The Germany Expat Business Show
A podcast that shares knowledge, stories and inspiration for anyone starting, running or growing a business as a non-German in Germany.
The Germany Expat Business Show
How to go from Ausländer Employee to Successful Company Owner with Ranjit Venkatesh
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Imagine uprooting your life and moving to a country where you don't speak the language to chase a dream. That's precisely what Ranjit did when he left India for Germany, and his journey is nothing short of remarkable. In our heart-to-heart, Ranjit, a seasoned entrepreneur, walks us through his challenging yet rewarding path from a language novice to a thriving business owner. Tune in as he shares the pivotal moments, from landing a project with Deutsche Telekom to the strategic pivots of establishing his own company.
Navigating the complex world of business in a country that's not your birthplace requires resilience and a strong network, both of which Ranjit has mastered. His anecdotes about ensuring an employee's residency and the strategic shift to a home office are testaments to his adaptability. For all the freelancers and aspiring business owners out there, Ranjit's insights into the power of past colleagues, professional networks, and agencies can be the key to unlocking new levels of success. His tale is a striking example of how embracing change can forge unexpected opportunities.
Beyond the entrepreneurial grind, Ranjit also underscores the importance of continuous personal development. His involvement with Toastmasters shines a light on the profound impact that honing public speaking and leadership skills can have on professional growth. If you're pondering on how to handle the recurring tasks of business ownership or seeking advice, Ranjit's experiences reveal the strength found in community and mentorship. Embark on this episode for a dose of inspiration, practical advice, and a reminder that no one should navigate the intricacies of business, especially in a foreign land, alone.
You can find this episode and all episodes as well as show notes for each at https://thegermanylist.de/the-germany-expat-business-show-podcast/
Starting or running a business in Germany as a foreigner? Already running an online business in Germany as an expat? Wanting to grow your German-based business? Working as a freelancer in Germany? You'll love my guide with over 30 resources for expat business owners in Germany.
Hi, I'm Eleanor Meyerhofer, a native Californian designer and digital strategist. In October of 1999, a few years after graduating from design school, I flew from San Francisco to Munich with a fistful of Deutschmarks, a dial-up connection and an extremely vague plan. 20 plus years later, after a 10-year stint at a global agency, freelancing and launching two online businesses, I'm still here Now. I'm talking to other expat business owners to share knowledge, stories and inspiration for other non-Germans running businesses in Germany. I'm here talking to Ranjit, venkatesh and Ranjit, I'm going to ask you the question I ask everybody first who are you and what is the two-minute version of how you ended up in Germany? Okay?
Speaker 2:Thank you, eleanor. Thank you for having me on your podcast. So my name is Ranjit. I come from the south of India and I came to Germany in the year 2002. And the reason why I came was this was the first country which decided to give me a job. Right Till then, I had been a trainee in India. I have never worked in India and I had this opportunity to come to Germany with a green card for my first job. So I said you know, sign me up, I'll come to any part of the world if you're giving me a job. And that's how I landed in Germany.
Speaker 1:Okay, and who was this job with, can I?
Speaker 2:ask you. This job was actually with a college senior of mine and she had married a German and she came to India and she wanted to find some you know software developers who would come and join her small company. It was just a company with three owners and two of us developers.
Speaker 1:Okay, and was that here in Munich?
Speaker 2:No, it was in a city called Kandel, which is very small, around 3,000 people who live there, right next to Karlsruhe.
Speaker 1:Okay, so full disclosure. You and I are former colleagues, so I'm going to fast forward to the part when you ended up at Sapient, because that's where we met, and why don't you tell us a little bit about what you did there and how long you worked there?
Speaker 2:Sounds good. So fast forward from Kandel, which was 2002, I moved to two other cities, ludwigstaf and Mannheim, and then I landed in Munich in 2005, and I've never looked back. And, eleanor, that's where we met in Sapient. So when I came to Sapient, I joined as a software developer or in Sapient you would call it a senior associate or something right and that's how my journey started as a software developer. You know, very typical for somebody who comes from India and starts working in Germany.
Speaker 2:And what kind of projects did I end up doing? I think one of my change, the projects which changed me in Sapient, was one project which I did with Deutsche Telekom. The first thing I remember about that project is the project lead told me you know the project language is German, oh God. And that was the opening statement. I was like, are you kidding me? I had done my interviews in German. But then you know, and I was wondering how am I going to get fluent? And the way I got fluent was this there were around 12 to 14 guys on a call every day in the morning and we had to speak German. And there's one thing I've learned If you don't speak fast enough, you don't have a point and after one year of doing a call with 12 to 14 men on a call in Germany, I think my German actually picked up on speed. I don't know about mistakes, I'm still working on that.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about that. When you came here, just from at the very beginning, did you have any German skills?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no. I started learning German right after I lost my first job, so my first job was a very short stint, I think. Before the probation period got over, I was out of the job and while I was looking for a job, I just realized something that in Germany, as a beginner, as a career starter, very few people are interested in your real skills. They're more interested in your language skills. If you don't have German, even big companies were not interested in you. I'm talking about 2002, times of change.
Speaker 1:Right, right, okay. So when you were in these calls, these daily calls with 12 to 14 German guys, how did you do any extra stuff to get your German, to accelerate your German? Or what did you do? Was it just trial by fire, or were you doing classes at night?
Speaker 2:I always have been a big believer in the German Volkshochschule, an adult education school which is subsidized by the German government, and I've been always doing courses there. So I think I must have done a good eight to 10 German courses over the years, and I think they helped me a lot.
Speaker 1:So in-person courses.
Speaker 2:In-person courses. Yes, Okay. I mean, recently I've kind of switched to online language courses, but that's more. That's French and I'm just learning French for fun, Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, german, okay, so let's fast forward. So I know we both had our times at Sapient and then went on to do our own things. Tell us about what you're doing now, and was this right after Sapient, or was there something between Sapient and your job? What you're doing?
Speaker 2:now Let me see. So I was in Sapient from 2005 to 2013. Okay, and around that time when I left Sapient, that's when I had a baby girl.
Speaker 2:And then, when you have a kid, start thinking about life in a different way and I said you know, I'm going to go and try and do my own thing, and 2013 is when I went freelance. 2015 is when I started my company. I always wanted to have a company and I always had chosen the name around 10 years back, even before I'd started the company. So I started the company in 2015 and the focus was basically software development and services.
Speaker 1:Okay, Tell me a little bit about the process from going starting as a freelancer and then deciding to start your own company.
Speaker 2:That's a good question, I mean. So my luckily, the company I worked for before, which was Sapient, was nice enough to let me have two of their clients.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's always handy. Yeah, it is always handy. I mean, the interesting thing was those two clients were too small for Sapient, but they were big enough for me as somebody who was beginning off his or her career, so I think that's something I can definitely recommend people. If you're in the consulting business and you're becoming a freelancer, just go and ask your company. They might be willing to let you have some customers. And the reason why I switched to becoming a company was, at some point, I wanted to have my own employees and I thought it's always a nice thing to have a company and then have your employees. Not that you really need to have a company to have employees, but it just felt right for me. So I did that in 2015.
Speaker 1:You wanted employees. Employees are my worst nightmare.
Speaker 2:I have a story for that, but I'll get into that a bit later.
Speaker 1:Okay, so wait, does that? Do you have to be a GMA hot to have employees? What did you have to do to quote, unquote start a company? What did that look like?
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, good, that's a good question. I mean first point, you don't need to be a company to have employees. I just started a company because I wanted to. There are different forms of companies. The one I have is called as an UGAY, which is the name of the sales shaft, which is much easier to staff.
Speaker 2:It needs a smaller capital to start and get it running, but it has the same regulations that game be has to follow. And my way of doing that was I did a course with the Chamber of Commerce, the industry and hundreds comma and they kind of, in one day, kind of help you through what you really need as a freelancer or a company owner what are the legal tax details that you need to go around?
Speaker 1:Okay, and this, I'm assuming, was all in German.
Speaker 2:This was all in German. By that time, my German had become good enough to understand and take it from there.
Speaker 1:And this is, you know, the IHACA. Is this course, is this like free, or do you pay for?
Speaker 2:this Like what? The course is not free, but it's I don't know. I think it's still available in the IHACA. If anybody who wants to become a freelancer or a company owner it's called ish machemish, self-standing Okay, I can definitely recommend it for those people who are interested in, you know, becoming a freelancer or a company owner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've never taken it down. I know they do a bunch of stuff and I should like avail myself of it, but I don't. So is this the company you have now?
Speaker 2:That's right. I started the company in 2015 and that is the company which I still have.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay. So I have a high level idea of what you do, but why don't you talk a little bit about what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Okay. So the company it started off with a focus on custom software development because both my clients, which I had, got from SAP and needed software development and at some point in 2015, I decided I'm ready to take it on an employee. So a colleague of mine from India, I asked him and he flew all over here and he joined me as an employee in Germany and together we were managing two clients in Germany and we did software development for quite a while and at some point something interesting happened. You know, both my clients at the same time, around the same time, outsourced the projects that we were doing in Germany to India and Philippines.
Speaker 2:Talk about outsourcing work from an Indian to India. Oh man, Okay, that was quite a learning experience. And that's when, you know, at some point of time we were really we were finding it difficult to get the work back because it had been already outsourced, and at that point I kind of let my colleague go. He's now a very successful software developer and he's become a scrum master and agile coach. So he's on a nice journey by himself, but I've decided not to have employees in Germany.
Speaker 2:So, what I do instead is I still help clients with outsourcing, but I have a company in India and I cooperate with them, so whenever a client of mine needs software outsourcing. I take the work and I subcontract it with them.
Speaker 1:Did you do this as a preemptive measure after that experience of, like the Jiu Jitsu move of ha ha, ha, we're going? To outsource to India. So, okay, I'm going to get a jump on that and make sure.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, because with outsourcing I kind of lost at least 75% of work and I'm going to you know, by having a cooperation partner in India it kind of made it a much easier switch, especially when I'm now talking to clients and I'm doing some work for them.
Speaker 2:It's very easy for me to then talk to them and say hey, do you need any help with outsourcing? I can take it from there. And for the clients in Germany, the advantage is they have a local partner to talk to In German. Contracts are in German, you know, the legal headquarters are in Munich.
Speaker 1:So what do you do now?
Speaker 2:So that's a good question because around 2015, I thought I had done enough of software development, especially with the move of outsourcing and many things.
Speaker 2:So at 2015, I kind of moved from software development into the role of a scrum master, because I'd been working on a lot of scrum projects till then and I decided to start looking into the role of a scrum master in much more in detail and I started helping clients in a freelance position as a scrum master and the scrum master role has been going on for quite a while and since around 2019, 2020, I've kind of transitioned into an agile coach, which is where I then go and help teams set up and run with scrum. You know, there are some clients where I just go in, pick up a role as a scrum master, train the team and let them find their own scrum master and in in-house scrum master and then they'll run maybe another team. I help as a product owner and then get an internal product owner and let them run. Sometimes I coordinate outsourced teams in India and once they have an internal person, I then let them go with it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's all software, so it's like people building their in-house software Very much.
Speaker 2:I've been true to those roots as a software developer working with software teams, even when I changed careers to a scrum master and a giant coach. I've been working primarily with software teams and teams which require outsourcing.
Speaker 1:Is your company just your name, or what's the name of your company?
Speaker 2:That's a good point because, like I told you, I had these names figured out even 10 years before I started the company. So the name of the company is called Moss and Lichens. Anybody who listens to that name thinks it's something to do with biology or biotechnology or something. But no, it's just two words which came together and they sounded right.
Speaker 2:But the story I have around Moss and Lichens is that these are two kind of plant forms it's an algae and a fungus and they've been around for thousands of years and they can actually grow and live anywhere in the world, in the coldest regions of Antarctica and the hottest regions of the Sahara Desert. So it's about being adaptable. So that's one story. The other story is Moss and Lichens have very synergic relationships with their hosts. So you will see when you walk by in the woods, when you look at trees, you'll see Moss and Fungus attached to trees or to old buildings. They have a very synergic relationship. Sometimes even Moss is creating food for Fungus. So the point is about me and the client. Together we have a synergic relationship.
Speaker 1:Okay, I like it. Speaking of adaptability, let's go back to the part where your client it was kind of your bread and butter client outsourced the work. How did you get through that, Because I'm sure that was not a pleasant experience.
Speaker 2:No, no. So that was not a very pleasant experience. But then, right before that, one of my friends had always told me about being liquid and having liquid resources, especially as a company. So one of the things that you, when you have an employee, you'll have to realize this is that the company might not be doing well, but you'll still have to be paying your employee, and unless you want to let go of your employee and things like that.
Speaker 2:But in this particular case, I wanted to make sure that this particular employee had a good base in Germany and got his permanent residence, so I was going to make sure that he went through that time period and got that permanent residence, and so liquid reserves in the company really helped out a lot. And you kind of build it. You keep it in the company and make sure that it's good for that. You're good for maybe eight to 12 months, and this is something, this is a formula that even after I let go of that employee and I have, you know, built a much more stable financial platform. This is a rule that I always live by. You know I can go without work for the next year, but then my company can still pay me.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's great. And is that something, just a business principle you adhere to or as an Uge to? You have to do that.
Speaker 2:You don't have to do it. I mean it's just a business principle, it's from a you know when you feel it once.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't want it to happen again and you know, those were the times in which I think I was just married then. But now I have a daughter, and then you know you have a house. And then you're like thinking you know how, do you want changes in your business to affect your private life? And if the answer is no, you don't want it to affect then you can actually build a backup, a financial plan which just covers you for the next 12 months.
Speaker 1:Okay. So how did you get? Okay, you had your liquid reserves, but then obviously you needed new clients. So how did you handle that?
Speaker 2:So at some point, you know, I moved on from having an employee to not having an employee. I moved on from my office space I had rented office space. I moved on from there into a home office. So I kind of reduced my expenses. The highest expenses in my company is only me as an employee. So that's one point.
Speaker 2:The second thing is I started offering my services on a freelance basis and just started working on normal projects and like as a scrum master in companies. And this, when I did it in a few companies for a year or two, it's kind of starts building up a financial backup which kind of gives you a bit of freedom on what else you can do. And that's the freedom I had in 2022. So that freedom allowed me to now think a bit differently from the role of an agile coach or a very operational role into training. So right now, since 2022, I've been doing a bit of training on the side for teams and departments Wherein I train them on scrum or I train them on agile methods. So that is something which is now really interesting for me because for the first time, it's combining a passion of mine, which is public speaking, into something I do for work, which is agile and agile training. So since 2022, training has gotten into a part of the offering that I have.
Speaker 1:Okay, One thing you said. You said I started offering these services Like to whom? How do you have a network like? How did that work out?
Speaker 2:Okay. So, in fact, interesting point regarding so one of the network is I work with a lot of agencies. So I'm in touch with the agencies in Munich like Hayes Contractor, a few other agencies in Munich which are looking for the kind of jobs that are interesting for me. So I'm in touch with them. But one of my last clients interestingly it was set up by an ex sapient colleague of mine, Right, and this colleague was there.
Speaker 2:Now I mean, okay, the colleague was Dieter, Right, and this was Dieter sitting there for two, three years and his client said, hey, I need a scrum master for another project. And Dieter said I know somebody and he connected me up and then I was working with this client for the next three years or so, Right, so I think this is something that all of us should really consider, especially when you've been working with a company that you admire or a company that you admired while you work, for the people that you worked with and created a relationship with are all well wishes now spread out in different places and you can just write them and ask them hey, is there any interesting work or is there something that I can help you with?
Speaker 1:It's true. Probably at least 30% of my projects have either been for ex-Sapient people or, if I really trace it back, it's like somebody who I worked with at Sapient. So yeah, there's your network. But tell me a little bit about these agencies and how you're connected to them.
Speaker 2:Okay so the agencies. The initial connection is very often just online. You have a few platforms where you can look out for jobs and then you get connected. There are a few agencies in Munich which go a bit beyond that. They just want to come, sit down and have a chat with you, wherein they sit down and find out what kind of a person you are, because they then tend to talk to their clients and then they can figure out who will fit which project. Okay so I've had that experience with a few agencies, but not recently.
Speaker 1:Okay, but then are you, is it like a temp? Not temp is the wrong word, but are you like booking yourself to the agency and then the agency is booking to the client and you don't directly book the client?
Speaker 2:That is sometimes the case, but for example.
Speaker 2:See that particular example where I gave you where Dita connected me with the client then, it becomes a direct relationship between me and the customer and it's not easy to get into a big company in Germany, but if you can do it, if you have a company, the contractual procedures are different. When I switched from a freelancer to a company owner, it becomes very interesting because I work with another strategy consulting company based out of the US and the way they look at me when I was an individual as against when I'm a company, the contract itself changes and the seriousness changes. So if you are not too worried about the increase in accounting expenses per month oh God, okay and that you want to come across as a company, I can recommend that.
Speaker 1:See that I mean I am not. I don't do the kind of work where I would like. I would work for a company for like three years and a big organization where you can work with different teams. And I tend to like to work with organizations that have like max 10 people where I can send an invoice and you can pay with PayPal or Stripe. But I know it's very lucrative to work with organizations. But purchase orders, buying like how all of that, who do you even interact with in an organization?
Speaker 2:Okay, that's a good question, especially this question of getting a supplier number and then, working with a purchase order.
Speaker 2:You just mentioned that, but I think it's an important skill to learn, especially for a lot of expats working in Germany. When you start working with big companies, it's not easy to get a supplier number and it's not easy to get into that procedure. But once you do that, I think there's a lot of untapped projects out there and a lot of untapped budgets which are waiting to be tapped. Because just imagine, let's say, you plan your work for every quarter but then a purchase order, you could actually plan your work for the next year. Right, you could have a purchase order which is indicating their interest in spending that amount of money with you for the next four quarters. So just imagine the kind of financial stability that these purchase orders can take you to.
Speaker 1:But then you are. Do you have like multiple clients at one time, or are you just then dedicated to that client?
Speaker 2:So my focus is always to have at least two clients right. So right now I have two clients right and my focus is always to have two clients because otherwise as a freelancer in Germany you run it into the danger of what do they call it?
Speaker 2:Exactly the Scheinzelbständisch kind. So having two clients is always a good plan, especially when you don't want to spread yourself too thin with one client, and also in terms of services. I have two to three services which I offer and this kind of spreads it across. So for one client I do a bit of software development, for one client I do some software outsourcing and for another client I do some agile training, so that three different services that I'm offering which are happening in parallel, you just need. When you do things in parallel, you have to be careful about billability.
Speaker 2:You have to be careful about fixed expenses, variable expenses, so it's a different kind of a challenge, but it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Do you like, do you want to keep it that way? Are you trying to get out of one and just do all agile training, or do you like to keep your fingers and doing a little bit of everything?
Speaker 2:So the thing that I would like to move into in 2024, there are two areas which I find very interesting. One is agile training, another one is communication training, and communication training has to do with the fact that I've been a Toastmaster since the last 20 years and I enjoy speech making and I enjoy standing in front of an audience and talking, and two years back I won the European contest for the international speech contest. Oh, wow, right. So there's a lot of passion that I do voluntarily and I'm trying to see if, from agile training, I can move into communication training and speech making. Mm-hmm, so yes, okay. So these are two new areas I'm willing to explore in 2024.
Speaker 1:Didn't you? I feel like I remember going to a couple of Toastmasters events you did at Sapient, or we had an internal Toastmasters group.
Speaker 2:You're right. I think I remember you coming to one Toastmasters event in the event in the where was this? Parolin and Platz. This was like 15 years back, I think it was at.
Speaker 1:America House. That's right, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually. I mean I like public speaking. I've always enjoyed it, I think. Then I left Sapient and then I had a baby and then I like disappeared for a couple years off the scene. But I do remember that and I imagine that must help you. Even without going into the communication training, just in the agile training, just being comfortable speaking in front of groups must be a helpful skill.
Speaker 2:Definitely, Definitely. I mean Toastmasters has kind of helped me. I mean, I go to Toastmasters twice a month and I've been doing that since 2003.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So some of the people there are some of my very good friends. You know one of them conducted my wedding. One of them was the guy who spoke on the bus with all my wedding guests. So it's a part of my life and it's also a hobby that I just enjoy and maybe for the folks listening that don't know, what Toastmasters is.
Speaker 1:you can just like a couple sentences about what it is and if people want to get involved in a little Toastmasters, plug.
Speaker 2:I mean. Toastmasters is a public speaking club which was started around 90 years back in the United States by some a person called Ralph Smedley. He was attending YMCA meetings and he found out that none of them were running properly. So his initial idea was to make meetings run better and he also realized that people help with, needed help with communication and so on. So the Toastmasters club meetings are very interesting because in over two hours you will have around 15 to 20 roles and each role is timed.
Speaker 2:So we do different kinds of speaking roles and we time them and you have a chance to be a moderator or speaker and evaluator. You would learn how to do impromptu speaking, and all at club level. And at the same time you can take it bigger when you attend competitions inside Germany, europe wide and so on. And it's Munich has got 10 to 12 clubs oh really, english, german, french and Chinese. So if you're free one evening and you want to figure out what to do while you want to speak in front of people or get over your fear of speaking, toastmasters is the place to be.
Speaker 1:Okay, I didn't realize there were so many in town. This is a little technical, but I want to go back, just because I think it's an interesting point and kind of not readily available knowledge about, to supplier numbers. Like you said, it's a tricky process. Can you talk about a little bit about what it looked like getting a supplier number?
Speaker 2:Okay, before you can get a supplier number, you need to get the year of, let's say, a senior manager or a director in a big company.
Speaker 2:I've been recently talking to a friend of mine who's in sales and he was helping me to go through the entire sales procedure, and one of the sales procedure is about being able to talk to your client, identify a pain and then find out whether you have a service or a product which can help them overcome that pain.
Speaker 2:So if you can convince one senior manager or a director that you have a service or a product, the rest is all easy. The convincing the person, the executive buyer, the one who's responsible for purchasing, is not normally done by you. It's done by the person that you have already convinced, that senior manager or director. They just go and tell the purchasing department hey, this is my budget for this year, I'm just going to take a part of this budget and give it to this particular service provider. This is the projected budget for next year and I'm going to take a part of that and work with this person. And if you are a company based out of Munich and if you have all your paperwork with you, it's actually very easy to provide the details and get going and get that supplier number.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you have to have a buying point, a person, that's a buying point at the right level, and then they take care of it in the organization, and so, and that's easier if you have a Uge versus just being Ranjit Vikatesh, or would it work either way?
Speaker 2:It would work either way. So the thing is, what I've realized is, ever since I've said that I have a company, I think it's a mental change for some people. See, if I was Bill Gates, people would talk to me and they would know that I can command a group of 1000 people or 10,000 people if a project needed it. But if it is my name, they don't know what's behind it. But the moment I put a company's name, it changes the perspective of the person because they don't know.
Speaker 2:The moment you say company, people always think in plural. And when you say you have a cooperation partner and you say the cooperation partner has 300 to 400 people, suddenly they know that you cannot just solve one problem. You can possibly solve bigger problems and you can possibly solve problems which need support over a longer time period. So a company kind of changes perspective in the person dealing with you. So, for example, when a person works with me, they are not making a contract with me as Ranjith Venkatesh, they make a contract with my company which is Mohsen Lichens. Mohsen Lichens provides Ranjith Venkatesh as a person who offers services.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. It's sort of like with this software development agency. It's a strategic partnership, so without having to build up your own agency, you can still offer all these services that you were just talking about. That's interesting because for me as a creative, if you ever want to scale, one of the most obvious places people talk about starting an agency but you have no interest in doing at all. But sometimes I make a lot of connections with people that I could partner with. There was a bigger project, we could come together and deliver it. It's a little different, I think, with software development, but still that sounds like a great model because you don't have all the overhead or stress of employees or a company, but you can also, like you said, use the advantages of having a company.
Speaker 2:I mean, it does come with another part, like see, once you have a company the accounting gets a bit more complex. You have software applications nowadays, which are very good, which can help you with that. But then, even being a software developer, I still listen to this piece of advice from a German friend of mine. He told me you know, raja, do whatever you want in Germany, but don't do German taxes. Life is too short, life is too short to be learning and engaging with it. And so I took his advice seriously. So I don't do taxes in Germany, I don't do accounting in Germany. It might cost me a bit, but then I put that time back into work. You know the time that I gained from that. I put it back into work so that I can do something with that time.
Speaker 1:I still okay if you have only like two clients, it's one thing, but I still okay. Just have to take a two minute rant on German taxes. But I have a story abroad. Or I pay monthly. They do all my book how to do all this? But still the paperwork is nuts. I'm like really hoping AI is going to come and solve this, because it's too complicated. So I mean, when you say there's application, I mean you're not like I've looked around all the things sorted. I mean, are you using like Lex square? Are you?
Speaker 2:are you just give it all, you don't do. Anything I don't do. I don't touch software. Yeah, so the thing is, I use so much software in my life I don't want to use software for taxation and accounting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't either, but still I'll have like, if I sell like a digital thing online, I have to get that invoice. Then I have to get the duplicate from my CRM with all the right stuff. It's just. It just seems like it should be easier. If you're, I'm not doing it myself, but it's still. I mean, I guess at the end of the day it's just a couple hours a month, but I hate it so much and I feel like it's so unnecessarily complicated that there's got to be a better way.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that you say that takes you a couple of hours, because it doesn't take me a couple of hours. Yeah, so I'm. I'm. Normally my accounting takes me around 15 minutes in a month. Wow, yeah, so my accounting is basically based around invoices that I paid and invoices that I sent to my clients. They are all in. I need to make sure that they are in a PDF form and I upload it onto a website of my tax consultant, and it takes me 15 minutes because I'm searching for the invoices. If you are, if you're very good, let's say, every week you put away your invoices, it might even take you lesser time, but the thing is the searching for the invoices is the time consuming one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and some like I'm. I'm trying software that will automate attachments because I just put in two different. This is really exciting, folks. Sorry, I mean I put, but still, if you are doing business in Germany, you must be dealing with taxes. I have one, that's, that goes through my bank and one that goes through my business credit card, and I still just have to gather and I feel like, okay, you, I did all this last month. Can you just use those? Like why do I have to do it? But anyways, before this gets too tedious, I will start wrapping things up and I would like to ask what is one thing you wish you knew before you started?
Speaker 2:That's a good one. I mean, there's one. If there's one thing I think, you can ask your friends, your, your ex colleagues and people who have walked the path before for help. I think this is something. I've always tried to do everything myself, but then at some point you realize there are so many people out there. As long as you don't abuse their time and then make good use of it, people are willing to share knowledge and help you out, if you're a freelance or if you're a company owner, because I always go to people who have done the things I would like to do and I asked them how they did that.
Speaker 2:And people are very willing to share that kind of information and you can figure out if that is the path for you and if you can take it and go with it.
Speaker 1:Well, it was so great to chat with you, ranjeet, and I appreciate you taking the time and I think everybody's going to find a lot of value in this episode, so thanks a lot.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Alino.