With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
JULY 2014 BCBUSINESS 37 ISTOCK I N D I A Doing Business in Mumbai With a population triple all of B.C.'s, India's largest city o ers a wealth of opportunity by Anne Casselman I ndia's largest city can prove a chal- lenge in adaption and exibility for Vancouverites. "It's always important to use local knowledge but this is triply true in India and Mumbai especially," says Christine McLaren, resident writer for the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Mumbai. Case in point: her employer was developing a market- ing stratey and PR campaign and defaulted to taking out newspaper ads, even though locals advised that the most e ective way to get word out was to hire an elephant with a banner on it. Eventually they did hire an elephant, with great success, but not before wasting time and resources on point- less media buys. Formal/Informal It's important to embrace the informal. "So much of Mumbai's economy is informal and it's usually the most e cient part of the economy," says McLaren. To get things done quickly, be prepared to hire a lone operator rather than an established busi- ness and to forego the formality of a receipt. On the opposite end of the spectrum, getting anything done through o cial channels in- volves massive paper- work and a considerable time investment, so bring your patience and the right documenta- tion when dealing with bureaucracy. Cold Calls Don't be shy to pick up the phone. "In India it's appropriate to cold call people and often it's even expected," says McLaren. Don't always expect a reply from email but if they do reply and tell you to call later, it's an invitation, not a brush-o . Beware Holidays "In Bombay it seems like there's a festival or holiday every week, which makes scheduling deadlines a bit di - cult," says Eric Leyland, principal of Vancouver's Design Management Services. Make sure that the holidays are on your radar (which draw on the Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths as well as political and national celebrations) and be ready to close shop. Even if businesses aren't closed on a holiday, traf- c and transit grind to a halt so they might as well be closed. If you're at the wrong place at the right time, you may nd yourself swept up in a crowd of half a mil- lion people marching a Ganesh statue to the sea during the Hindu festi- val of Ganesh Chaturthi, for example. SOURCE: BC Stats OLD AND NEW Mumbai: city of contrasts. TOP THREE B.C. EXPORTS TO INDIA, 2013 COAL $183 million COPPER ORE $176 million WOOD PULP $45 million p030-037-Intel_july.indd 37 14-06-04 8:10 AM