About Me

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Mumbai, India
I run an IT Security consulting firm based out of India. We started off from scratch in 2001 when I was 21, and have offices in Mumbai, Bahrain, and UAE. The idea behind the blog is to share the stories of how we run the business, the deals we make, the deals that break, the heartburn, and the sheer joy.

The Ultimate Startup Guide

The Ultimate Startup Guide is an e-book that provides answers to all your questions related to starting and growing a business in India. Everything you wanted to know about entrepreneurship in India from ideation to registration to marketing to hiring. The book contains a large number of practical examples, anecdotes, interviews, and motivational material to help you get started, and to grow rapidly in a booming Indian economy. If you've got the idea, this book will help you through with the execution and realize your dreams. Here are some of the key questions you will find answered in this book:
  • When starting a business, what are the legal issues involved?
  • What form of incorporation is better suited to which type of business?
  • What tax issues are involved?
  • How do I start a business and what are the pitfalls?
  • How do I market my business in the absence of significant funding?
  • How do I get funded?
  • What are the basic accounting concepts I should be aware of?
  • What is a business plan and how should I build one?
The brief table of contents of the book is as follows:
  1. Getting started
  2. Ideation
  3. Forms of Enterprises
  4. Funding
  5. Basic Accounting and Taxation
  6. Import and Export Licensing
  7. Trademark and Patenting
  8. Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
  9. Building a Business Plan
  10. Marketing on a Shoestring
  11. Website and Branding
  12. Women Entrepreneurs
  13. Templates
To order the Ultimate Startup Guide - email me at kkmookhey@gmail.com.

Details of the book are:
Title: The Ultimate Startup Guide
Author: Kanwal Mookhey
Pages: 150
Additional: Companion CD contains numerous templates for building your business plan, calculating cashflow, preparing profit and loss, and balance sheets, preparing invoices, your resume and profile, marketing material, websites, contracts, and many other useful and motivational material.

Friday, October 30, 2009

A new enterprise - part 1

Taking into consideration the fact that scaling a consulting business is a long-term affair, I've decided to take at least the training component out and make that into a separate enterprise. Since it has been quite some time since I incorporated a business, I thought I'd jot down the brief journey of getting an enterprise up and running here to help budding entrepreneurs see the first few steps at least of getting a business off the ground

The first thing I did was to think up of an impressive enough name for the training business - we came up with Institute of Information Security. I then got my in-house team to get the website done www.iisecurity.in

I tasked one of my team members to experiment with some of the e-learning software, and we narrowed down on eFront. So the eLearning channel is also up and running at http://elearning.iisecurity.in

We've also started doing the SEO for the website, and it already ranks high up when searching for specific terms related to the security training business. I also logged in the business with JustDial (www.justdial.com) and with Google local business search.

Finally, the legal part. In order to incorporate the enterprise, we are doing it as a partnership. So I contacted my CA, gave him the broad terms of the partnership, and he's built all the rest of the legalese around it. The deed will be printed out on Rs. 500 stamp paper and will become a registered deed.

Oh, and of course, the process for trademark registration has already been started through my earlier trademark agent (atozservices.info).