UK restaurant expansion to the Middle East fails for the same reasons every time

I've been speaking with operators and leadership teams considering GCC expansion recently, and the same costly assumptions keep surfacing.

"Location works the same way here." It doesn't. In the UK you can succeed in multiple neighbourhoods if your concept is strong. In Dubai, location dictates everything. Who your customer is, where they're coming from, what they expect. I've seen operators pick sites based on prestige or what agents have sold them, without understanding traffic patterns or whether the area is residential or tourist-focused.

"It's just another international market." Starting with the assumption that your UK processes transfer directly is where problems begin. Things work differently here. Licensing, inspections, how decisions get made. Your hospitality leadership team needs to understand this market structurally, not just operationally.

"We'll hire locally and they'll figure it out." You'll post a role and get 5,000 applications, but finding the right 10 people is a different problem entirely. The bigger mistake is not defining your resource structure early enough. Where does accountability sit? What's managed centrally versus in-market?

A proper restaurant feasibility study and time on the ground before committing will save you more than any amount of optimism.

What assumption would you challenge first?