Adnan Feroz: four cities made me. Thirty countries taught me.

The Gulf was my first classroom.

Born in India, raised in Jeddah. Before I knew the word for it, I was learning how business works in the Gulf: patience, family, the long conversation before the short signature, and a handshake that carries more weight than any slide.

I came to Dubai in 2023 already speaking the language of the room.

At eighteen, I built my first organisation.

We moved to the Greater Toronto Area when I was in high school. First job at sixteen. At the University of Toronto, where I was admitted on a Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship, I founded CAIDSS, Challenging AIDS in Society. Within a year it ran on by-laws, sponsors and GAAP reporting, with 1,200 members across 20 Canadian campuses.

I left after first year to build businesses. The habit I kept: find the people who care, give them a structure, and get the thing done.

Six stores. Eight hundred people. Every shift.

Assistant Manager across six McDonald's corporate stores, rotating between them, with a combined crew of 800+ and head-office leadership training. Then Store Manager of a 100-person Les Ailes de la Mode store in Toronto, with holiday sales up 15%.

Labour, unit economics, standards, the Friday-night rush: the operating discipline every mandate since has run on.

Fourteen years learning how a deal really closes.

I joined Century 21 in 2010 and stayed fourteen years: USD 300 million in personal sales, CENTURION Producer, Top 1%. I ran investor clinics with CIBC, spoke at the Business, Franchise & Investment Expo, and learned from people who had done it bigger: Jack Welch and JT Foxx at Mega Partnering in Tampa in 2013, Hugh Hilton of Alvarez & Marsal, and an evening when the Consuls General of India and Pakistan sat down to dinner at my table.

A bestseller, and a method with a licence plate.

Beyond Riches with Income Properties: The 90/90 Strategy went to #1 on Amazon in three categories, with a foreword by Raymond Aaron. We launched it on stage at the Toronto Fall Home Show, put it on bus shelters across the city, and sold more than 10,000 copies. The 90/90 Method became a brand, The 90/90 Strategists, and even made it onto my licence plate. Along the way I learned from authors who had walked the road first, including David Chilton of The Wealthy Barber.

I built the studio with my own hands.

In 2020 I consolidated my companies into one 5,000 sq ft space at 1465 Pickering Parkway: Waa'iz Up Media, The Accounting Doc, the Century 21 team and Acquisition Design Build. I planned it, framed the stage and painted the tables myself. Out of that studio came my talk show, Amplify Your Voice, more than 1,000 videos and 10 million+ views, and in 2022 the editor's chair at Living in Toronto.

I kept learning from the best marketers alive: Neil Patel, Neel Dhingra's FORWARD Mastermind, and in 2022 Gary Vaynerchuk, who shared one of my videos with his followers and called me "a marketing genius."

I moved the desk to the Gulf.

In July 2023 I opened Adnan Feroz Properties in Dubai. In Doha I sat down with my friend Saud Almana, Vice Chairman of Almana Group, and the founder of Fiber Mountain, M. H. Raza, and put the two together: a GCC distribution partnership for a US data-centre company, which we took to GITEX Dubai in October 2024. On the way out of the Almana boardroom, the first ball kicked at the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 sat in a glass case by the door.

In the Gulf, the room is the relationship.

Dubai rewards people who show up, listen first and come back. I spent my first two years in the city earning seats at the right tables: galas with Akbar Veerjee, long evenings at the homes of Jayant Nanda and Z. I. Sherwani, office visits with Ashok Sagar, and community dinners alongside leaders such as Saifee Rupawala of LULU and Ali Asgar Fakhruddin of Sterling Perfumes.

Nobody in these photos was a transaction. Every one of them is a relationship.

A fourteen-company group gave me the pen.

In October 2025, Abdulla Bin Mujren Investment Group gave me a written global mandate to represent the group, negotiate and sign. Then I did what I do: I brought people to the table. Edward Karr on US gold. Peter Lee of Fast Pay in the UK. Vikram Jain of Galaxy Weblinks in Boston. Alnoor Dhrollia, a copper-mine owner from the DRC. I took my guest Dr. Aref Ali Nayed, former Libyan Ambassador to the UAE, to the Bin Mujren family home, and opened a Canada–UAE corridor with officials at three levels of Canadian government and the Embassy of Canada.

Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

At ADGM's Abu Dhabi Finance Week, attending under the ABMIG mandate, I met Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan and spent time with Peter Abraam, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer of International Holding Company.

Still building. Still signing.

Founder and board director of AERC, a 7,500-tonne-a-day waste-to-energy consortium, built in collaboration with ABMIG. Advising the board of NASA Hospitals with Dr. Riyaz Khan. Head of Alliances & Growth at Galaxy Weblinks with Vikram Jain. A USD 1B exclusive sales mandate for two Dubai towers. And BollyX Studios, signed with my partner Shahid Hassan, now shooting its first film, Cafe DXB.

250 cities. One family. One faith.

I am a Muslim, a husband and a father. Off duty you will find me off-roading in the desert outside Dubai, building very large LEGO sets with my kids, or grilling mutton slowly over charcoal. Thirty countries and 250 cities so far, and every one of them taught me something about people.