Lachlan Jackson, founder and Managing Director of Ecocoast, a Dubai-based specialist marine contracting and coastal protection services company, wasn’t at the company’s headquarters at Dubai Investment Park when I arrived there, as I was (obviously) a bit too early for our interview. In those extra minutes, I looked around the bright meeting room I had been seated in: besides a table and about six or eight chairs, the room contained a shelf with books (which were mostly entrepreneurship-themed), and the wall behind it was plastered with posters. Next to that, there was a whiteboard stocked with dry erase markers, and yellow and pink colored sticky notes scattered all over it, indicating that spontaneous brainstorming sessions often happen here to encourage frequent, efficient, and concise knowledge-sharing. Perhaps the most eye-catching element of all in the room was a wall decked in black chalkboard paint, allowing the team to write down ideas and plans in different vivacious colors.

If you want to understand how the Ecocoast team functions, just consider that one wall- it is a simple, practical, and not-very-expensive DIY solution, but even scribbling on it with a dusty chalk is a way of making the team members more deeply attached to and aligned with the commitments they have taken on. As another testament to this, later on in our conversation, Jackson would tell me that there are two executive coaches who work with the team, himself included, on a regular basis to hold them accountable for their goals. “Everything we do, every product or service that we start doing, we approach them like we are pioneers,” says Jackson, remaining valid and succinct throughout the interview. “We are either the first to bring it to the region, or we take an existing idea and make it better. We have a very narrow focus with what we do, but we dive deep back into the value chain, and we control the supply of our materials, the manufacturing, the project execution, and the engineering behind it.”

Launched in 2009, Ecocoast Contracting provides specialist marine contracting and coastal protection services -covering the full lifecycle of a marine or coastal project from development and protection, marine infrastructure, to operation and maintenance- to developers, contractors, operators and governments, primarily in the UAE. These services encompass two main areas -coastal protection and marine infrastructure- mainly focusing on the installation of marinas, marine piling, beach cleaning and maintenance. Since 2014, Ecocoast has cleaned over 2,800,000 square meters of area and removed over 2,240 cubic meters of debris from beaches and golf courses, equating to over 5,180 tons or 50 trailer loads. Today, Ecocoast Contracting is a parent company to Ecobarrier Manufacturing, a marine manufacturing firm Jackson set up in 2012, that designs, manufactures and distributes a range of marine protection and demarcation barriers under the brand Ecobarrier.

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