Starting a small enterprise in Sri Lanka is not a big problem. You can register it as a unlimited or limited liability company, with very little capital. With latest changes to the companies act now it is possible to start a company with even a single director.
This article is not about the process of registering or start up of an enterprise but about few issues you may face running the same on shorter term. This article is purely written based on my personal experience and may view differently by academics (as there are only few theories we have developed locally to suit ourselves).
The biggest issue as I see running an enterprise is managing the Human Resources. Our children from the small age are being thought to take a book based approach where more than half of them leave the standard education stream by O/L or A/L's to join the workforce without having any idea of the challenge ahead. This aggravates by the ideology of most entrepreneurs who couldn't comprehend and understand his most valuable asset the Human Resource.
Some areas that need to fix your ATTITUDE as an entrepreneur for the success
* Remember your employees have their own problems.
* This starts with transport, imaging they spend 1/3 of their work life on the road. If you can help this smoothed out they have one less problem to worry. An average of 2-3 hours being spent in traveling for most employees in urban area
* Meals, generally employees cannot afford eating out as well they find it difficult finding places closer their offices or factories and therefore try bringing meals from home. This again would require few more hours of their time.
* The result is an employee working 8 hours a day would fairly spend closer to 12 hours on achieving their work goals. This is not counting any overtime or extra work they need to do if demanded.
* Employee attitude - This is not your problem (at least until they joined your organization) but is the biggest drawback on leading a successful enterprise. Your time and money should be spent largely on this if you need to be successful in the business
Conclusion:
you need to integrate yourselves to your employees life style and see how you could make their life more comfortable (I am not discussing here salaries and other benefits which are the basics). If you can provide transport or local accommodation (specially for young workers) , meals you will notice the amount of absenteeism would largely reduced. Strong polices on attendance timing and lunch hours etc will put negative impacts on employees on unavoidable infrastructure situation.
Attitude, on work ethics, customer satisfaction, quality, interpersonal communications are the next major challenges, that you may need to pay attention. Try having informal get together s , team building trainings and some quality time understanding your employees problems. Don't read so many books on too many principles on how to create structured organizations, well structured organizations do requires substantial number of employees with specific job functions (of course you can do this when your organization become bigger). Spend as much money as possible in training your people (don't sign contracts for training them) but make sure they apply what they learn (only you can make it happen).
Spend some quality money in your finance function, nothing will run without the help of a good finance function. But remember finance function is not book keeping, it is beyond that and I would write a separate article on that later.
Finally, if it permits you need to keep your total workforce below 30. Beyond this point you need professionals in HR to take your role, which also require reorganization of your complete operation, and keep watching the 3rd Year, 5th Year and the 7th Year, these are the time frames many companies loose their focus.
Good luck!
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