Doing business deals in Indonesia has a different feel than in the West. In principle it is the same fundamental things you are doing: Selling or buying services or products, making contracts or any other sort of normal transaction.
Indonesia is full of people that will do anything to get a job – "anything" at that also means that you as the employer has to be extra careful checking people's credentials.
This is why the real test should be placed directly in the job interview. I work with a few simple rules when recruiting:
Wivvies use a few basic rules when they create web pages for people / organizations / companies and these rules are pretty much the same each time.
Wivvies sets up the framework so the client can append the contents to the web page themselves from start and in the future. Wivvies has this policy in order to avoid misunderstand details about the contents and in order to lower the overall cost for the client.
First of all, with the current infrastructure and communication policies in Indonesia, you will not get the correct Internet line, but you can optimize the possibilities to get a good line.
Hopefully, I will be able to rewrite this article in a few months or years and paint or prettier picture, but I personally doubt it.
Indonesia is not well developed when it comes to fiber optic cables, these cables are usually present in the urban centers and usually they are installed along major roads.
This article is not the absolute true. Jakarta is vast and the possibilities are endless and that means I can only scratch the surface of this topic in this article.
The traffic situation influences these decisions heavily; you have to take into account the employees have to be able to reach the workplace within reasonable traveling time.
You also have to take into account that if your company is dependent on a lot of material from and to seaports, airports or even the main roads.
Being an expat in Indonesia is not cheap; there are many expenses involved that Westerners usually do not take into account like: Education for children, health insurance, security factors finding a house, travel expenses etc.
Here are the most necessary key figures for the Jakarta area:
One child in private international school: USD 25.000 a year, this does not include field trips and other connected expenses.
Housing in Jakarta varies from USD 1.200 to 5.000 a month depending on area and quality of apartment/house.
Indonesia was the first country in the world to publish CSR guidelines (Corperate Social Responsibility), that does not mean that the salary level is not competitive - it just means that employees expect to be treated with respect.
The base salaries in Indonesia can be seen in the table below, but please be aware of the fact that these are Jakarta salaries and these are higher than all other Indonesian locations.
Please also notice the difference between high and low salary levels - the wealth distribution in Indonesia is very uneven.
Let me tell you a story about how my 1st business setup in Indonesia evolved. It all started in 2006 where I was suppossed to setup a software outsourcing company in Bandung.
I thought Bandung was the right place due to ITC (Institute Technology Indonesia) and recruitment possibilities. I met up with the local authorities KMBP to start processing my license to conduct business in Indonesia.
Wivvies mainly does programming and graphical work, but actually a large part of my work time is spent creating ideas and bundling business plans to these ideas. Sometimes the ideas I work with are my own and sometimes I help somebody else developing their ideas.
If you look at other articles from the business and Indonesia chapter you will also notice that Wivvies is able to help carrying out business initiations in Indonesia. The business plans are presented either by web pages, word and excel documents, powerpoint presentations or Flash presentations.
