DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

The May edition of Dare's Eweek started with Chetan Indap discussing one of the pain points for almost every entrepreneur - procuring the right human resources. Broadly speaking an entrepreneur goes through three stages - starts-up stage, in-market stage and growth stage. It is of paramount importance for an entrepreneur to secure the right people with the right skill sets at each stage so as to save time and energy in the long run.

Chetan Indap Founder, StaffOnContract.com

Chetan says that at the start-up stage you usually require people who are multitaskers and have a basic knowledge of almost all the work processes. These are the people who help you steadily gain popularity in the market. In a couple of years when the start-up moves to the in-market stage the venture needs a perfect balance of senior professionals as well as newbies who work towards making the business familiar to customers and where the prime focus is not on generating profits. It is only when they move into the growth stage, achieve break even point and plan on expanding that the need for professionals becomes a pressing need. Five to six months down the line the entrepreneur realises that although he thought it was a good idea to hire friends or acquaintances to start-up the venture, in the long run they are the ones that seem to weigh you down. Another factor that makes the entrepreneur lose focus from hiring the right people is his restlessness to bring his product or idea to market. This makes him gather whatever manforce is available to him and hence he does not give enough thought to creating an efficient team.

Chetan invested on this need for a lot of corporate houses and started staffoncontract.com. a unique B2B Marketplace, was launched in January 2011 to bring together Demand-side (IT firms) and Supply-side (IT sub-contracting firms) in an organized manner to quickly find and deploy IT Contract staff on ‘just-in-time’ basis.  A project of Joule Consulting Pvt Ltd, StaffOnContract.com envisions to grow into an ‘Employee as a Service (EaaS)’ platform, synonymous to Cloud Computing.

Advantages:
- Through contract hiring, you get experts for specific fields to execute your work be it software development, business planning, market expertise etc.
- One can also define the engagement of such contract employees based on the money one can spare on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- It enables you to secure people just in time when the work starts through recommendations and references.
- It also allows one to ramp down the work assigned to such workers and makes the process quicker as there are no such thing as a notice period with such workers.

Issues/Challenges:
- Such workers can quit as and when they require without prior notification as they are not obligated to the company for a fixed duration of time.
- Since one has to work with a variety of contract staff who are basically experts in their own fields there may arise cases of intercontractor synergy as they come from different work cultures.
- The employees here are on a time and material basis and hence will not really as loyal to your project as a dedicated member of the entrepreneur's team will be.

Cost benefit of contracting:
Chetan says that although contract staffing has cost advantage over quality advantage. However, in the long run he says such costs will be made up through returns one gets through contract staffing. He also states that although staffoncontract.com is only available to corporate houses now, the company will soon make such facilities available to start-ups at a subsidized rate.

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