Stepping out

I have made a major decision towards becoming independent. It is not as profound as quitting my day job to concentrate on a Freelance career, but more like stepping out to a more entrepreneurial role in a start up operation.

Since my dream always has been to make a start-up a reality, I took the most logical step towards doing the whole exercise for someone else, by starting up an off-shore operation for a foreign company. I figured this was the best way for me to get the exposure that I need to get my fingers burned without actually getiing them burned.

In a couple of months, I will be stepping out of my comfortable day job to set up an off-shore development office. I will be responsible for setting up an office, procuring hardware, recruiting a team and managing operations. Personally, it is an upgrade for me because I am currently used to operating in an environment where there is a lot of support services in place. Most of my job functions were limited to managing only the project team. There was a Finance division to take care of the financial matters, there was human resources to take care of human resources matters, there was admin to take care of the administrations matters and if I really could not handle the projects or the clients or the team, there was my higher management who were there to step in.

But in this start up operation, there is no body that I can run to or to hand over my responsibilities to. I am going ot be solely responsible for the success or the failure of the local operation as I am completely incharge of it.

It also gives me the freedon to set up an opertion the way I always dreamed of. When you work in a established company you have these ideas of how you would do things differently, only if you were in charge. Well now I AM going to be in-charge. So it is up to me to design the processes and systems to make them work the way I want. And these days I am giving those things a lot of thought as much as to the process of setting up a physical office.

I also plan to record on this blog, the process of setting up this operation for the benefit of all of us.