Everything you need to know before you start.

Founder-led service businesses with 10 to 50 employees, especially in the UAE, Dubai, and the wider GCC. If growth is real but the operating system underneath is starting to wobble, ARCAS was built for you.

We find where revenue, cost, and risk are leaking inside your business. Then we give you the tools to fix it yourself or work with us to fix it together. The diagnosis maps the problem. The services fix it.

A consultant starts with a proposal and works on your business. ARCAS starts with a free diagnosis and works with you. We embed inside your team, not as an outside vendor handing you a deck. At the end of the engagement, you keep everything: role scorecards, SOPs, decision rules, dashboards, and trained owners. A consultant leaves you with slides. ARCAS leaves you with a system your team can run without us.

Because adding AI to a business with unclear roles, undocumented processes, and founder-dependent decisions does not grow revenue. It increases costs, compresses margins, and traps the founder further. People alignment and systems documentation come first. AI is the accelerant, not the foundation.

Both, plus open source. The free tools (diagnosis, playbook, SOP Starter, Delegation Map, AI Readiness Check) are self-serve. You can use them without speaking to anyone. FounderOS and PersonalOS are open source on GitHub. Clone them and run them yourself. The consulting side is scoped to fixed engagements: 15 to 30 days for Founder OS, 60 to 90 days for Business Rewire. Self-serve is enough when you know the problem and have capacity to fix it. Consulting makes sense when the fix needs to happen inside the team with someone who has done it before.

No. The full playbook is free to read, no account needed. The only gate is a soft one: if you want a version tailored to your own business, we email it to you based on your diagnosis results. That tailored version is still free. We just need an email to send it. The generic playbook stays open to everyone.

Yes. FounderOS is open source. It runs as a voice-first operating layer for solo founders, built on Notion and Claude. Six core docs: identity, priorities, decisions, clients, daily anchors, weekly commitments. Three install paths depending on your stack. Notion template, Claude desktop with the Notion MCP, or the Claude Code plugin with local markdown files. Free. Owned by you. Lives at github.com/ARCASSystems/FounderOS. It does not run workflows, host webhooks, or store anything in our cloud. It holds the thinking layer. You keep the data on your own machine.

The repo is the deliverable. If you are a solo founder with the time and patience to install it yourself, clone the repo and follow the quickstart. If you want it shaped to your actual operating routine, with the daily flow mapped and the AI quick-win plugged into the tools you already use, that is what the paid 15 to 30 day Founder OS engagement is for. Same destination. Different rung on the ladder.

A Claude Code plugin for individuals, not businesses. It stores your career data on your own machine (CV, applications, story bank, skills inventory) and loads it into Claude so the model treats you like a returning user with context, not a fresh stranger every session. Lives at github.com/ARCASSystems/PersonalOS. Audience is career changers, freelancers, and anyone running their own job search. Separate from the ARCAS business work. If you are hiring, the diagnosis is the right tool. If you are job-searching, PersonalOS is.

You land on the diagnosis page. No account, no login required. You enter your company name, your role, your industry, and your team size. Then you choose which areas of your business to diagnose. The engine asks targeted questions, scores your answers in real time, and produces a full report with a risk exposure analysis, a weekly action plan, and AI-ready prompts you can copy into any LLM. When you download or email your report, we ask for your email once. No account is created. Everything is free.

No. The diagnosis is free. Always. No login. No paywall. You get a full risk exposure analysis, a weekly action plan, and AI-ready prompts at no cost. When you download or email your branded PDF report, we ask for your email once so we can send you a summary. No account is created. No data is sold.

Five to eight minutes for the full scan across all seven areas. The engine recommends the focus areas most likely to matter for your business based on your intake answers. You can switch to others at any point. Pause and come back whenever you need to. Progress saves automatically.

Yes. The diagnosis runs one focus area at a time. Start with the one the engine recommends first, usually two to three minutes, and decide whether to continue. The downloadable report works whether you completed one area or all seven.

Yes. The diagnosis works whether you are the founder or a team leader filling it in. The questions adapt based on who is answering.

A branded PDF report, AI prompts you can copy into any LLM, a one-week focus plan, and a scored breakdown of where revenue, cost, and risk are leaking. After that, you have three paths. Self-serve: use the report, playbook, and tools to fix it yourself. Strategy call: book a free 30-minute call to pressure-test the findings with someone who built the engine. Engagement: if the fix needs hands-on help, move into Founder OS or Business Rewire.

Book a 30-min strategy call. Bring your diagnosis. We pressure-test the findings together. The engine is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same results. But context matters, and that is what the call is for.

No. By default, everything you enter stays in your browser. You choose whether to share, and you can share just an overview without financial details, or keep everything private. We do not use your data for sales calls.

No. The diagnosis engine is entirely rule-based and deterministic. There is no AI running on your information. We generate AI-ready prompts for your use. You copy them into ChatGPT, Claude, or any LLM you choose. We never send your data to an AI provider.

Yes. Your diagnosis data is stored securely, and you can choose to keep everything local to your browser. We do not share data with third parties. ARCAS is built with UAE and GCC compliance in mind. Your business data never leaves your control unless you explicitly choose to share it.

A free 30-minute conversation where we walk through your business together. You bring the diagnosis report if you have one. We map friction points, review your tool stack, and hand you a plan you can run yourself. No pitch, no upsell. If deeper support makes sense, you decide.

You do not need to. But it helps. The diagnosis gives us a shared starting point so the conversation moves faster. Without it, we spend the first 15 minutes mapping what the engine would have shown in 5.

No. There is no retainer and no 6-month engagement. Founder OS runs 15 to 30 days. Business Rewire runs 60 to 90 days. Both have fixed scope and clear deliverables. You decide what happens after the diagnosis.

The person on the strategy call is the person who built the engine. No account managers. No handoffs.

Interior design, recruitment, marketing and PR, facilities management, and other founder-led service businesses in the UAE and GCC. The diagnosis adapts to your industry and team size.

Strategy call: free. Paid diagnostics phase: from $999 (audit, function mapping, friction analysis, tailored plan). Founder OS: from $499, delivered inside the first week and refined over 15 to 30 days. Business Rewire: scoped after diagnostics, typically runs 60 to 90 days. We scope to a hard commercial target, not to hours. You see the full number before you commit, not after.

Do the math on your own team. At 20 people, every week the founder is the bottleneck usually costs 8 to 12 hours of team idle time, 1 to 2 delayed decisions on live deals, and one escalation that could have been resolved without you. Over a quarter that is a full month of operating speed. The diagnosis tells you the specific number for your business. Not fixing it does not keep the status quo. It slowly makes the founder more expensive.

Decision load drops first. Roles, handoffs, and escalation rules get written down and trained, which takes the founder out of the routing layer. Delivery follows a system instead of one person's memory, so it gets more consistent across clients. Margin visibility comes back because you can see where time and money are going before they leave. By day 60 to 90, the team runs recurring work without the founder in the room.

You own everything we build. Role scorecards, documented SOPs for your core workflows, decision rules so your team stops escalating to you, a dashboard someone on the team can run, owner training so the system holds after we leave, and AI workflows where the business is ready for them. Nothing lives behind a paywall on our side.

We agree on 3 to 5 measurable outcomes at the start of the engagement. Common ones: revenue at risk reduced, founder hours recovered per week, rework rate on delivery, team escalation volume, onboarding time for new hires, and margin improvement on core services. We track these during the engagement and review them at handover. If you cannot point to a measurable change, we did not deliver.

The diagnosis shows the leak. The playbook explains the fix. What you cannot do alone is sit in your team meeting and see what they are too close to see. That visibility takes someone who has done this work before, building the fix inside your real team, your real workflows, and your real decision environment. We sell time.

A COO costs AED 30,000 to 50,000 per month and takes 6 months to learn the business. A business coach gives you frameworks but does not install them in your team. An AI agency builds tools but does not fix the operating system underneath. ARCAS is a fixed-scope engagement: 15 to 90 days, scoped to your actual leaks, focused on what stays behind when we leave. If a COO, coach, or agency is the right answer for you, the diagnosis will tell you that too.

Week 1 is observation, not deployment. We sit inside your team's existing meetings and handoffs: the sales review, the client delivery stand-up, the week-end wrap. We watch how decisions actually flow, where they stall, and what your team already knows but is not saying. By day 7 you have a written read-out of the top three leaks and the sequence we are going to fix them in. Nothing gets changed before then.

Founder OS: expect 3 to 5 hours per week from the founder for 15 to 30 days. No team involvement required. Business Rewire: expect 2 to 3 hours per week from the founder, plus 1 to 2 hours per week from each team lead involved. Most of the work happens in existing meetings and workflows, not on top of them. The time cost is part of the ROI: if we need more than that, the engagement is scoped wrong.

You can. The engagements are scoped in phases, and each phase ends with a written review against the commercial target we agreed at the start. If the numbers are not tracking, we tell you before you tell us, and we renegotiate or stop. You keep everything built up to that point. We do not lock founders into retainers they cannot exit.

Most of our work is with teams that mix English with Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, and whatever combination you have on the floor. SOPs are written in English but structured to be read fast by non-native readers. Role scorecards and decision rules are one page, plain words, no jargon. If a specific tool or training needs to be in Arabic, we flag that early and plan around it.

You run the system yourself. That is the entire point. Everything we build is documented, trained, and handed over to an internal owner. We do a 30-day check-in after handover to confirm the system is holding. If you want ongoing support after that, it is available but optional. The goal is internal ownership, not a dependency on ARCAS.

Founder OS is fully remote. Business Rewire requires on-site embedding for at least part of the engagement because the work involves observing how the team actually operates, not just how the founder describes it. If you are outside the UAE or GCC, we can scope a remote-first engagement, but the results depend on your team's willingness to be observed and coached through video.

Good. We are not replacing any of that. We check whether the tools you have are actually being used the way they were intended. Most businesses we work with have a CRM, an HR system, and some documented processes. The issue is rarely the tool. It is the decision logic, ownership, and adoption underneath. If your existing infrastructure is working, the diagnosis will confirm that and the engagement will build on it, not replace it.

Four groups. Pre-revenue founders who need to find product-market fit before fixing operations. Companies above 50 employees that need a full-time COO, not a fixed engagement. Founders looking for a strategy deck without implementation. And anyone who wants AI to replace their team instead of supporting it. If you fall into one of these groups, the free tools and playbook are still useful. The paid engagement is not the right fit yet.

Use the free tools first. Diagnosis, playbook, SOP Starter, Delegation Map, AI Readiness Check. If you want a full operating layer for yourself, FounderOS is open source on GitHub. Clone it, follow the quickstart, run it on your own machine. The paid Founder OS engagement is sized for founders with revenue and the budget to skip the DIY step. If you are pre-revenue, start with the repo.

The diagnosis, playbook, and all free tools work for any service business globally. The regulatory content (Emiratisation, e-invoicing, ESR) is UAE and GCC specific. Paid engagements are currently focused on the UAE and GCC because on-site work is part of the Business Rewire model. Founder OS can run remotely for businesses anywhere.

If your business has 20 to 49 employees in one of the 14 targeted sectors, MoHRE Emiratisation mandates apply now. Non-compliance fines start at AED 96,000 per year and rise to AED 108,000 or more. The diagnosis identifies whether your roles, systems, and onboarding are ready to absorb new hires productively, not just to fill a quota.

Communication complexity jumps from 45 potential interactions at 10 people to 190 at 20. The founder can no longer be in every conversation. At the same time, regulatory obligations increase. Emiratisation mandates, formalized HR systems, and compliance documentation become mandatory rather than optional. The diagnosis maps where your operating system needs to formalize.

Beyond Emiratisation, four pressures are active right now. E-invoicing rolling out across 2026 and 2027. Corporate tax at 9% on profits above AED 375,000, which requires clean financial systems. Transfer pricing documentation. Economic Substance Regulations (ESR) audits getting tighter. All four assume you have documented processes someone can audit on demand.

No. That is the large-organisation playbook and it does not apply here. In a business with 10 to 50 people, every person matters. You need systems that make each person more effective, not replaceable. AI comes after the people and systems are working, not instead of them.

We help you design roles, not quotas. When a business adds an Emirati hire into an environment with clear role responsibilities, documented KPIs, and a structured progression path, retention improves and the hire becomes productive faster. When the environment has unclear roles and founder-dependent decisions, turnover is high and the compliance cost compounds.