Selecting various vendors

Selecting various vendors

After setting-up the vision for the center and hiring guidelines, we turned our attention to actually set-up the entity. You'd need a handful of vendors/consultants to set-up and maintain the operation. Here is the list:

0. Bankers
1. Consultants to take care of legal formalities, including STPI registration
2. Real estate agent to get an office space
3. IT consultants to plan the IT infrastructure
4. Vendors that could supply hardware and software
5. Security agency
6. House keeping and pantry service providers
7. Payroll service provider
8. Internet and telephony service providers
9. Group mediclaim service providers
10. Someone that can provide various office equipments like refrigerator, TV etc.,
11. HR consultants for special hiring
12. Someone that could print our letter heads, business cards, signage etc.,
13. Floral decorators
14. General insurers for office equipments, PCs etc.,
15. Someone that can take care of AMCs for our UPS, A/c etc.,
16. Travel agent (air tickets, hotel booking, cab etc.,)
17. PR consultant
18. Courier service provider
19. Clearing and Forwarding agent
20. Temp staff providers
21. Caterers

Some of the choices were straightforward. We are working globally with a few who have their local offices (a choice that was a big regret later on due to poor service, yes from some multinationals). We knew a few folks directly for years, like our IT Consultants Tathsthu Technologies, who were our ex-colleagues and whose services we had used in our former companies. For the remaining 15-17 vendors, on an average we decided to get atleast 2-3 quotes. It means we were dealing suddenly with over 35-45 vendors, who had confusing quotes (no matter what is your requirement, they will offer some standard they are used to).

The problem of dealing with so many vendors got compounded by the fact that we didn't even had an office space. For over a month, we worked out of my childhood friend's office, who kindly let us use a part of his office and infrastructure. We had, on an average 2-3 meetings with most vendors - first meeting where we explained our requirement, second one where they came and explained their quotes, and subsequent ones mostly for clarifications and negotiations. So, we had over 100 meetings in a month.

I must confess that its not been a great experience dealing with vendors. Except for a small percentage of them, most won't appear to be keen to do any business, even during recession hit times. For example, we were talking simultanesouly to Airtel, Tata, Reliance and Spectranet for internet. One of these was providing voice and data to the building we would eventually rent. This operator had nothing to loose as all the infrastructure was in place, but refused even to come down for a chat on their quote. "Its a standard one, take it or leave it" was the reply. Most are not punctual. They won't understand the needs or more importantly care to understand the needs. Its so very surprising that when these companies spend so much monies on ads, irritating telemarketing etc., etc., don't care when we ourselves approach them for business.

We are now settled and almost everything is in place. It was fun when we started, but it got frustrating as things took lot longer to close and lots of energy was spent in getting the office up and running. I'm glad its over and that we have been focussing on our core engineering activities.