is painful, but it always pays off at the end and it created much more credibility for Kafaa and helped us spread through strong word of mouth in the market.

What is your vision for the company in three years’ time?

First is to continue our organic growth in what we do. We are gaining more and more expertise each day in what we do and that gives us an even further edge in perfecting what we do which gives us more outreach and credibility in our basic services. This is creating tremendous demands on us. Second is how much we can capitalize on technologies, on the Internet of People, and the Internet of Things, to provide our services in digitized forms as well as automated ways so that it is faster to implement, easier to control, and fixable to expand and multiply. Capitalising on that sense on machine learning and the evolving world of metaverse environment. Industrial I 4.0 is progressing globally, faster in some countries than others, but it is definitely hitting the ground in Saudi Arabia, the GCC and the Middle East region as a whole. This will affect how fast Kafaa can progress to help our clients utilize and capitalize on such technologies to cope with customer and consumer needs in the future. These services are still in the design phase. We have been approached by various investors who want to join us and we have been open to that. However, we want to have the right investor who shares the same passion. We do not only loom for the financial contribution but also the right added value that helps achieve our vision and growth plans.

In the next three to five years, we believe we can definitely double the business. We have been growing very nicely. We started with a very small team of less than five of us in 2016. We are now well above 60 people sitting between Jeddah and Riyadh. We go almost everywhere in Saudi and wherever we have clients. That number in the coming few years could grow to 100 people with various expertise. Today, our teams have good diversity from different nationalities. Also we have male and female although we could improve in having more females in our team. One of the unwritten visions I had personally for the company was, and still is, how Kafaa will become a platform for those who want to have a career in operation excellence and who want to grow their expertise in this field. which does not exist elsewhere. That is one of the unique things we provide to young engineers who join us as a career. It takes sometimes years and good efforts to develop expertise in this field, but it is very rewarding on the professional level, as well as the financial level. We have people that have been growing very nicely in their careers since they started as new hires and now, they are in more advanced management positions with a very good technical expertise. The growth people make with us in their careers and their exposures and development is exponential. Kafaa family members, and even those who moved on to other places, always feel proud of the fast development they witnessed during their journey with us. They actually compare weeks working in Kafaa to months and years elsewhere. This really brings me special joy because I envisioned how much people can come to Kafaa and learn about operational excellence and how they can advance their career and take it elsewhere as well. That is definitely one of the successes that I personally celebrate and my passion is to spread this knowhow further as much as I can.

For more information, please visit: https://kafaa.sa.

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