3 NOVEMBER 2026 · 20:00 GST · 6 MIN READ · DUBAI CAREER NOTES

Thirteen years in the Gulf: from cold calls in Hyderabad to Head of Operations in Dubai

By Prudhvi Polavarapu, supply chain and e-commerce operations leader in Dubai

In 2012 I was a business development executive at Blue Dart in Hyderabad, making cold calls with a headset and a target sheet, holding a 25% connection-to-conversation rate and learning the sentence I still operate by: every delivery is a service, not a shipment. This is the road from that desk to running operations in Dubai, told straight, because somebody reading this is standing exactly where I stood.

The unglamorous start, which was the real start

My first Dubai job, at First Flight in 2013, was courier sales. No team, no title worth printing, just a territory and a number. I knocked doors in industrial areas in summer heat, won 40+ B2B clients, kept 90% of them, and earned a promotion to Territory Sales Manager. Here is what nobody tells you about this city: it watches quietly what you do with a small thing before it hands you a bigger one. The promotion was never about the sales. It was about the ninety percent who stayed.

Saying yes before feeling ready

In 2016 Team Express handed me an e-commerce division: nine supervisors, a 300-driver workforce under them, and a P&L with my name on it. I had never run anything close to that size, and I said yes anyway, then worked backwards from the promise. Daily numbers on a whiteboard. Honest reviews where the worst route got fixed first. A delivery operation for 1,500 passports a day for a government-grade client, where a single lost document was unthinkable. Revenue grew 57% in six months, and I learned that leadership is mostly a cadence kept without excuses, in weeks when you feel like keeping it and weeks when you do not.

The city watches what you do with a small thing before it hands you a bigger one.

The founding years, where the real education happened

In 2019 I joined WIMO as a founding team member: a shipping aggregator built from zero. Serviceability maps drawn by hand, 15+ partners onboarded one difficult negotiation at a time, and Namshi same-day delivery in Riyadh scaled to 1,200 to 1,500 shipments a day, around half a million in a year. I left in 2021; the company was acquired by Emirates Post in 2022, and the systems and partner network we built during my tenure were part of what made it worth buying. Then Quick Ship, deeper into the engine room as founding team and Head of Operations: an AED 12M business at 20% gross profit, 13 3PL partners, 250+ tons a month of imports, five customs regimes cleared with zero holds across three years.

At two in the morning, during peak

If you want one image of these thirteen years, take this one: a fulfilment centre during Black Friday peak, two in the morning, 5,000 orders in the day's queue, and the sorting lines still moving. I am on the floor, not because the dashboard needed me there, but because floors tell truths dashboards round off. Somewhere between the conveyor and the loading dock is everything I know about operations: the promise is made on a website in milliseconds, and kept by tired, honest people at 2am. Your job is to be worthy of both ends.

What thirteen years actually taught

Compounding beats positioning: every role I ever won here was won by the previous role's numbers, not by clever negotiation. Staying close to the work is a strategy, not a sentimentality. And reinvention is rent: I started in couriers, and today I build AI agents for inventory checks and partner scorecards, because the market moved and the rent came due.

If you are at the cold-call stage tonight, holding some unglamorous line with a number on it, hear this from thirteen years down the road: that line is the start of your route. Keep it honest, keep it measured, and keep moving. The city notices. It noticed me.