Dubai: Despite the global economic recession, the biggest-ever Pakistan Business Directory was launched in Dubai Thursday with at least 600 new entries.
"We were sceptical about compiling our eighth edition of the Pakistan Business Directory for fear of low response and negative comments from people, but we were amazed by the tremendous response of 600 new entries from Pakistani companies and businesses opened in the UAE recently," publisher Atif Malik said.
The director contains more than 6,000 entries of Pakistani companies from all over the UAE including their telephone numbers, business categories, e-mails and addresses.
He said that his team shunned all the negative propaganda about a business slowdown and found out during data collection that more Pakistani companies are starting up in the UAE and there has been an increase in business activities.
Dr Saeed Mahmond, Consul General, who launched the directory, said that the UAE has emerged as the single largest foreign investor in Pakistan as well as the second biggest trade partner after the United States.
"Bilateral trade between the two countries stands at $7 billion (Dh26 billion) in financial year 2008-2009," he noted.
He said the UAE has also become the second biggest source of foreign remittances through banking channels.
In 2008-09, Pakistani expatriates remitted $1.2 billion from the UAE compared to $850 million in 2007-08.
Source: Gulf News
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Setting Up a Company
Even if you have a business plan and the financing all in order, you still have to go through the motions of actually setting up the company, registering it, and making it official. Many people might consider paying someone for a service, but if you are a do-it-yourself kind of person and you want to save a lot of money you can do it yourself. All it takes is an afternoon and a little bit of patience.
1. Why Incorporate?
The biggest advantage to setting up a company is incorporation. Unlike an unincorporated business, corporated businesses are a separate legal entity. The company will have its own name. You should incorporate even if you are just running a one-person home business. You can also sell your company later if the need arises if you incorporate.
2. Limited Liability
By far, the biggest advantage to incorporating, however, is getting what is known as limited liability. Let's say for the sake of argument that someone sues your business. As a separate legal entity, the worst that can happen is that you lose everything you invested into starting up the company - collectors are not able to force you to sell your car, home, etc. This isn't the case with an unincorporated business - your liability is unlimited and your personal finances in addition to the finances of your company are at stake.
3. Step 1 - Select A Name
In order to start a business, first, you must apply for a registered name. You will want to do research beforehand to see if any businesses in your community currently are already using the name you are thinking about naming your business. Try and choose a name that is unique, memorable, and distinguishes your business as belonging to a particular industry. For example, Acme Industries isn't as good as Acme Autobody. Likewise, Acme Autobody can be made more origional and memorable - Speedy Autobody. It might also help to add your town or city onto the end, for example, Speedy Autobody Seattle. This is just an example of what separates the sheep from the goats. You might also want to put your name in the company name, for example, Johns Autobody Shop.
4. What Type Of Company Should You Choose
As was gone over earlier, chances are you will want your company to be incorporated, meaning you are not personally liable for your business. Other than that, you can choose to have your company privately or publicly owned. Unless you are huge and intend to be listed in the stock market you should stock to the private variety.
5. Your Obligations
Once your business name has been approved, you will be provided with a company registration number. It is then up to you to fill out another, second form to register for an income tax number for your business. You are also likely going to be required to have your place of business inspected to make sure that it adheres to the requirements of a building code - proper fire extinguishers should be a minimum requirement. Lastly, you may want to put up a small sign for your business and you will also want to display your licence in an inconspicous place on the premises.
By: Trevor Marshall
1. Why Incorporate?
The biggest advantage to setting up a company is incorporation. Unlike an unincorporated business, corporated businesses are a separate legal entity. The company will have its own name. You should incorporate even if you are just running a one-person home business. You can also sell your company later if the need arises if you incorporate.
2. Limited Liability
By far, the biggest advantage to incorporating, however, is getting what is known as limited liability. Let's say for the sake of argument that someone sues your business. As a separate legal entity, the worst that can happen is that you lose everything you invested into starting up the company - collectors are not able to force you to sell your car, home, etc. This isn't the case with an unincorporated business - your liability is unlimited and your personal finances in addition to the finances of your company are at stake.
3. Step 1 - Select A Name
In order to start a business, first, you must apply for a registered name. You will want to do research beforehand to see if any businesses in your community currently are already using the name you are thinking about naming your business. Try and choose a name that is unique, memorable, and distinguishes your business as belonging to a particular industry. For example, Acme Industries isn't as good as Acme Autobody. Likewise, Acme Autobody can be made more origional and memorable - Speedy Autobody. It might also help to add your town or city onto the end, for example, Speedy Autobody Seattle. This is just an example of what separates the sheep from the goats. You might also want to put your name in the company name, for example, Johns Autobody Shop.
4. What Type Of Company Should You Choose
As was gone over earlier, chances are you will want your company to be incorporated, meaning you are not personally liable for your business. Other than that, you can choose to have your company privately or publicly owned. Unless you are huge and intend to be listed in the stock market you should stock to the private variety.
5. Your Obligations
Once your business name has been approved, you will be provided with a company registration number. It is then up to you to fill out another, second form to register for an income tax number for your business. You are also likely going to be required to have your place of business inspected to make sure that it adheres to the requirements of a building code - proper fire extinguishers should be a minimum requirement. Lastly, you may want to put up a small sign for your business and you will also want to display your licence in an inconspicous place on the premises.
By: Trevor Marshall
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Starting a business in Recession
Though we all know that Dubai has been hardly hit by recession, and I myself was affected by it. Now the question, is a recession a good time to be an entrepreneur?
From econsultancy:
Silicon Valley veteran Guy Kawasaki believes the answer to both is "yes".
From econsultancy:
Silicon Valley veteran Guy Kawasaki believes the answer to both is "yes".
In a post on Building43, he argues that there are new economics of entrepreneurship:
- Talent is free or cheap. Thanks to the ills of the recession, Kawasaki writes "If there was ever a time to get great people for free or cheap, this is it".
- Tools are free or cheap. Citing open source, Kawasaki says "You’d really have to work at it to spend a lot of money for the tools to build something these days".
- Storage, bandwidth and servers are free or cheap. Thanks to cloud hosting services, "you can get more storage, bandwidth, and servers for $1,000 a month than you’ll be able to use".
- Marketing is free or cheap. Twitter is "the single best way to market your product or service" and Facebook "is a close second". Both, of course, are free.
Having started a number of online businesses over the years and being in the midst of starting a couple of news ones during this recession, I disagree with Kawasaki. Here's why.
Talent isn't free or cheap.
There are plenty of good people who are unemployed or under-employed right now but that doesn't mean that most of them are willing and able to work for a pittance. Furthermore, from what I see in my network, the best people don't have any shortage of work.
But whether or not you can find decent worker bees at little cost is besides the point in my opinion. Trying to use "free or cheap" labor is not a good long-term strategy for attracting and retaining talent. As they say, you get what you pay for, recession or no recession. When the people you hire feel like they're being taken advantage of and aren't invested in your success, don't be surprised when they fail to deliver what you expected. And don't be surprised when they drop you like a bad habit once they find an opportunity that compensates them fairly.
Tools are cheap but that doesn't mean building a skyscraper is.
Open source solutions are great and can significantly reduce your costs. But if they're not put in the hands of competent, talented developers, they're worthless. If you give a monkey a hammer, don't expect him to build you a house; if you give a novice developer PHP and MySQL, don't expect him to build you a scalable web application.
Open source, in my opinion, is a double-edged sword for this reason. While lots of people know how to build applications that seem to work with the free tools that exist, a much smaller number know how to build applications that work at scale. You can easily find someone who can build you a database-driven website with reasonably complex functionality; it's much harder to find someone who can build a database-driven website that won't go down for the count when you get slammed with a few hundred thousand visitors in a few hours.
Storage, bandwidth and servers can be cheap but true scalability requires investment.
When Kawasaki says "you can get more storage, bandwidth, and servers for $1,000 a month than you’ll be able to use", he may be right. That's because most sites don't need $1,000 worth of storage, bandwidth and servers. For a heavily trafficked site with hefty database interaction, trust me: you're not going to throw your web application onto a "cloud" VPS and survive.
A couple of observations:
- Many of the startups that tout the advantages of cloud hosting and its benefits don't have enough usage to speak credibly. Most would get along just fine with a dedicated server or two.
- To the extent that cloud hosting convinces startups that they don't need to worry about building scalable applications, this is folly. Any startup that thinks the cloud will solve the challenge of scalability is missing the point. Caching, database query optimization and the use of high-performance/lightweight HTTP servers, for instance, result in better applications and better architectures and are things that every startup should look at.
Real marketing isn't free.
Twitter and Facebook can be great marketing tools depending on the type of business you run. But how many highly-successful and profitable startups can you name that relied solely on Twitter and Facebook to market themselves?
If you limit your marketing efforts to services that are free, you're probably missing your greatest opportunities. Kawasaki himself notes that his startup, Alltop, isn't exactly taking over the world despite the fact that he's been "evangelizing" it on Twitter for 18 months. Clearly something is not working here and Kawasaki should probably consider that if Alltop is going to succeed, he needs to do more than tweet.
Conclusion
The message here is that there are no new economics of entrepreneurship. Starting a web-based business can be done cost-effectively but that doesn't mean that the most important components are free or "cheap"
Finally, Kawasaki neglects to note the single greatest cost an entrepreneur will incur: opportunity cost. The economics of that never change.
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