The new office!

The New office
The New office
The New office

We recently shifted our office to Sakinaka to a larger, much open space. Shifting to a commercial property has its charms, and it has its overheads as well.

This office will see us through for atleast the next couple of years, and hopefully we will be forced to move on to a much larger space after that!

Yes, the cake was our own celebrations on having finished the furnishing of the office.

The difference between a Good vendor and a Great vendor

9 months into this business, here’s a gem of a lesson that I have learnt. It’s good to have vendor’s guilt (you need to be clued in on Amit’s blog for this term, he is going to has shed more light on this – Vendor’s Guilt). It keeps you on the edge, it makes you deliver on time. However, it’s great to learn how to control this feeling and not get overwhelmed by the same. On a more personal note –

One of the primary reasons for starting a services firm was to beat the run of the mill service providers that I see in the Indian IT Services market. Service providers need to be value adding rather than extracting value from the organization.

Being steered by this value, the focus has always been on adding value. Getting recognition and paid for providing this value is the differentiation between a good and a great vendor.

How to Ace a Job Interview

When I was going for my first interview, no one told me this … however as time went by, all of us learnt the hard way.

  • Always sit upright in the chair, slightly lean forward
  • Never cross your arms or legs, that makes your posture defensive
  • Always smile and be forthcoming about your weaknesses
  • Be honest and do not be afraid to say “I don’t know”

After a decade of working and interviewing people, this infographic is a great summary of what are the basic things you should do when going for an interview.

How-to-Ace-a-Job-Interview

Saving your Paper Trail

 

In the course of our lives, we create a large paper trail which we take with us as a means of identifying who we are, this trail involves

  • Identification proofs such as driver’s license, pan cards, UID (hope that works!), ration cards
  • Bills (telephone, electricity, credit cards) and their respective receipts
  • Mark sheets and Passing certificates (and thank god I have gone through that phase!)
  • Certifications
  • Insurance policies and other financial documents (pass books, cheque books, shares)

The list of paper documents we manage is endless … in fact as I am writing this, I know that there is one drawer-full of electricity bills in my house, all of my family members have a separate file for certificates and documents which is at least 2 inches thick. Despite of maintaining this growing trail of papers, when the time comes to fill taxes (which should have been a mundane task since I have been doing it for the past decade of my working life), I end up running around till the last-minute.

The problem?

A paper storage and retrieval system which is messy at best and chaotic at the worst. I am not alone in this war against documents, businesses suffer the same problem as well. For start-ups, the first 5 years go in peace, in the sixth year though, there is a drastic need to get all of your papers in place. That includes TDS filings, bills for incidentals, purchase documents, sales receipts … the list goes on. So what is to be done?

This is where Document Storage Solutions come into play

Document Storage involves storage and management of important documents, records management for example or simple archival of the existing documents to be fetched at a later time. These solutions are also useful for governments, for example the UK government does use strong record management facilities to support their Freedom of Information requests from the citizens. However, FOI can only be useful where the document is actually stored, what about those  documents which are destroyed? Some problems are beyond the scope of Document Storage :-)

What is important for us here is that sometimes maintaining and storing all these paper documents becomes an issue (in terms of space, in terms of finding the documents at the right time), and that’s why services which can effectively maintain these services are being founded and I find them just the solution for saving you (or your organization’s) paper trails.