Software Business in the Middle East

Time to time I read articles that discuss what the best choice is – to get employed or run your own business.

There is no silver bullet for this question. Business and employment are much related to each other, otherwise business owners would never find employees and employees would never get a job. It’s a matter of your personal taste. It’s like a choice whether you want to work in small or large company.

I guess it would be interesting to talk about my own experience of working as employee and then as small business owner.

Your personal time

Employment – normally, you work from 8 am to 5 pm with one hour lunch break. The rest is your own personal time that you can spend however you want. I was working long hours, but that was my personal choice. Excepting several times, nobody ever asked me to stay late or come to work on week-end.

Own business – during the first year I had no personal time at all. Then, after my son’s birth, I started to spend 1.5-2 hours each evening having a walk with my kid. Also, my wife won the battle of having Saturday as a family day when I try not to even starting up my computer.

My normal working day now is 12 hours. I took my first two-weeks vacation 20 months after we had started the company. During my vacation I checked and replied all my e-mails daily, and I was working for a few days as it was needed.

Independency

Employment – yes, you have kind of dependency on your employer. But, it’s not very clear who depends on whom. In Sweden, you cannot get laid off easily – probably only in case if you come drunk to the office, or you turned down the company network downloading porn movies, or your company gets closed. It’s also kind of winning a lottery to be laid off in Sweden – you get enough money to live your normal life within several months until you get another job. Also don’t forget about pretty powerful social support from the government.

Own business – as my ex-boss said before I quit, he was the only one I reported to when I was employed. In your own business you will report to and be responsible for a lot of people: customers, partners, sub-contractors and so on.

In addition to the politics inside your organization, you have to learn the politics your customers play with. Last year one of the officials asked for the shares in our business promising sales and public awareness about our product. We rejected the offer, and recently it came to my knowledge that several large contracts haven’t been closed last year thanks to him. Enemies can kill your business, but sometimes you have no other way rather than getting more enemies.

Mobile Phone

Employment – I used to switch off my mobile phone before I went to bed.

Own business – the phone is always on as customers or colleagues can call any time complaining about the eventual issues. Such night calls happened only once or twice for the last year, but still phone is on as you never know what happens next.

Risks

Employment – probably the most risky thing is to get laid off. You also get depression together with eventual financial troubles as it’s not funny at all to get laid off.

Own business – in case your business fails, you might pay your debts back for many years. And you get depression too.

Lifestyle

Employment – you get a paycheque regularly. The amount in your paycheque defines your lifestyle.

Own business – since the majority of income comes back to business, we spend only reasonable amount of money for living, buying things we really need. It’s kind of downgrade for me comparing to my lifestyle when I was employed. Sure, in case of successful business you will probably never remember the financial difficulties, but nobody can guarantee the success.

Career and Power

Employment – there is for sure the fighting for better position, better salary and more power.

Own business – probably, no career issues if you are the only one in your company. If not, then you might face difficulties if you haven’t carefully discussed and signed your partnership agreement.

Knowledge and Experience

Employment – it depends on your job, but it depends even more on how you feel about your job. Even at boring work of making and fixing setup programs you can find something funny to learn and new ways to implement it.

Own business – new experience and knowledge is the most exciting part in running your own business. You learn how to deal with customers, how to keep your accounting in order, how to negotiate and a lot of other stuff.

My company is kind of game for me – it’s funny, it’s risky, and it’s scary. But I like it

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In the end of November my partner got an excellent idea to demonstrate the advantages of our product by collecting a statistics of prescription errors in United Arab Emirates. It took us about two weeks to collect and enter 800+ prescriptions. Then we run Clinical Check – it’s a special feature of Clinical Decision Support software to analyze if the prescribed drugs have contraindications, precautions (like pregnancy and so on) or prescription has duplication in drug therapy when two or more drugs are prescribed to treat the same disease.

The result was, well, scary – about 16% of all analyzed prescriptions got pretty serious mistakes that might even lead to the patient death or disability. Actually, the number of errors is the same as in United States…but just 10 years ago.

It was interesting to see the reaction of public on this statistics. In the beginning of December we participated in the Medication Errors conference where we announced our statistics. As result, within the last few weeks in December they published one article in the local English newspaper, and then in Arabic newspaper too. The last one also published a larger article later that discussed the issue in more details. There are also couple other newspapers that have already arranged the appointments for the interview. The result is pretty good, I guess, especially considering the fact that we haven’t yet approached the specialized Healthcare magazines in the region asking them to discuss the issues of prescription errors.

There is one sensitive point – not to make Ministry of Health your enemy. Although they are slow sometimes on their daily work, they can react fast to ban somebody. The important thing here is not to blame anybody for the errors – doctors and pharmacists will always make mistakes and no software can guarantee safe treatment. The point is to offer solution that might help reducing number of errors.

It’s difficult to tell how this statistics will affect our sales. At least we can present the results to our existing and potential customers. One of the Universities here has decided to make a larger research by analyzing 20,000 prescriptions. This will bring very interesting results, I believe. So the experiment goes on!

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