It starts with a conversation. Use the contact form or email us directly and we'll schedule a discovery call — typically 45–60 minutes. There's no pitch, no sales pressure. We ask the right questions, you tell us where you are, and we give you an honest assessment of whether and how we can help.

If there's a fit, we'll follow up with a scoped engagement proposal within five working days. If we're not the right partner for what you need, we'll tell you that too.

It depends entirely on the scope. We work across three broad engagement types:

Strategic diagnostic— typically 4–6 weeks. A deep assessment of your market position, channel architecture, and growth blockers, delivered as an actionable report and presentation.
Market entry or expansion— typically 6–18 months. Active in-market work: distributor identification, channel development, sales structure build, launch support.
Ongoing strategic retainer— rolling engagements for businesses that want continuous senior-level support without the overhead of a full-time hire.
We always define scope upfront. You won't find us manufacturing dependency or extending timelines unnecessarily.

We work with businesses that have something genuinely worth taking to market — regardless of size. That includes early-stage companies with strong technology but no international sales infrastructure, and established businesses with stalled growth or underperforming distribution.

What we don't work with is companies that aren't ready. If your product needs more development, your pricing isn't viable, or your internal team isn't aligned — we'll tell you before we take your money.
Readiness matters more to us than scale.

It's a structured conversation — not a sales presentation. We'll want to understand:

What you make or do, and the problem it solves
Which markets you're targeting and why
What you've already tried — what worked and what didn't
What your sales infrastructure looks like today
What a successful outcome looks like in 12–24 months
You'll leave the call with a clearer picture of what we'd recommend, even if you don't proceed with us. That's intentional — we'd rather earn your trust upfront than win a contract through ambiguity.

Both — but we never underestimate the value of being physically present. Markets are built by people, and relationships that close business are built in rooms, not on screens.

For international engagements, we will be in-market when it matters: for distributor meetings, trade events, key customer presentations, and launch moments. Day-to-day strategic work is managed remotely with structured reporting and regular calls.

Our core services cover three interconnected areas:

International Market Entry & Expansion— target market selection, entry strategy, regulatory mapping, launch planning and execution across new geographies.
Sales Strategy & Channel Development— building or restructuring sales operations, distributor identification and onboarding, territory planning, KPI frameworks, and commercial performance improvement.
Business Development & Partnership Building— identifying strategic partners, negotiating commercial structures, and building the external relationships that create long-term revenue.
In addition, we represent and commercialise Bioglo — our proprietary UV hygiene detection technology — across hygiene-critical industry sectors globally.

Our sector experience spans food production and processing (aquaculture, dairy, meat, beverage), healthcare and infection prevention, pharmaceutical and life sciences, and industrial manufacturing.

Geographically, we operate across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America. We have particular depth in markets where relationship-led business development is critical — the GCC, Scandinavia, and the Asia-Pacific region.

We don't manufacture expertise we don't have. If a market or sector sits outside our direct experience, we'll tell you — and help you find someone who can genuinely help.

A Shaka strategic diagnostic is a deep, structured assessment of your growth position. It delivers:

A clear analysis of your target market landscape and competitive position
An honest audit of your current sales and channel structure — what's working, what isn't, and why
Identification of the highest-value growth opportunities available to you
A prioritised set of strategic recommendations with clear rationale
A 90-day action plan to begin execution immediately
It's a document built to be used — not to sit on a shelf. Every recommendation is grounded in your commercial reality, not theory
Readiness matters more to us than scale.

We don't use databases and mail-merges. Distributor identification is done through direct market intelligence — sector contacts, trade networks, and in-country relationships built over two decades of international business development.

Once candidates are identified, we qualify them against a structured framework covering:

Existing customer base and sector penetration
Commercial capability — team size, sales resource, warehousing
Portfolio fit — do they already carry complementary or competing products?
Strategic alignment — are they hungry for growth or managing decline?
Financial stability and reputation in-market
We present you with a shortlist of properly qualified candidates — not a long list of maybes.

Bluntly: we've done the thing we advise on. The principals of Shaka International have built international sales operations from scratch, turned around underperforming distributor networks, and taken new technologies to market across multiple continents. We're not strategists who have never carried a bag — we've been in the room, negotiated the deal, and lived with the consequences.

We are also genuinely independent. We tell you what we believe is right for your business — not what protects a future retainer. If the honest answer is "you don't need us for this," we say so.
That's not a common quality in professional services. We consider it non-negotiable.

Bioglo is a UV fluorescence-based system that makes biofilm, bacterial contamination, and hygiene failures visible in real time — without chemical application, without lab delays, and without disrupting production.

Biofilm is the organised colony structure bacteria create on surfaces. It's the primary source of persistent contamination in processing environments, yet it's completely invisible to the naked eye and largely undetectable by conventional testing until a problem has already occurred.

Bioglo's UV system illuminates the fluorescence emitted by biofilm and organic residues, giving hygiene teams an immediate, visual map of contamination — exactly where it is, and how extensively it's spread.

In field evaluations at salmon processing facilities in Shetland, Bioglo consistently detected biofilm in harvesting and gutting zones that had passed standard hygiene checks. The contamination was real. The cleaning had simply missed it.

Any industry where surface hygiene is operationally and commercially critical. Active and proven sectors include:

Aquaculture and seafood processing
Dairy and liquid food production
Meat processing and cold chain facilities
Healthcare, IPC and surgical environments
Wine, beer and beverage production
Pharmaceutical and life sciences manufacturing
Cannabis and controlled indoor cultivation
The common thread is simple: environments where contamination has significant human, regulatory, or financial consequences.

ATP testing tells you there's a problem — after the swab, after the result, after the time it takes to send it away or read the luminometer. And it tells you nothing about where the problem is, how far it spreads, or whether cleaning actually fixed it.

Bioglo is a different category of tool entirely:

Immediate— results are visible in real time, in the moment cleaning is assessed
Spatial— you see the exact location and extent of contamination, not just a pass/fail number
Non-disruptive— no chemicals, no sampling delay, no production stoppage
Preventive— identifies risk zones before contamination causes a product failure or regulatory issue
ATP and microbiological testing still have their place in a hygiene programme. Bioglo doesn't replace them — it gives you the visibility layer that makes everything else more effective.

We work with a small number of carefully selected distribution partners in each territory — organisations with genuine reach into the right sectors and the commercial capability to represent Bioglo properly.

If you're interested in distribution, contact us directly with a brief outline of your organisation, the sectors you serve, and the territories you operate in. We'll respond within five working days.

For facility trials — where you want to evaluate Bioglo in your own processing environment before committing to a wider rollout — we run structured field evaluations. These are scoped engagements, not free samples. We invest time and expertise; we ask you to invest the access and operational co-operation that makes the evaluation genuinely useful.

The Scottish Sea Farms field evaluation is a good example of what a properly run Bioglo trial looks like. You can read the full case study on our Insights page.

Yes. The fluorescence detection principle behind Bioglo is grounded in established microbiology. Biofilm's extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) matrix — the structural scaffold bacteria produce to anchor and protect their colonies — exhibits characteristic fluorescence under specific UV wavelengths. This is a documented phenomenon, not a proprietary claim.

Bioglo's hardware and protocols are engineered to detect this fluorescence reliably in demanding industrial environments — where ambient light, surface materials, and operational conditions would defeat a less precisely calibrated system.

Field validation across multiple facilities in the aquaculture sector has consistently confirmed detection of biofilm in areas that passed standard cleaning verification — providing real-world evidence of both the technology's sensitivity and the scale of the problem it addresses.