They have done it once
Not advised on it. Done it — with the budget, the politics and the mistakes that came with it.
For institutions
Talk to the people who have already built it.
Built By Icons is a network of the people who built landmark institutions — and a way for organisations to reach them. Three things are available: an hour of someone's judgement, a team assembled around a brief, and a programme to record your own institutional memory before it leaves the building.
The problem we solve
When an institution sets out to build something it has never built before — a broadcaster, a research university, a Sharia-compliant bank, a national carrier, a hospital system — the market offers frameworks, benchmarks and slides. What it does not offer is the person who did it, who knows what the framework left out and what it actually cost.
Not advised on it. Done it — with the budget, the politics and the mistakes that came with it.
No implementation contract waiting at the end, no team to place, no software to attach.
Most of them built these institutions here, in Arabic and English, under the same constraints you are under.
What is available
An hour, or a series of them, with someone who has held your problem before. You describe the question; we identify who has actually answered it and arrange the conversation.
Available now.A commissioned build. Six people who each ran one function at an institution like the one you are creating — editorial, engineering, digital, distribution, commercial, operations — brought together for the duration of the project.
From 2027, as the directory reaches depth.Your own institution, recorded. We interview your retiring generation, build the archive, and hand it back to you as a searchable record your successors can query.
By programme, per institution.Every request reaches us first, never the member directly. We qualify it, put it to the people who fit, and come back to you with who is willing. Members set their own rates and decline freely — which is why the ones who say yes are worth having.
Corporate memory
Every institution we have researched has the same gap. The archive holds the output — the broadcasts, the annual reports, the photographs — and almost nothing about the decisions behind them. How the first bureau was opened. What was argued about the week before launch. Which calls were right, and which were not.
That knowledge sits with a few hundred people, most of whom have already left, and it has no other copy. When they go, an institution loses the only account of how it became itself.
Era by era and function by function, working from the public record and from your own people.
One hour each, on video, with consent and sign-off at every stage.
Transcribed, indexed by era, function and decision — in Arabic and English.
A question returns the answer of the person who was there, attributed and in their own words.
An anniversary is the natural moment for this, and the reason is practical rather than sentimental: it is the one time an institution will fund it, and the people you need are still reachable.
How we work
We do not publish or sell contact details, and we are not a recruitment business. Nobody in the directory is approached without their consent.
Members decline what they cannot discuss. Anything under an obligation to a former employer stays under it.
If nobody in the network has genuinely done what you are attempting, we will tell you rather than send you the nearest available name.
Where to start
A paragraph is enough: what you are setting up, roughly when, and the decision you are stuck on. We will tell you whether the network holds someone who has faced it, and what it would take to reach them.