Built a bankable financial model for waystations on the Hijrah Route

Challenge

A Saudi transportation operator was developing commercial waystations along the pilgrimage route between Makkah and Madinah under a long-term concession, combining highway retail, fuel and parking with a large bus operation serving pilgrims. It needed one lender-ready financial model, starting with no verified cost or revenue data, no agreed capital structure, and two very different businesses that had never been modeled together.

Response

• Built a fully linked, 30-year three-statement model with a CAPM-based cost of capital and a year-by-year WACC schedule that tracks leverage as debt amortizes
• Integrated real estate (retail, fuel, parking) and bus operations on a consistent basis, with tiered revenue sharing across vehicle and asset classes
• Benchmarked every major assumption against regional market data, documented each source, and flagged any input without a verified benchmark
• Broke out returns by business stream instead of a single blended IRR
• Caught and corrected two material errors in client-supplied data before they reached a lender-facing deliverable
• Adapted the model in real time as the capital structure, discount-rate method and transportation cost data changed mid-engagement

Impact

• A bankable, fully sourced model, with every assumption traceable rather than asserted
• A standalone positive return on the core real estate business, clearly separated from the still-developing transportation revenue
• A version-controlled model and executive presentation the client's team can keep updating as real leases, quotes and operating data arrive
• A defensible, audit-ready case for the project's next financing milestone