Hunting for an office

I have started the hunt for a an office space to house the new operation that I will be incharge of in a couple of months. Before I move on to take it up completely, I need to find a place and set-up the infrastructure in-place. So the top item in the agends is to find a decent office location.

When yo talking about offices in Sri Lanka, there are two paths you can take. One is the more traditional way of renting out space in a commercial building. Commercial buildings are the easiest palces to setup offices as they provide most of the amneties needed for such a place. Also, you have the option of sharing some of the costs such as security and janitorial services with the other occupants of the building. Plus, if you are lucky, you may find a place which is more or less in a ready to move in condition, provided you can source the furniture at short notice.

But commercial spaces tend to have a few nuisances as well. Parking is a problem with most commercial areas. Plus, since you are sharing the building with other establishments, given the current security situation in the country, commercial establishments are at a higher security risk. Add to that some commercial building have restrictions on the working hours, equipment, etc.

The second path which you can take is to rent a decent house and convert it to an office. This is a path a lot of small offices take as it is easier to find houses and they tend to cost a little bit lesser comparatively. Plus, by getting a house converted to an office gives you enough freedom to set it up the way you want. You can create provate spaces for the teams in your company using the rooms of the house without spending on partitioning. Also, you have the privacy and the freedom to work in an environment which can be located in a more calm and quiet environment.

The added headaches are you need to worry about security and janitorial services exclusively for the location as the chances of sharing those costs are almost non-existant. Also, you may need to do some modifications such as lighting to create an office environment, and electrical and network cabling.

Finally there are the neighbours that you have to be concerned about. Some neighbours do not like an office being setup in thier next door. They might consider it to be a invasion of thier privacy. Also, you have to be careful about your employees not disturbing the residential neighbourhood.

With all these things in mind, I am on the lookout for a office space! I prefer a commercial space as it will give us the fastest route to setup the operations with the builti-in options that are available.

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.