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.

Twitter and my other social networks

Online on long

For someone who first went online some 15 years ago with a CompuServe [1] account and having been online literally non-stop since June 2000, I am not particularly enamoured by the many social networking fads and there are quite a few.

I started blogging over 5 and half years ago and did because I felt I ruminated a lot about events and issues around me but never really have a forum in which to express myself or air my views.

Probably, I should have been political, but after a brutal encounter with student union politics where the authorities interfered with anyone who dared have independent thoughts, I felt the game was just too dirty for my sensibilities – however, when I did politics, people knew I was in politics that was 25 years ago.

Links to strange places

There are so many social networks they are as comforting as a scratch to a rash, but one does really wonder what real purpose they serve, but each to their own.

The only mainstream social networking site I am registered to is LinkedIn [2], this is a professional setting for networking with people you have associated with in your career.

As I entered details of my work life, I began to make connections with people I had worked with over the years, we commended and recommended each other based on memories of our experiences and before you know it, you have a self-referencing career profile.

Someone comes across your LinkedIn profile and finds that you are connected to other well known persons, that can be taken at face value or more inquiries can be made – before you know it, you are connected if not working through the connections made within the LinkedIn network.

Though, I have not yet secured an opportunity yet with LinkedIn, I know as a self-employed consultant that in the last 10 years, all projects I have been on have come about through undocumented networks, LinkedIn in my view can take that further sometime in the future, I think.

A commitment to Blogs flagging

Blogs can be difficult to write and it could take time to incubate and then appear as an opinion, I have held issues for months at times before I felt the time was ripe to write with inspired fervour.

Somehow, my blogs are not short, they are fully referenced, attributed and painstakingly researched, well, I try, it might not be as thorough as one would like it but my write-ups are not academic treatises.

The advent of Twitter [3] has somehow changed my blogging perspective, as system whereby you condense a topic, a reference and your opinion into 140 characters must test anyone’s abilities in concision, precision, brevity and context, you bet, mine have been tested.

I have been quite a purist about Short Message Service (SMS) messages, I hate abbreviations and what is known as SMS English, I once received such a message from my kid sister, I politely told her I could not understand what she had written – it took my mother transcribing it to traditional English for the penny to drop.

The Twitter spirit is fabulous

Anyway, I do like Twitter, it makes you think about how to put it all together in one Tweet making allowances for a reply or a ReTweet. This means you Tweet must be at least 2 characters plus your Tweeter identity short of 140 characters. Sometimes, you have to rephrase a Tweet and still maintain the original context, but I wonder what this would make of communication.

Would we all become masters of the soundbite, earnest purveyors of the dramatic put-down or scribblers of putative one-liners?

I am not sure that Twitter would radically affect the seeming verbosity of my blogs but this outlet is very useful; in 140 characters, I could be serious, silly, salacious, sceptical, sanguine, sarcastic, probably scandalous but never seditious.

A toolbox of Twitter spanners

Beyond that, Twitter came in useful when I found myself the only passenger on a boat, I sent a Tweet announcing where I was and one announcing my arrival on terra firma – it offers public insurance with private assurance.

There are so many Twitter tools out there but I have selected three for their ease of use, basic functionality and follower management capabilities.

I use the PowerTwitter Add-on to Firefox [4], it automatically expands the shortened URL to the source and shows pictures and video links if the short URL points to those elements. I can immediately see who I am following and who is following me.

My Swiss-Army Twitter knife

Twhirl [5] is easy and portable, the reply, ReTweet, favourite and direct message icons are available when the mouse is moved over the image of the Tweeter. I use the http://is.gd URL shortener because it gives the shortest URL and only this weekend the sequentially generated part moved up from 4 characters to 5 characters.

Then suddenly I got all this following from lewd profiles, those I did block but I also ended up blocking some profiles I should have just stopped following – I found out how to better work the system over time.

Just like my blogs the general theme of my Tweets is also about things too concerning to ignore, so really, I am not interesting in some other get-rich- quick Internet money making idea – if the ideas were so good, the purveyors of such Twitter Spam would be serial entrepreneurs making money not part of the nuisance of online noise.

Between friends, acquaintances and hobos

Just like I learnt with ICQ over 10 years ago, in the first day, I was connected to 50 people who did not say more than “Hello”, I was so clueless about who they were, what their interests were and they had not bothered to fill in their profiles. I cleaned out everything and ended up with just 5 connections. The same logic has applied to all my other networks, I engage with people who engage me because there is no point taking traffic you cannot use. It is already a jungle out there.

So, this is where Tweepular [6] came in useful, it shows mutual follows, unrequited follows and followers – in fact, it is a crude tool I use every other day based on the last time a Tweet was published and the content of that last Tweet to decide whether to follow or not – so that the point in time when I check Tweepular my decision is a hammer and that momentary Tweet is a nail.

The developers of Tweepular are such fun loving crazy people, as it generates your data the progress bar has the Twitter bird moonwalking – makes me smile everytime.

What I would like

I would like to see a proper reference to Tweets I have replied to so the thread is consistent and if necessary one should be able to easy expose a thread to public viewing.

I have published my Tweets on my blog, on the left there is a full-colour Flash based record of recent Tweets and to the bottom right of my blog, you can find a list of my last 50 Tweets.

Tweepular intends to create a feature to show Recent Unfollowers, but really, are we that bothered? In the end, the ideal TwitterVerse is to be followed by just the same people you want to follow, we would never get that ideal but people are getting on my list the more their one-liners have content, context, sense and probably some humour too.

I am not on FaceBook, I am just not persuaded of its usefulness at all and Flickr handles my photographs efficiently, in fact, I have had a few published in forums, guides and journals.

Sources

[1] CompuServe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] LinkedIn Home

[3] Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Power Twitter : Add-ons for Firefox

[5] twhirl | the social software client

[6] Tweepular Login

Shopping down the wire

I flew British Midland

I think it was April 1995 when I went online through Compuserve and bought an air ticket from British Midland to Amsterdam from London on the aptly named http://iflyBritishMidland.com website.

Since then I have bought books, goods, and electronics online without much worry, though a good friend did inform me over the weekend that he was a victim of credit card fraud but thankfully his bank was alert enough to see the irregularities and contact him to repudiate transactions made in his name by some other unauthorised person.

Assumptions clouding alertness

However, recently, I have been wondering if Internet Shopping is anymore the fun it used to be where you had choices, options and the flexibility of not having to explain yourself too many times to get something done.

I noticed that when I book air tickets on the KLM site, if it was towards the end of the month there was the possibility that the return date would be presented as month hence even though one just wanted a couple of days.

For instance, I wanted to travel on the 26th and return on the 29th, it was when I was checking in online that I found that the 29th return date was a month hence rather than the same month.

This has happened to me to before and I have to pay for another full fare ticket to correct the mistake, this time my ticket was flexible, I could change it if I wanted.

Fewer choices on the Internet

In fact, I would think if I had bought the ticket at a counter, it would be nigh on impossible to end up with the wrong return date, the teller would probably have asked if I really wanted to spend 34 days away instead of 3 – Methinks this kind of logic is necessary on the website.

The ticket was flexible which meant I could change it, but using the Internet facility for ticket alteration offered to charge me the full whack for the ticket, however, when I made a phone call to customer services, the change was effected without additional charge – what relief.

Ich bin leider

Then, using the flexibility of being able to book journeys between countries which the German Railways bahn.de site offers as opposed to the rigidity of other country railway sites, I booked a ticket to Geneva.

The site could not offer me a price but I got an acknowledgement of my request, usually, when an air ticket is booked, you get a confirmation of the request, a confirmation of the order and the cost of the transaction in minutes, you get that with hotels too.

German efficiency went up the creek for that, for days, I heard or saw nothing for 8 days, I had to call customer services, meanwhile earlier in the day I had emailed them to determine if my tickets would be sent.

I was informed they were sent that very day, but it took the best part of 4 working days for the tickets to traverse the humongous cavern between Germany and the Netherlands.

I was none the wiser about the cost of the ticket or whether it had really been sorted for the intervening period.

Schrecklicher Kundendienst

A reply arrived which simply said if I did not get the tickets before the day of travel, I should buy the tickets on the day of travel and then ask for a reimbursement.

These people still deliver 21 days to deliver my tickets and had already given up on giving me any service – I was gobsmacked – I was travelling around Easter, I might not get a seat and the tickets might cost twice over for a 12 hour journey – at which point I really regretted not going to a ticket counter, queuing up for maybe an hour and arranging my travel over 30 minutes for a booking fee.

I gave up on trying to remonstrate and waited – eventually the tickets arrived like I said, but there was much lost in customer service that could only be termed deplorable and beyond the pale.

Press the flesh

I doubt if I would be quick to book certain things on the Internet soon again, the need for human interaction with the warts and foibles might just be what one needs.

Surely, do your research and help the teller along with the information required for your transaction but keep your credit card in your pocket when sat behind that inanimate screen and take a walk down to the shop, the store or the ticket counter and make social conversation.

Obviously, when I said what is 2 inches between friends to the assistant the other day when trying to buy a television and talking about size, you should have seen his face go bright red, I would suppose he was adding colour to the conversation – the things that go on in people’s minds, unspeakable.

You cannot call computers stupid, but it is strange what you can call human beings when you have the right temperament.