Why I moved my business life to Dubai

On 10 November 2024, I moved to Dubai.

I arrived with years of work behind me, clients in Italy, and an agency that Barbara Francini and I had founded a few months earlier. Mayor Digital already existed. I knew what I wanted to build.

So the question is fair: why move when things already worked?

Things were already working

By 2024 I had spent years inside other people's businesses and inside my own. I had helped companies grow through digital acquisition and run performance campaigns across several industries.

I had co-founded Saloning, an education business helping salon and beauty businesses build stronger internal marketing capabilities. I had also operated e-commerce ventures of my own, where I paid for the ads and lived with the margins.

Then Barbara and I started Mayor Digital.

None of this depended on Dubai.

I mention it because the move could easily read like a familiar story: man moves to Dubai, man becomes successful.

My version is less dramatic.

I already knew what I wanted to build. I wanted to see what would happen if I built it in a different environment.

Why change environment

I think entrepreneurs underestimate how much their surroundings set their defaults.

The people around you affect the size of the conversations you have. They influence how long a decision can take before it starts to feel slow. They shape which markets you naturally consider accessible and which ones feel like something for later.

You don't always notice this while it is happening.

You notice it when you leave.

I don't think Dubai simply has more successful people than other cities. What stands out to me is the concentration.

In a relatively small area, you meet founders, investors, operators and professionals from dozens of countries, and many of them came here deliberately.

International ambition is visible in meetings, in offices and in the questions people ask across a table.

I wanted that pressure around me.

I wanted a market in motion, a wider network than the one I had, and an environment that would make it harder for me to settle.

What I was actually looking for

Safety came first, and I'll keep it short.

I wanted to live and work in a place where I feel safe going about my day. I have that here.

Then opportunity.

Businesses, investors and professionals from many countries choose Dubai as a base, and that density changes the number and variety of conversations you can have in a week.

Then the network.

By network, I mean proximity.

When you live in a place, you can meet someone on Monday and sit down with them again on Thursday. You enter conversations you would never hear about from a distance. Relationships grow from repeated contact, and repeated contact requires you to be there.

Then international exposure.

From Italy, most of my work naturally pointed toward the Italian market. From Dubai, I work with UAE businesses, international companies and entrepreneurs who think across borders by default.

My reference points moved.

And then there was pressure, probably the reason I think about most.

I wanted to make comfort harder.

When you spend your days around people who build, invest, launch and expand across countries, your internal benchmark shifts.

Nobody asks you to raise it.

You raise it because the old one starts to look small.

I'm talking about what feels like a normal level of ambition, and that has very little to do with how many hours you work.

What changed once I was actually here

The first thing was speed.

Conversations here move quickly. You meet someone and a second meeting can follow within days. Introductions happen without much ceremony, and so does the willingness to explore a collaboration.

None of this makes the work easy.

But with that speed around me, I ran out of excuses for a slow pace of my own.

The second thing was how normal international business feels.

In many places, "international expansion" sounds like a strategic initiative with its own slide deck.

Here, working across nationalities and markets can simply be part of an ordinary week.

You write proposals for clients from different countries. You adjust your tone for different cultures. You think about positioning differently depending on the market.

After a while, you stop treating international business as something exceptional.

That changes how you think about a company before you even start building it.

The third thing was visible ambition, and the noise that comes with it.

You see a lot of ambition on display in Dubai.

Some of it belongs to serious operators. Some of it is image.

You meet people who present themselves as highly successful and have little underneath, and you meet quiet people running serious companies.

Then there is competition.

In a market with this many options, clients compare and talent compares. Attention has to be earned continuously, and it disappears quickly when you stop earning it.

That raised my expectations of myself and of what we deliver.

What changed in the way I work

I think about markets before channels.

When I look at a business now, my first questions concern where it could operate, which markets make sense, and how its positioning would translate across cultures.

Marketing comes after that.

I also move faster.

I spend less time polishing ideas in private. I test them, take them to the market, listen and adjust.

I usually learn more from a rough version in front of real clients than from a polished version that never leaves the document.

I raised my standard on presentation, service, communication, response times and execution.

When clients have alternatives, I notice every slow reply and every weak detail, in my own work first.

I also network with more purpose.

I build relationships through real business: shared opportunities, useful conversations and credibility on both sides.

One contact who has seen your work outweighs fifty who have seen your business card.

And I think beyond marketing more than I used to.

At Mayor Digital I lead digital strategy, performance, client relationships and commercial conversations, while Barbara leads PR, events and offline communication.

My days now involve economics, products, markets, people and technology as much as campaigns.

Marketing remains one of my core skills.

It no longer describes the whole job, and I made that shift faster here than I think I would have at home.

What Dubai does not do

This part matters to me, because you hear a lot of promises about Dubai.

Moving here won't give you a business model.

It won't make a weak offer strong.

It won't give you competence you didn't have.

It won't automatically find you customers, execute for you or turn contacts into relationships.

And it certainly won't make everyone successful.

I think of the city as an amplifier.

It can amplify ambition, speed, access and connections.

It can also amplify superficiality, spending, distraction and ego.

You choose which side you feed, and you keep choosing.

The city can increase your exposure to opportunity.

The work stays yours.

The value of moving

Almost two years after moving, I'd summarise it in one line: I changed the context around me.

Context shapes expectations, behaviour, relationships, reference points and the size of your ambition.

It changes what starts to feel normal.

I brought the same skills to Dubai and put them in a different room, with different people, at a different speed.

I don't think everyone should move to Dubai.

For me, the lesson reaches beyond any city.

Sometimes you keep the goal and change the place where you pursue it.

I didn't move to Dubai to change what I do. I moved because I wanted to change the environment in which I do it.