Starting operations

Since my last post in mid February about hunting for an office space, I managed to find a quiet location in the suburbs for a decent rent. It is an ideal location for an IT operation as it is in a very quiet neighbourhood, mostly residential. Still it is not far away from the main roads so travelling is pretty convenient.

After the finding the space, negotiating the lease and getting approval from company directors for the place, finally signing the lease took a quite a bit of a toll. All this time I never had to deal with such nuisances and personally I am not a very good negotiator. I hate negotiations!

Then another set of activities: Wiring the place, getting Internet and Phones, buying furniture, buying the other equipment, etc, etc. it was exhausting but interesting. It was exhausting at times as there was nobody else but me to do all the things. And the thing I hated most was having to run around to do things.

Then when my stuff arrived in Sri Lanka from the US, getting them cleared from the customs was another story all together. And talk about starting a bank account. It took nearly 2 months to get the bank account opened and get my self added in as an authorized signatory to operate the account. The fact that some of my directors are overseas is what hampered the whole process as they had to sign two resolutions, and I was told about them at two different times. So there were documents couriered up and down. Good business for courier companies!

So there I was. After two weeks of signing the lease agreement, there I was, the one and only employee of the company, working alone, using makeshift furniture, working on a borrowed laptop. Then eventually my furniture arrived, in four batches and so did my computers. A wireless router took 5 weeks to be delivered as the shipment was blocked by the Telecom Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka because they thought 802.11 n spec was a security threat to the country!

When the basic infrastructure was in place, my next task was to get the right people in. Well that was a another story. I will write a separate post on that when I get some time. But in conclusion, it has been a pretty interesting experience. Terrifying at times, tiring sometimes, but nevertheless, very interesting and a learning experience. Also, it gave me a lot of freedom to set it up the way I wanted, more or less like setting up the operations for my own business. And now, I am ready to rock!