Every year, thousands of entrepreneurs quietly reach the same conclusion: the country they built their business in is no longer the country that makes sense to run it from.
Most of them do nothing about it, because the process of relocating a business across borders looks, from the outside, like a maze with no exit. Kevin McKenzie and Shayan Nasiri decided to walk through that maze themselves first, and then build the exit for everyone else.
Today, their company, GenZone, has helped more than 1,400 founders across over 50 countries set up companies in Dubai and structure US LLCs from abroad. But the story didn’t start with a business plan. It started with two Canadians doing the math on their own tax bills and not liking what they saw.
Two Finance Minds, One Frustration
Kevin and Shayan both studied at the University of Ottawa and built early careers in finance, wealth management, and business analysis. That background gave them something most founders in the relocation space don’t have: a genuine, technical understanding of how tax systems, banking structures, and corporate entities actually work, rather than a surface-level sales pitch about going offshore.
Kevin’s path ran through wealth management and a stint with Canada’s tax authority, which gave him a front-row view of exactly how much of an entrepreneur’s income gets absorbed before it ever reaches their pocket. Watching that erosion happen to his own earnings was the trigger. It wasn’t resentment toward paying tax. It was the recognition that a mobile, internationally-earning founder had legitimate options that almost nobody was explaining clearly.
Shayan came at the same problem from a different angle, asking why founders who had every legal option available to them, a Dubai free zone company, a US LLC, a compliant residency structure, so rarely used any of them. The answer wasn’t a lack of options. It was that the process to access those options was scattered across ten different providers, none of whom talked to each other.
The Industry They Didn’t Want to Use
Before GenZone existed, Kevin and Shayan went through Dubai’s company formation process as clients, not consultants. What they found was an industry built around opacity: pricing that shifted after the first payment, slow and inconsistent communication, and providers who handled one narrow piece of the puzzle while leaving the founder to figure out banking, residency, and compliance entirely on their own.
For a UAE-focused entrepreneur, that’s already a headache. For someone trying to combine a UAE structure with a US LLC for banking and payment processing, and manage both correctly, it was close to unworkable.
No single firm on the Dubai side offered a real US LLC service. No US-focused formation company understood UAE residency or tax residency planning. Founders were left stitching together two entirely separate industries by themselves.
That gap became the foundation of GenZone, launched in February 2021.
Building the Firm They Wished Had Existed
GenZone’s core idea is straightforward to describe and unusually hard to execute: give founders one place to handle everything, with pricing disclosed upfront rather than discovered later.
The flagship service is Dubai free zone and mainland company formation, covering trade license acquisition, residency visa processing, and corporate bank account opening. The process is built to be genuinely end-to-end, not just paperwork followed by a handoff to the client to figure out the rest.
Alongside that, GenZone offers US LLC formation for non-residents, specialising in Wyoming and Delaware entities for international founders who need access to US banking infrastructure, payment processors like Stripe and PayPal, and the credibility that comes with an American-registered business. Incorporation is completed within 24 to 48 hours, with EIN numbers delivered within three to five business days.
That dual-structure approach, UAE and US LLC formation offered by the same firm, is still uncommon in the market. Dubai-focused competitors generally don’t touch US entity formation. US LLC specialists generally have no UAE presence or expertise. GenZone built its business squarely in the space between those two industries.
Who GenZone Serves
The client profile is specific: internationally earning founders who need a compliant global structure rather than a single local one.
That means SaaS builders and agency owners in Australia and the UK who are tired of handing 40% of their income to a tax authority while running fully remote businesses. It means e-commerce sellers and consultants across Europe who have outgrown their home jurisdiction and need a structure that reflects how they actually operate. And it increasingly means digital asset holders and Web3 founders who need a compliant UAE entity to access regulated OTC desks and convert crypto positions into real-world capital cleanly.
The firm also serves founders who want more than just a company registration. GenZone’s real estate advisory arm, led by property advisor Liall Smith, works with clients who want to deploy capital into Dubai property once their structure and residency are in place, including off-plan investments, ready properties, and Golden Visa-qualifying purchases.
The firm has presented its Europe-to-Dubai relocation playbook at events including a summit in Portugal co-organised with Círculo Dourado, one of Portugal’s leading business communities, reflecting the growing wave of European founders looking seriously at Dubai as a permanent base.
What the Track Record Shows
From a small team handling its first clients in 2021, GenZone has scaled to a firm that has formed over 1,400 companies, supported the relocation of more than 2,500 people to Dubai, and earned Gold and Titanium recognition as a UAE Free Zone partner.
The reviews on Trustpilot reflect something more than smooth transactions. Clients consistently describe direct access to Kevin and Shayan themselves, communication that doesn’t disappear after the contract is signed, and a team that stays involved through banking, residency, and beyond. That level of accessibility is a deliberate choice, not an accident of being small.
Leadership Style: Accessible, Not Just Scalable
One thing that shows up repeatedly in how clients describe working with GenZone is direct access to the founders themselves. In an industry where growth usually means the people who built the company disappear behind layers of account managers, Kevin and Shayan have stayed deliberately reachable, including in-person meetings at GenZone’s Dubai office for founders who want to sit across a table from the people making decisions.
Both founders came from client-facing finance backgrounds where the value was in the relationship as much as the transaction. Scaling GenZone into a firm serving clients in 50-plus countries without losing that accessibility has meant building a lean, senior team and leaning on technology and process rather than layers of middle management to handle volume.
The result is a company culture that treats founder availability as a feature to protect, not a bottleneck to engineer away.
What Comes Next
GenZone’s roadmap points toward deepening rather than diversifying. The company has been expanding its post-incorporation support, including its LaunchPad client portal for managing UAE and US entities side by side, and building out real estate advisory for clients who want to deploy capital into Dubai property once their structure and residency are in place.
The bigger opportunity Kevin and Shayan are building toward is category ownership. Very few firms anywhere have credibly combined UAE company formation with US LLC structuring for non-resident founders. GenZone’s bet is that as more digital entrepreneurs from Australia, the UK, Canada, and continental Europe look to build compliant, tax-efficient global structures, the firm that already does both well will be the one they call first.
For two Canadians who started by trying to solve their own tax problem, that’s a fairly good position to be building from.
