Akin Konsult gets registered in less than 35

Hardly doing business smoothly

Just about a year ago, a report was published about the cost of doing business around the globe from the basic registration of the entity through to getting elements together to make that business function.

The bottleneck impeding the smooth transaction of business registration is the bureaucracy that underpins the system in most cases, but bureaucracies do not have to be all that bad. Properly managed and efficient bureaucracies do exist and function like clockwork.

For instance, with the basic information of being a single man with a salary, a mortgage and no other extraneous liabilities; I file my taxes online from inception to completion in less than 25 minutes, if it takes an hour for anyone else, they must be filing for team.

“Den say” to nothing happening

So, I finally decided to form a company and register one in the Netherlands where I live, the residual Nigerian in me trying to allay concerns about the process immersed myself in asking questions and seeking first-hand information from others.

I sunk into the “den say” complex – “den say” {A pidgin English translation of they said, they being anyone and everyone} the process of accumulating information from everywhere but authenticated verifiable sources till you have enough to knock the courage and boldness out of you to do what should be done. Read this in the light of the residual Nigerian lurking in my seemingly Western outlook.

This silly situation basically kept me from doing this stuff for months because I was waiting to have my hand held through the process when I could have just read up on the stuff in the first place.

Get on with it, yourself

Anyway, I finally went to the company registration website and immediately found the forms I needed to fill for a sole proprietorship – in English.

Bless these people, the English end of the form was filled in and it automatically filled in the official Dutch version so you just got it right – thankfully, ICT Consultant translates to ICT Consultant in Dutch, the aspect of design, architecture and development is easily done with a quick chat on MSN Messenger with a friend and we were done.

I printed out the form and left it a while until I was overcome with shingles, but it was at the back of my mind. Meanwhile, I had a chat to a friend who had just finished a company registration last week, it was a positive ”den say”.

All the help and more

So, this afternoon, as I realised I had strength to do something, I left home for the Kamer van Koophandel (KvK), namely, the Chamber of Commerce which is a few hundred metres from the Central Station in Amsterdam.

As I got to the KvK, I asked in English about company registrations, the friendly receptionist immediately gave me a VAT form to go with my company registration and a ticket signifying my turn in the queue with a warning that it might take 15 minutes to get called. I think I arrived there at just before half-past three in the afternoon – they close at 5 o’ clock.

I filled in the financial projections for the VAT registration and wondered, I had just walked into the Chamber of Commerce a foreign not speaking the lingo to register my company and it would be done in minutes without having had any money exchanging hands to get in the queue, having some urchin demand something to see my forms and then dismiss them out-of-hand because palms have not been greased.

I snapped out of that trance quickly enough to realise, I am in the Netherlands not Nigeria and my number came up E42. He asked if I could speak Dutch, I said badly, and he replied, no problem, we help as many languages as we can speak.

All done in 35 or less

No tension, as we entered his office, he asked if I was registered with the local government, I thought I was, I have been paying council taxes for years, the payer is definitely no ghost.

I produced the forms and my identity, a British passport as I explained the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom which consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – lots of light hearted banter, I signed the form and my company was registered, within 5 minutes, I had the confirmation that I own and run Akin Konsult, an ICT consultancy as a business entity in the Netherlands.

Another 10 minutes, the process had been completed for my VAT registration all in one go and at one basic cost that did not exceed EUR 30.

In all, I probably spent 35 minutes from the time I walked in the KvK and left the proud owner of a fully registered sole proprietorship all managed and steered by people who are a members of a bureaucracy no doubt but are satisfied with their jobs, willing to help, very friends, deftly efficient and quite knowledgeable about their tasks.

Most importantly, they were doing me no favours and they were asking for no favours, they were just doing their jobs and I left extremely impressed with what should be an everyday circumstance anywhere in the world.

I would indeed want to find out the experiences of company registrations in other countries especially the one that leaves the residual Nigerian awakened from dormancy when it should have been extinct.

Presence without essence - Internet

Snail mail, no call

I just received mail in the post from a renowned retail and catalogue services concern in the Netherlands with an Internet presence [1]. The contents suggested that I call to arrange when I would be available to receive my order.

Such communication should not be strange; it does have an element of customer service which until quite recently was not to be expected in the Netherlands.

It can only mean that organisations are implicitly working on some other aspect of their business model and fabric that allows for their employees in the customer-facing departments to feel a little more involved as representatives of their organisation and a very interesting touch of shared responsibilities.

However, this mail came about when I was shopping around for some exercise equipment, this time, an exercise bicycle having already acquired the Total Gym XL and the Ab Burner which is usually advertised as the Ab King Pro.

The history of my desires for a perfect body over the laid-back approach of easy-living without the complications and vain-glorious hedonism is not too well documented, but work is apace at getting fitter and looking better. Suffice it to say, the gym on the second floor of my apartment block has been visited thrice, however, not in any attempt to break any sweat, even though aerobics presents an interesting spectacle.

Left in the pre-history of e-Commerce

The issue on view here is the number of companies that have an Internet presence but have not fully inculcated the essence of being on the Internet, having a web present and offering opportunities to transact business with them.

The first observation was months ago when having observed what the Ab King Pro does for working on the abdominal muscles on one of those ubiquitous and at times utterly loathsome shopping channels [2], I went to their web site and placed an order.

Having been an Internet user since 1994, I have been rather confident of Internet transactions since 1996 when I could book flights on the British Midland site then called http://www.iflybristishmidland.com - it was awfully nice to be able to eliminate completely the middleman and enjoy the convenience of seeing all the options and making your own choices to your particular convenience. The foray into e-commerce in its infancy encouraged my subsequent activities of conveniently preferring the Internet ordering system to the calling the customer service or sales desk.

I had inadvertently mistyped my credit card details, which eventually turned out to be convenient, because having placed the order, it offered no record of the transaction on screen or by email, even though that transaction had successfully registered an email message to their sales department. Basically, on the tip-off of a friend the gym kit was obtained for about a quarter of the price at a retail outlet [3] having done the requisite research on the Internet.

Premium call deterrent

In fact, the charges for calling the premium rate number are outrageous; where the possibility of keeping you connected for over 30 minutes is likely, with 20 of those minutes being on a waiting queue because all sales people are engaged. When you finally get connected to the "friendly" sales person, just hope that you can both agree on a language for your dialogue and that what you are ordering is what is being offered. Once before after waiting over two and a half hours, I was put back in the queue because he spoke Dutch, I spoke English - How is that for communication breakdown?

Unreasonable form options

Anyway, I made this order on the company's web site, only to find out that there was no means of payment, rather someone was going to call me to arrange delivery. There was a restriction of only allowing fixed line phone numbers rather than mobile numbers which offer a sense of contactable ubiquity. Eventually, a letter arrived rather than the call a good seven working days after.

What is most irksome about this is I now take the cost of the phone call they were supposed to make and probably for all their Internet presence; I would have to pay at the doorstep when the goods are delivered. In arranging a window for delivery which at times is based of a 4-hour morning or afternoon, I am prepared to be surprised if they offer evening deliveries at no additional cost.

Aspiring but despairing

The most amusing of these Internet presences without essence firms was a personal computer firm; it took the best part of 2 weeks to adequately shop around for a laptop. What was quite striking about it was the fact that it was nigh on impossible to walk out of over 8 PC shops with a ready-built computer, everything required a waiting period of days in some instances.

I then decided on the convenience of Internet-shopping for a laptop and did get one of the best specifications I could find. As I placed the order I suddenly realised the order had been confirmed without a means of payment. Then I called the firm only to be told I could pay at the door. That was plainly and utterly inconvenient for the risks and circumstances.

With much persuasion we agreed on making a bank transfer, and then the parcel arrived through the regular parcel delivery service. Having gotten the impression that a company courier would deliver the laptop and collect the payment at the doorstep, they used the regular post.

Ideas should fit in your strategy

In conclusion, it is evident that those who have jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon, did so without securing a think-through of what they intend to achieve by having a web presence. The concept of basic web presence is now Internet pre-history, the Ice Age of thawing of innovation just before the dawn of the DotComs.

If a company is interested in engaging customers in an interactive choice-driven environment that allows them to make quality decisions on products of interest, then they should complete the process by offering the full experience of convincingly ordering, knowingly paying and confidently expecting service of those orders or requests.

Just being a supermarket style trolley which never gets to the check-out till is no fun to either the buyer or the seller. The start-up of an e-commerce business could incur large initial costs, but once the audience and marketplace is established, it is still no operation for the faint hearted.

References 

[1] Wehkamp http://www.wehkamp.nl/homepage/p_homepage.asp?Page=HOM [2] Telsell http://www.telsell.com/ [3] Perry Sport http://www.perrysport.nl/ [4] Computerland http://computerland.com