Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Jani Jermans: I have been in the industry for almost 15 years and while leading the global immigration and travel in various industries, I saw there was no one single company who supported the corporate with their end to end requirements. Corporate was finding it difficult when they have to deploy people out of the country. For example, for one deployment overseas, company has to reach out to local law firms in the destination country for work permit processing, payroll companies to set up payroll, another person for audit and compliance etc. Some of the countries need local entity and labour quota in order to process work permit and corporate had to decline such projects as they were not aware that there are companies like ours who can support with the sponsorship where they don’t have labour quota. Also corporate have to reach out to recruitment/staffing company to fulfil the local hires etc. So it was a need of an hour to start a company which becomes one stop solution for entire international requirements and that’s how SJ Mobilita’ was born.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by SJ Mobilita
Jani Jermans:
International: Recruitment, Staffing, Payroll, Immigration support like processing work permits (we can support for more than 150 countries), Audit and compliance, Sponsorship of work permit if the client doesn’t have an entity in the destination country, Consulate Interview Preparation, Guidance and support on consular documents for various countries, Validation of Business Travel compliance, Relocation, Setting up office in International location, Legal support for any employee concerns in terms of local labour laws, Entire Travel Support like business travel, Leadership offsites etc for both international and domestic locations, Translation of documents in international languages, Relocation support, HR consulting on minimum wages, policy guidelines, best practices, and any other service requirements for the corporate.
Domestic: Recruitment, Staffing, payroll, compliance on expats employed in India, visa and travel support, FRRO Support, relocation support and any other support services required for the corporate
Great Companies: What makes SJ Mobilita different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Jani Jermans: Currently we do not have any company managing end to end support for corporate on the International requirements other than SJ Mobilita’. So we are the only company who is an one stop solution in providing end to end support for corporates on their international requirements
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Jani Jermans: There have been numerous occasions or struggles that were a learning experience for us over the years and we had to work our way through them. In one instance, we had a large client for whom we setup a full staffing implementation abscond after a month without paying anything for a month of effort for about 25 employees. It was a big setback for us as we had invested heavily in the setup and had to take the loss on ourselves.
A big problem we face being a start-up is that we are competing with the big and established brands in a lot of cases and have to ensure that we are competitive without compromising on the quality of our offering. For example we had to lose out on a project where we were cost saving the client 20% of their expense, still they had to go ahead with another company just because of the brand even though their cost was way above ours.
Another struggle we had initially was that, when we started we didn't have brand recognition and breaking into the market without that required a lot of effort from our side and collaboration with our clients. Once we had the first few clients onboarded things became easier.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line SJ Mobilita?
Jani Jermans: In order to grow we will be focusing on business development both locally and internationally. We also will leverage the word of mouth network of our existing clients which has been our biggest asset.
Five years down the line, we want to be covering all the countries in the world in terms of support and also want to increase the CSR effort to be able to sponsor complete education expenses for at least 100 students
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Jani Jermans: The main advice I would give is to focus on your product and have a quality offering, instead of focusing on growth immediately. Growth will come automatically with a quality offering. Too many companies focus on growth at the expense of a product. In addition ensure that you never, ever compromise on your ethics and values when building up your company. This is the only thing which will guarantee your long term success.